So… here we are. The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel. Lindsay Ellis is back, pointing her laser-guided essay cannon at the moral panic du jour, and what do you know — the target this time is a woman who teaches toddlers how to clap their hands and go potty. And yet somehow, some way, this becomes a proxy battlefield for the culture war. Because of course it does. We live in a world where the most dangerous thing you can do is sing “Old MacDonald” with the wrong collaborator.

Ellis, true to form, comes out swinging: irony, sarcasm, deep-cut references to Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, and the ever-reliable format of “here’s why the thing you think is apolitical has actually been a culture-shaping ideological hot zone since Nixon.” She doesn’t just defend Ms Rachel — she folds her into a pantheon of empathy warriors stretching back to Fred Rogers, Jim Henson, and the Blue’s Clues crew.

And, yeah, that’s the point: the so-called “unforgivable sin” isn’t that Ms Rachel raised money for starving kids — it’s that she did so while breaking ranks with the new orthodoxy of empathy-is-weakness. The right doesn’t just want kids not to learn about pronouns or Palestine; they want to salt the earth where compassion used to grow. Cue Ellis’s whole tangent about empathy now being cast as a “toxic” left-wing trick, complete with PragerU professors, “Daily Wire for Babies,” and the world’s least charismatic Mr. Rogers knockoff.