Cancelling a man with Tourette’s is a new low for the woke elite

If you ever find yourself confused by the complexities of the ever-evolving hierarchy of oppression, the ‘compassionate’ left is happy to fill you in. Certain identity markers – particularly race and gender identity – place you comfortably in the upper layers of the victimhood trifle. But having a life-inhibiting neurological disorder? That, it seems, gives you little more than the soggy sponge at the bottom.

Proof of this arrived last night at the 2026 BAFTAs. The best and brightest of the global entertainment elite gathered to sip champagne and receive accolades for various achievements in film and television. Also present was Scottish campaigner for Tourette’s Syndrome, John Davidson. The 54-year-old is both the executive producer and the subject of the biopic, I Swear, which depicts his personal struggles living with Tourette’s through the Eighties and Nineties. Like all of Davidson’s work, the film’s aim is to raise awareness for a condition that few people understand. It portrays the reality of the disability in unflinching detail. This includes his profane verbal tics at inopportune moments – known as ‘coprolalia’, which around 10 per cent of people with Tourette’s exhibit. Since Davidson does not have the ability to switch off his condition when the cameras are rolling, these very tics made several appearances over the course of Sunday evening’s BAFTAs.

As Sinners stars Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo, two black men, took to the stage to present an award, Davidson could be heard yelling the n-word from the crowd. Jordan and Lindo paused, then carried on with professionalism. Immediately afterwards, BAFTAs host Alan Cumming acknowledged the ‘strong and offensive language’, explaining that ‘Tourette’s syndrome is a disability, and the tics you’ve heard tonight are involuntary, which means the person who has Tourette’s syndrome has no control over their language… We apologise if you were offended.’

Throughout the night, somebody in the crowd – presumably Davidson – was also reported to have shouted, ‘Shut the fuck up!’, at BAFTA chair Sara Putt and, ‘Fuck you!’, during the presentation of the best children’s and family film award. Unsurprisingly, however, these were not the tics that drew the most attention online.

‘Calling black men the n-word is racism’, declared Dr Allison Wiltz, a ‘pro-black womanist writer and scholar’, in an X post which garnered thousands of likes. If Davidson ‘can’t control the slurs he says, he should watch from a separate area, not in the main audience where black people are exposed to slurs’. Note the word ‘exposed’ – as if Davidson’s disability were some viral infection he was selfish to leave the house with. ‘He could watch in a VIP side room while black people are on stage’, Wiltz added. ‘No way they should have someone in the audience who’s known for yelling slurs. There are some people who expose themselves in public’, she said. ‘We segregate them from children so they won’t be exposed to inappropriate things.’

Dozens of other race warriors joined the chorus. ‘Why would having Tourette’s make you blurt out racial slurs at black people on stage?’, tweeted one. ‘This is just overt racism, call it what it is’, said another. Soon a grim consensus formed – that Davidson’s outburst meant he should be excluded or segregated from an event like the BAFTAs. ‘Maybe he shouldn’t be invited to [a] space where black people are present’, opined one identitarian. ‘Ban that mentally ill racist from awards shows’, posted another.

It wasn’t just random X users displaying their ignorance of Davidson’s condition, either. As TV rent-a-gob Narinder Kaur insisted, Jordan and Lindo had been subjected to ‘racial trauma’. And so by inviting Davidson, BAFTA had continued in ‘a long tradition of prioritising white comfort’. ‘Black people are just supposed to be okay with being disrespected and dehumanised so that other people don’t feel bad’, claimed Jemele Hill, a contributing writer for the Atlantic.

Perhaps most upsetting of all were Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx’s throwaway comments on Instagram. ‘Nah he meant that’, Foxx said of Davidson. ‘Unacceptable.’ Foxx is a celebrity with huge influence and devoted followers. For someone with his sway to imply Davidson was hiding behind a neurodevelopmental condition as an excuse to express racism is beyond irresponsible.

For Jordan and Lindo’s part, it must have been deeply disturbing to have had a racial slur yelled at them on live television. But I would wager that navigating life with Tourette’s is far harder than any of the discomfort faced by the Hollywood set last night. Would Foxx really be willing to trade his life as a black multimillionaire filmstar for that of a neurologically disabled white man? Of course not. Because if he or any of the other ‘progressive’ elites who joined the pile-on against Davidson had an iota of actual compassion and empathy, they might have been forced to confront their own relative ‘privilege’.

I Swear is a heartbreaking watch at times. It shows how difficult it is to navigate daily life with involuntary verbal and motor tics, even today. What’s more, in Scotland during the Eighties and Nineties, understanding of Tourette’s was virtually non-existent. Davidson would involuntarily backhand friends and family in the face. He would shout insults at the police. He struggled to find employment. Yet since few understood his behaviour, he was bullied and beaten. His life, by anyone’s standards, has been incredibly difficult as a result of his disability.

‘Tourette’s is such an awful condition that most of the time I don’t want to be the centre of attention’, Davidson told the BBC. ‘I want to be able to walk down the street and not be noticed because I’m shouting or swearing.’

In fact, Davidson’s tics had made him so self-conscious that the premiere of I Swear was the first time he had been to the cinema since he was 10 years old. Yet as soon as he found himself in the company of the ‘enlightened’ woke elites for just a few hours at the BAFTAs, the self-satisfied, self-righteous identitarians were calling for him to be banished from public spaces, segregated from polite society, cancelled even – solely for his disability.

Since the post-BAFTA’s woke meltdown, a handful of people with Tourette’s – many of them black – have come forward to fight Davidson’s corner. Coprolalia ‘is something that is already very embarrassing for all of us’, explained one young influencer on TikTok. ‘It’s not something that somebody can control. It’s not something that somebody wants to say… You can’t be offended when a disabled person is disabled.’ Another stressed that coprolalia is not a case of people ‘saying their hidden thoughts and opinions… It’s the thing you want to say least in the moment.’ Hence why some Tourette’s sufferers might blurt out things like ‘I have a bomb’ at an airport, or request sexual activity that they don’t really want. It is almost certainly the case that Davidson shouted the n-word not because he meant it or he is racist, but because it would be the most embarrassing, excruciating thing possible to blurt out in the presence of black people.

Undoubtedly, the voices of reason will be lost beneath those of our official moral arbiters. After years of telling the rest of us to platform marginalised voices, to defer to ‘lived experience’, to generally ‘do better’, they have proven to be themselves shockingly ignorant of a condition that causes genuine hardship. There is no awareness that they themselves are ‘exclusionary’. Those who bristle about having to be in close proximity with disabled people will not stop to wonder if they, themselves, are the bigots. ‘The best at hate are those who preach love’, Charles Bukowski once said. Perhaps, too, those most quick to tell the rest of us to ‘educate yourself’ are the ones most in need of taking their own advice.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.