People who disbelieve cancel culture is a thing do so mainly because they hope they can use it in the future to knock people out of jobs they themselves covet.
Like many movements that originate in the US, it’s all about the perception of a zero sum game and has everything to do with scarce jobs and nothing to do with moral panics or any moral feelings at all.
Here is a good example. This is all about competition for scarce academic jobs — whatever poor thinker wrote this uses an absolutely torturous abuse of reason to argue that firing someone for their views is not an abridgment of academic freedom. It’s absurd, and the amount of words spilled on it alone is enough to demonstrate its falsehood.
Anyway, yes, cancel culture is real, no, liberals cannot believe it’s real because most of them want the jobs they are so busily cancelling people out of.
It won’t work as they expect, but what ever does?