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Notes -
The best analogy I've seen about it is imagine you've been in a ringfight against an opponent for a long while. Since the last 10 years after he was handed a reinforced jockstrap by one of his supporters outside the ring he's taken to kicking you in the nuts every time he can, even though technically the "unstated rules" forbid it. The jockstrap means his own nuts are protected though. All this time you've been calling him out and saying that kicking people in the nuts is wrong, however he doesn't listen and does it at every opportunity he gets.
Through age after all these years the jockstrap has recently decayed to the point where it doesn't protect his nuts anymore. After a particularly nasty kicking session he inflicted on you you start kicking him back in the nuts. He suddenly starts howling and calling you a nasty for breaking the unstated rules of the fight and even worse, a hypocrite for saying nut kicking is wrong but then doing it anyway to him.
The issue is that your new behaviour is equally consistent with two different hypotheses: 1) You really are a hypocrite and only were saying nut kicking is wrong because he had a jockstrap and couldn't do it to him yourself before or 2) You truly believe nut kicking is wrong but also believe in "do unto others as they have done unto you" and the former belief for you overrides the second in importance.
Fortunately we have a way to test this. If we introduce a third fighter to the ring who's not related to either of the two we can see if you spontaneously start kicking the new person's nuts or stick to only kicking the nuts of the person who was kicking your nuts before. If the former then you're just a hypocrite while if it's the latter you probably genuinely believe in the wrongness of nut kicking. Translating back into the real world this is equivalent to finding another group that's effectively orthogonal to the standard left-right split and seeing if the attack dogs of the modern right also try and get them cancelled whenever one of them on a different side of an issue says something cancellable.
An example of this might be something like homeopathy: if a committed homeopath says something like "the medical establishment is run by the emissaries of Satan and any right thinking person has a duty towards humanity to kill them" (I'm sure there are crazy homeopaths that do say shit like this) then we can feed these sorts of incidents to non-homeopath right wing attack dogs and see if they try and get the homeopaths cancelled. If so then we can be convinced we just have hypocrites on our hands, if not then maybe they are at least a little respectable.
Any other ideas people may have? This seems like a genuine experiment that can be run.
This is a bit dumb, but I don't think anyone checked to see if that woman endorsed cancel culture before getting her fired, so that fits hypothesis 1 more than hypothesis 2.
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