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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WOKE RIGHT WANTS TO CANCEL MS RACHEL  
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Meagan Day
May 23, 2025
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_ 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
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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
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been killed in Gaza. The Israeli military has recently intensified
ground operations and aerial bombardments, killing one hundred people
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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
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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
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the rate of child death, amputation, and malnutrition in Gaza. For the
last year, she has continued
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post about the conditions
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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
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appeals
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“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
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advocacy as an expression of concern
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“all children, in every country. Not one is excluded” and has
also addressed famine
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Sudan. She told the 
[[link removed]]_Independent_
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her pathos was initially summoned by a video
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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
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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
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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
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Brainwasher.” Its online headline
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“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
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or child predation
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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years ago and having a cast member
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gender-neutral pronouns. Then, last year, shortly after the backlash
to her initial Gaza fundraiser, Accurso wished her followers
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happy Pride Month, sending Christian conservatives into a fit of
hyperventilation.

“She is accepting this sin by promoting gay pride,” lamented
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Cole, the director of the organization One Million Moms, which
is primarily devoted [[link removed]] 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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
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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
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days.

If the Right is taking over
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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 _
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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.

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Contributors

Meagan Day is an associate editor at Jacobin. She is the coauthor
of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to
Democratic Socialism.

 

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