Cancel culture has found a new target to be offended by, someone who literally can’t help what they say.

Sweet Anita is a streamer on Twitch who has amassed an audience of almost 600,000 people. Part of her popularity stems from her openness with Tourettes. She’s been able to juxtapose her charming personality with the often vile utterances her condition causes her to express, and this in turn has allowed her to educate fans about a neurodevelopmental disability that many would otherwise only know from jokes in movies and on TV.

I know she has tourettes but holy fuck pic.twitter.com/r3goxOovQr — Jeffthrow ❼ (@JeffThrow) December 9, 2019

Recently though, outrage culture decided to step up its game, and Anita became a target for a conglomerate of offense-seekers who have decided context no longer matters, and that those who speak bad words must be extinguished from the public eye.

After experiencing a particularly bad tic during a livestream earlier this week, Anita blurted out the phrase “kill the Jews!” before covering up her mouth with her hand in evident horror at her inability to control what she just said.

Social media and various comment sections came alight with coordinated calls for her cancellation. In now deleted tweets, another popular streamer openly called for Twitch to deplatform Anita over what she said.

Imagine being so shitty you try to use your audience of 53k to cancel a streamer cuz she said a naughty word due to Tourettes. I fucking despise cancel culture. She wasnt espousing hatred you dense fool. pic.twitter.com/YO0Aj5CNu1 — Sophia (Narwhal) Narwitz (@SophNar0747) December 10, 2019

As anyone familiar Tourettes will know, some people suffering from it battle a severe version of a symptom called Coprolalia. For those unaware, it heavily affects an area of the brain called the Basal Ganglia, which is tied into the language and emotion centers. The placement of the condition forces those with the disability to make involuntary sounds, to which as evidenced in the clip linked above, can come out as offensive phrases and slurs.

The reasoning such specifically offensive language is spewed is because sufferers are aware of what the most socially unacceptable words are, and due to the high emotions and stigmas often associated with such slurs, they are for lack of a better word, ‘stored’ within an emotional realm. It’s why when some people are mad they express terms they might not otherwise ever utter. It’s very much an emotional process. Try paying attention to whatever curse word you yell the next time you hit a thumb with a hammer.

I'm trying my best in this situation but honestly it's likely to happen again, the more people pressure me not to say it, the more my condition latches on to the phrase. It never used to be a tic before twitch, but chat has been intentionally triggering it. — Sweet Anita (@Tweet4nita) December 10, 2019

Cancel culture however, has no care in the world for pondering the “whys” behind certain events. To warriors of rage, the process running in their near empty minds is “this word bad, so this person must be bad.” It’s faulty logic to be sure, and to recall last year’s NPC meme, their programming needs an update.

Given how much of cancel culture emanates from the ‘woke’ community, it sure says a lot that they are now willingly targeting those their movement always vows to defend. For years they have sat upon a false air of moral superiority, always acted as if their quest to rid the world of naughty language and offensive personalities has been a noble cause. One about protecting the weak and the so called marginalized. But at its core most people opposed to them have known it’s always been about control.

I suppose now we can take comfort in knowing their hypocrisies are out in the open, and it’ll definitely make combatting wokescolds much easier, although I wish it occurred without people like Sweet Anita getting drowned out in hate for the sole “crime” of being born differently.

Ironic considering the term “ableism” is most often used by the camp currently engaging in it.

By Sophia Narwitz, writer & game journalist from the US.