One person's mob is another person's protest movement. It just seems less a problem with the number of people or the methods and more an issue with a difference of opinion about the content.
I haven't seen folks on the right vigorously defending those on the left or visa versa. They brutally denounce the other side and actively seek to remove them from positions of power or limit their voice. "Cancel cancel culture" feels more like "don't come after folks like me" rather than "don't go after anyone", which is fine, but I just don't see a consistent application across the political spectrum.
Some people are hypocrites. But I don’t see all of them that way. I don’t even see this as a left vs. right issue unless you go out of your way to define it that way. For instance, two of the more outspoken opponents of cancel culture, Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan, both publicly support Bernie Sanders. Alternatively, consider the TERF wars where trans activists try to cancel “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”. Radical feminists are on the right now? One of the signatories of the Harpers letter was Noam Chomsky.
If you go according to how we would have classified these people before the controversy of cancel culture itself, we would have to say that it was between two different factions of the left, with the right piling on later.
If all you see is hypocrisy I don’t disagree with you because people are that way a lot of the time. But maybe it’s because consistently opposing cancel culture seems like a deliberate partisan choice by itself these days. Joe Rogan has guests from the entire political spectrum and interacts with all of them in charity and good faith to the point of borderline naivety. And if you want to see an example the other way around, let me share this: https://reason.com/2018/08/02/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-rac...
I haven't seen folks on the right vigorously defending those on the left or visa versa. They brutally denounce the other side and actively seek to remove them from positions of power or limit their voice. "Cancel cancel culture" feels more like "don't come after folks like me" rather than "don't go after anyone", which is fine, but I just don't see a consistent application across the political spectrum.