> People forget that they invented cancel culture. Dixie Chicks anyone?

You can go a lot further back than that. McCarthyism was a powerful cancel culture and vestiges of that still manifest today. Linguistically, the weird and inexplicable way anything to the left of fascism in America can be described as "communism" if someone is in the mood to be pejorative is a vestige of McCarthy, or something even further back from the First Red Scare, I think.