The Woke Right Wants to Cancel Ms Rachel
Children’s content creator Ms Rachel is opposed to slaughtering children in Gaza and everywhere else. The Right’s attacks in response are reactionary wokeness run amok.
Ms Rachel entertains an audience of children on September 24, 2024. (Nathan Congleton / NBC via Getty Images)
“Big feelings are okay,” sings Ms Rachel in one of her characteristic children’s songs. “It’s okay to have big feelings. I’m here to stay with your big feelings. I’m not afraid of your big feelings.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment, one worth emphasizing to children so they can wrestle with some of the more difficult aspects of being human. A major piece of the backlash to “wokeness” in recent years has been an exhaustion with an unwillingness or inability to deal with big feelings — difficulty tolerating disagreement, demands for ideological congruence, overstatement of harm when it isn’t forthcoming. The Right calls people who are hypersensitive in this particular manner “snowflakes,” a term synonymous in conservative parlance with left-wing social justice warriors.
But as the Left struggles with how to shed the histrionic style of political engagement while staying committed to progressive social values, a new group of big-feeling-intolerant snowflakes has emerged: the Right and the pro-Israel lobby, as demonstrated by their recent attacks on Ms Rachel herself.
The popular children’s content creator, whose given name is Rachel Griffin Accurso, has become increasingly outspoken about violence against children in Palestine. Her advocacy consists entirely of observing the scale of Palestinian children’s suffering and making simple statements about its moral indefensibility. In response, conservatives are clutching their pearls over the immeasurable harm caused by her opinions. If “wokeness” pejoratively describes exaggerated grievance and swift social sanction for wrongthink, the Right’s condemnations of Ms Rachel are as woke as it gets.
Since Israel began its military campaign in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 attack, over fifteen thousand children have been killed in Gaza. The Israeli military has recently intensified ground operations and aerial bombardments, killing one hundred people in a single night last week, many of them children. One would expect a creator who devotes her life to children to be opposed to mass violence against them on this scale. But for the woke right, the harm incurred by children in Gaza is nothing compared to the harm incurred by supporters of Israel who are forced to encounter uncomfortable truths on Accurso’s social media feeds.
A Moral Panic
The controversy began in May 2024, when Accurso announced a fundraiser for children in Gaza and other war zones. This prompted a wave of intense pro-Israel criticism that surprised and rattled her. But in a tearful video posted to Instagram, she reasoned that the public disapproval was a small price to pay for using her massive platforms to speak about the toll Israel’s offensive has taken on children.
Thereafter, Accurso’s social media feeds started to intersperse nursery rhymes with statistics on the rate of child death, amputation, and malnutrition in Gaza. For the last year, she has continued to post about the conditions Palestinian children face to an audience of fifteen million on YouTube and ten million across TikTok and Instagram. These posts, which appear alongside potty training tips and phonics lessons, eschew geopolitical opinion for universalist moral appeals like “We can’t let children starve. That’s not who we are” and “We all know not to bomb and kill and starve children.” It’s a stark indicator of our times that pro-Israel forces so strenuously disagree.
Accurso has defended her advocacy as an expression of concern for “all children, in every country. Not one is excluded” and has also addressed famine in Sudan. She told the Independent that her pathos was initially summoned by a video of a Palestinian child in shock after an Israeli air strike.
“The look in his eyes has stayed in my mind since I saw the video,” she said. “No child should experience that kind of fear, shock, and terror.” In response to the backlash, she told journalist Medhi Hasan, “It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering.”
Her stated ethical motivations haven’t stopped the Right from branding Ms Rachel a covert operative pushing a sinister ideological agenda. In March, the New York Post ran an article about Accurso in print titled “Woke Brainwasher.” Its online headline was “The left keeps coming after our kids — now via YouTube’s Ms. Rachel,” deploying the Right’s tactic du jour: implicitly or explicitly draw an analogy between ideas it opposes and “grooming” or child predation. The Post proceeded to paranoically allege that Accurso’s content “sneaks in political themes — invariably leftist ones,” and that she exposes the children of parents who “invite her into their homes” to “Hamas-aligned talking points.”
Pro-Israel organizations have taken the paranoia to even greater extremes. The organization StopAntisemitism penned an open letter to Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, calling for an investigation into Accurso for alleged violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“Given the vast sums of foreign funds that have been directed toward propagandizing our young people on college campuses, we suspect there is a similar dynamic in the online influencer space,” the group said. It demanded that the Trump administration allocate resources to “find out who is behind Ms. Rachel’s push to demonize the Jewish state.”
Several other Zionist groups echoed the allegations of Hamas funding. The group JewsInSchool stated:
Ms Rachel has used her popularity with minor children to indoctrinate and use them as cash cows to raise funds for Gaza via an organization (Save the Children) that claims Gaza is an “occupied territory” and undergoing genocide. This is training children to provide material support for terror. We agree an investigation is in order.
When the New York Times asked Accurso whether she is funded by Hamas, she responded, “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false.”
But you never know which child content creators are rolling in Hamas cash, which is why you have to sleep with one eye open. Or, in other words, stay woke.
Cancel Culture vs Ms Rachel
Conspiracy theories aside, Accurso has naturally been accused ad nauseam of antisemitism. Her decision to speak out can’t possibly come down to the fact that Gaza has the highest child casualty rate on earth. It can’t possibly be inspired by endless horrific stories like that of Rahaf, a three-year-old from Gaza who lost both her legs in an Israeli air strike, whom Accurso featured on her social media channels. (“Thank you for seeing our children as human,” Rahaf’s mother told Ms Rachel.) It can only be proof of anti-Jewish animus.
Accurso’s critics have tried every play in the cancel culture book, from declaring certain opinions inadmissible by claiming they’ll harm whole communities, to scouring her archives for potential microaggressions, to leveling accusations of bigotry by omission, to weaponizing emotional appeals to shut down debate entirely.
This isn’t Ms Rachel’s first cancel-culture rodeo. Before she stood accused of hating Jews, Accurso stood accused of offending Christians. Two years ago, Christian influencers tried to cancel Ms Rachel for stating that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago and having a cast member who uses gender-neutral pronouns. Then, last year, shortly after the backlash to her initial Gaza fundraiser, Accurso wished her followers a happy Pride Month, sending Christian conservatives into a fit of hyperventilation.
“She is accepting this sin by promoting gay pride,” lamented Monica Cole, the director of the organization One Million Moms, which is primarily devoted to spotting microaggressions — sorry, lapses in conservative family values — in television commercials. Cole continued, “The Bible tells us that God made us male and female and that holy marriage is between one man and one woman. God gives us these boundaries because He knows what’s best for us.”
Conservatives called for a boycott of Ms Rachel’s content, condemning her Pride Month message as “vastly evil and inappropriate” and declaring, “This woman is sick. This is who your kids love to watch and look up to.” Again, Accurso responded to the backlash by appealing to simple universalist values of solidarity and inclusion, saying, “I love all of my neighbors, and that excludes no one.” She grounded this message in her own Christian faith, citing neighborly love as a value expressed in the Bible.
One conservative Christian publication saw this expression of universal love as itself nefarious, saying, “It is a genius of Satan to weaponize virtue, moving mankind to subvert the Truth while at the same time making him feel very good about his actions, whispering, see how loving you are!” Translation: basic prosocial values like kindness, inclusion, care, and love across lines of difference are a dirty, devilish trick. Keep your head on a swivel.
Right-wing media personality Charlie Kirk did not take kindly to Accurso invoking the Bible for wicked purposes. “Satan quoted scripture plenty,” he quipped, adding, “By the way, Ms Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours.” Kirk then quoted a verse from the Bible condemning homosexuals to death by stoning, calling this “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
Kirk has complained relentlessly about the (in his own words) “virtue-signaling, high horse, moral sanctimonious people” known as the woke left. But as far as preening self-righteousness is concerned, it’s hard to top Kirk and the woke right.
Return of the Scolds
The Right’s response to both Accurso’s anodyne Pride messaging and her morally grounded but otherwise apolitical opposition to child suffering in Palestine has been exhaustingly theatrical. Using hyperbole to render ideological opponents’ viewpoints unutterable, overstating the harm of words and ideas, appealing to authorities to cut the mic — it all makes one wonder who’s really infected by the “woke mind virus” these days.
If the Right is taking over from the Left as our culture’s most insufferable tongue-cluckers and finger-waggers, it’s only a reversion to form. A politics of pious indignation, paranoid thought, and language policing, righteous claims of moral transgression, and magnification of injury was their province to begin with.
In the 1970s culture war, it was the right-wing evangelicals who were considered puritanical and touchy, while the gays and their progressive allies were the witty and irreverent taboo-breakers. A 1977 Washington Post article about a Johnny Carson monologue mocking antigay culture war crusader Anita Bryant summed up the popular reaction to her brand of right-wing huffiness: “Carson and other comedians have turned her into a new symbolic stock comic figure . . . a prudish, self-righteous fanatic.”
That characterization aptly describes the Right that has risen up to denounce Ms Rachel as a nefarious mastermind of woke brainwashing and a source of profound harm.
Moral sanctimony and amplified grievance are political losers. The Right is welcome to reclaim them as their own. Meanwhile, the Left should strive to emulate Ms Rachel by being unafraid of big feelings and steadfast in our universal values.