they thrive on your ignorance

No, they thrive on your fear and outrage. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity. If they manage to tick you off, people who like watching you get angry will be attracted to their side.

cancel culture doesn't exist

Really? I can point to several examples where someone's career was ruined just because they were "cancelled" ([here are three CBS reported on] (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cancel-culture-changed-lives-forever-cbsn-originals/)).

Usually what happens is this:

1. Person says or does something to offend some group (often by accident)
2. Said group demands an apology
3. Person apologizes
4. No company wants to associate with the person for fear of backlash
5. The person is either fired or loses all followers

The best strategy, apparently, is to not apologize. That ticks off the group, but it also generally reduces how much publicity the event gets, which means there's a decent chance for it to blow over. In some cases, this leads to weird extremist subgroups because the person attracts the wrong sorts, and in others the person is able to change their behavior so that group comes back after forgetting about the incident.

It's incredibly stupid that apparently apologizing is punished, but that's how it seems to work out. Those who have been targeted that don't apologize tend to not be as impacted.

That said, I'll look through those links. I'm always interested to identify bigots so I can avoid them.