Rachel Accurso, the toddler entertainer known to millions of parents and kids as Ms. Rachel, is facing renewed criticism after pledging to match rapper Macklemore’s $1 million donation to organizations aiding Palestinians.
Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour after repeatedly calling for a “Free Palestine” and performing his anti-Israel song “Hind’s Hall” during his opening set at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. He then announced he would donate the $1 million he earned from the tour to Palestinian aid groups. Accurso responded by announcing she would match that donation, directing her contribution to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, an organization for which she serves as an ambassador.
The donation is the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Accurso, who has drawn accusations of amplifying Hamas-supplied casualty figures and platforming disputed narratives about the war in Gaza since it began.
In one widely circulated 2025 video, Accurso called Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza her “friend” just days before Azaiza admitted on an Arabic-language podcast that he had hidden footage of Israeli hostages being beaten by a crowd in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. He said he concealed the footage because he feared it would endanger the Palestinians who took part in the beatings. Accurso deleted her video afterward, though clips of it have continued to circulate online.
In January 2026, Accurso drew further scrutiny after appearing to “like” a comment on one of her posts that read “free America from the Jews.” She later said she had meant to delete the comment but “accidentally hit like and hide,” according to the Jerusalem Post. When an account called “thepalestinenewsnetwork” responded to her apology by writing, “Spoiler alert: They left the comment themselves,” Accurso replied, “ooooooooooohhhhh.” That comment was later deleted as well.
Asked by the Guardian why she takes political stands, Accurso said she has “a really good moral compass.”
A Pattern, Not a One-Off, Critics Say
Bethany Mandel, a Washington Examiner contributor, author and homeschooling mother of six, told Fox News Digital that Accurso’s activism reflects a broader habit among creators who rarely engage outside their own ideological circle.
“This is the case for a lot of liberals. They don’t see it as a political perspective at all. They just see the world in black and white and what they are doing is so clearly correct.”
Mandel said the pattern becomes especially concerning on Gaza, where she accused Accurso of accepting a one-sided account of the war.
“It’s important to understand that she only cares about one narrative. She only cares about this very false narrative where what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide, falsely categorizing it as such. She amplifies numbers that are not real, the numbers of deceased children, the numbers of people who have died in general, she’s accepting a Hamas narrative on every single thing and amplifying it.”
Mandel argued Accurso’s reach makes the issue bigger than children’s programming.
“She is serving as their mouthpiece for a lot of Americans not just children and not just the adults that follow her.”
Gender Content Also Under Fire
Mandel said her concerns about Accurso predate the Gaza controversy. She pointed to Accurso’s past videos featuring a non-binary musician — likely Jules Hoffman, a frequent collaborator — as evidence that Accurso “cares more about activism than education.”
“She’s had fellow musicians and performers on camera with her who have no gender, and she takes away gender from these individuals especially, and they are amorphous, they go by they/them. And it’s a woman, but you can’t really tell that, especially as a child.”
Mandel said stripping gender categories from content aimed at toddlers interferes with a basic developmental milestone.
“And this is something that’s really very damaging to children who are in the early stages of development, because one of the first ways that children learn to organize the world around them is by categorization, and the easiest way for a toddler to categorize the world around them is by female and male.”
She compared the risk to Donald Rumsfeld’s framing of
