{"id":105822,"date":"2025-08-30T03:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T03:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/105822\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T03:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T03:36:07","slug":"lindsay-ellis-talks-ms-rachel-gaza-and-empathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/105822\/","title":{"rendered":"Lindsay Ellis talks Ms. Rachel, Gaza, and empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, children\u2019s entertainer and YouTuber Ms. Rachel<\/a> attracted both praise and criticism for speaking out against world leaders enabling a genocide in Gaza. That Ms. Rachel (off-screen Rachel Accurso) would speak up for children<\/a> who happen to be living in a place being actively decimated by a neighboring government caught the \u201cleave politics out of children\u2019s media\u201d crowd off-guard. But teaching children about empathy has been a cornerstone of children\u2019s education and media, and the current effort to demonize empathy is actually being used for political ends, as fellow YouTuber Lindsay Ellis argues in a new video.<\/p>\n

For the unaware, Ellis is one of YouTube\u2019s earliest video essayists and remains one of the best on the platform (even if she\u2019s a lot more likely to post on Nebula<\/a> these days), usually offering film and pop culture analysis. As a relatively new mother, Ellis has been watching a lot of Ms. Rachel and is positioned to go long on this topic. In a new, two-hour-and-twenty-two-minute video uploaded on Tuesday, Ellis weaves together the history of Ms. Rachel, children\u2019s media,\u00a0 PBS, antisemitism, Zionism, and genocide in a way that makes the fraught topics digestible (if still often horrifying) without condescending. And despite the range of topics presented in the video, it\u2019s an examination of empathy that unites all of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as good and necessary as discussions of empathy are, the video has already tangibly helped at least a few people. As of this writing, a fundraiser accompanying the video has raised just shy of $500,000 for the Palestinian Children\u2019s Relief Fund, a fund that has helped kids like Rahaf, a three-year-old double amputee from Gaza who was medically evacuated to the United States earlier this year and has since appeared in some of Ms. Rachel\u2019s videos. Ultimately, both the financial support and the historical context are important tools. \u201cThe reason I did this video, beyond trying to raise money and show support for Ms. Rachel and people like her, was because I wanted to understand how this sort of thing happens, from a historical perspective and a sociological one,\u201d Ellis says toward the end of the video. \u201cThe reality is that there is not much we can do. But I do not want that to be mistaken for saying that we shouldn\u2019t do what we can.\u201d You can check out the video below.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ufeff<\/p>\n

Great job, Internet! (seriously):\u00a0Veronica Mars\u00a0movie raises all the money, gets the greenlight\u00a0<\/a>O hai, Great Job, Internet!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this year, children\u2019s entertainer and YouTuber Ms. Rachel attracted both praise and criticism for speaking out against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-105822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}