I think you might enjoy that film I mentioned, Operation Abolition. Taking this stuff out of its present context, and seeing the same behavior sixty years ago, is instructive and eye-opening.
It’s a culture war. It has never been about scientific integrity except in the sense that they’re “agin’ it.” You are a cultured person, ergo, you are the enemy.
These people speak to one another in little nuggets – parables about the evils of modernity as they see them. Anything that they don’t like has to be analogized (though there often is, as with creationists in general, an inability to distinguish analogy from identity) to one of those principal evils. Right now, they can’t demonize the Russians because they are politically allied with the Russian cause. So they start talking about the Chinese when reviewing your piece. “Cancel culture” is another of these little parables/analogies/nuggets of the anti-culture side of the culture war. Although you have said nothing that remotely suggests that this is what you are on about, it’s just too juicy an idea for them to resist. EVERYTHING they don’t like has been “cancel culture” for the last year or so. Next year it’ll be something else, but this is the flavor of the day. It’s unlikely to have the staying power of red-baiting, so in a year they’ll still have you shooting protesters at Tiananmen Square in your free time, but they’ll have moved on from “cancel culture” to accusing you of something else you didn’t do.
The key: these people will NEVER be honest. Attempting to understand why they do what they do will be a fool’s errand unless and until one understands that their opposition to our culture requires that they lie always and continuously.