The 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.

TODAY - Season 73

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.

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