That's exactly it. They have no actual defense against Cowbee's method of respectful patience (and they absolutely can't compete with his well rounded knowledge of history that he can back up with citations even they can't deny). So their only option is to fabricate outright ridiculous lies and twist themselves in knots to try paint him as the bad guy somehow. This time he's the big bad guy who must be literally boycotted because... he doesn't know about the wikipedia definition of once-niche term now used as a catch-all by anti-communists? Um. Right. Ok, libs. But no, I think we can safely assume that Cowbee is as well aware as the rest of us what reactionaries and liberals mean when they start frothing about "tankies."

Edit: It's also amusing they're calling to boycott not just Cowbee himself but an entire instance because a single user on it is supposedly unaware of the wikipedia definition of an epithet. An epithet every ML has encountered thousands of times. And this is supposed to make the fediverse, (which is famously all about sequestration and disconnecting people from each other and challenging ideas) a better place.