How the cancel culture was leveraged against RMS

It wasn't cancel culture. It was RMS trying to play semantics-lawyer on a public email list about what exactly the meanings of 'abuse', 'assault' and 'pedophilia' are.

While he's made a career doing that for terms like 'freedom' and 'open source', that doesn't carry over well for things that have very narrow and precise legal meanings and which are crimes with real victims.