This is a popular right wing conspiracy theory which is based on misdirection and tu quoque. In the reality based community, cancel culture and the limiting of free discourse is an inherent cultural value and political policy endemic in right wing, authoritarian systems. History is extremely clear on this point.

It was the left in the US for the entirety of the 20th century that defended free speech from the continual onslaught by the right, from the attacks on the labor unions, to the attacks on journalists, to the attacks on writers, to the indeceny book bans to the free speech movement at Berkeley. In every instance, it was the right who threatened free speech and employed cancel culture tactics. Reagan was one of the most famous purveyors of this cancel culture, destroying entire careers of professionals because they were accused of belonging to a political party (many of whom did not) that he didn’t like.

I don’t think I need to go into all the overt evidence of the current US policy positions on the right promoting book bans, the state-enforced limiting of free speech in the schools, the conservative crackdown on sex education and basic science on things like menstruation, and the denial of climate change. This is all well known and provable. It is happening now.

In an attempt to reverse and deny this historical reality, conservatives have blamed "consent manufacturers" (in this context, a dog whistle for liberals and the left stolen from Chomsky who used it in a slightly different way) for trying to limit and contain the measurable increase of hate speech and the explicit rise in political violence on their opponents fomented by this speech.

This attack on so-called consent manufacturers is an attack on the free and open media, which conservatives have managed to decimate at the local level, and consolidate and monopolize at the national level. This was all part of a highly coordinated campaign that began with Regan, who specifically decentralized the media to thank Murdoch who helped him win New York, fulfilling the promises of the Powell memo, and creating a propaganda and disinformation machine on the right that has misinformed Americans for close to forty years.

This is all documented and recorded. The short hand for "people can now say all kinds of things they couldn’t before" is that the right wing is no longer pretending to be part of modernity and is now openly embracing and defending authoritarianism, fascism, and the hate speech that fuels the political violence it wages on society. The veil has been taken off and the floodgates have been lifted. Lies are now equivalent to facts, facts are considered liberal lies, and reality is whatever the right thinks it should be.

This is just like I said—the recrudescence of the simmering violent and terrorist nature at the extremes of right wing discourse that Twitter has now normalized. Social Darwinism, might makes right, and open calls for violence are now becoming glorified above the rule of law and democratic norms and practices. This is the end result.

You don’t see the problem because you are part of the problem. To see the problem at hand, you have to see from a POV other than your own. That requires compassion, empathy, and putting yourself in the shoes of others that are wholly unlike yourself. This is impossible to do when the normalization of hate speech and attacks on the media and institutions require othering those who are not like you and do not fit into the silo of the right wing bubble. I have become totally disgusted by what I see on Twitter now. It is filled with the worst kind of people promoting the worst kind of ideas that have the worst kind of outcomes. The sooner the site shutters, the better.