When podcaster Julia Mazur posted a TikTok about spending a barely hungover Saturday studying how one can make shakshuka, the preliminary response to her video was pretty regular. Mazur — whose podcast Pretty Much Done explores relationships and loving your life at each stage — usually posts TikToks cataloging her life as a single 29-year-old to her 18,000 followers. But on Sunday, one thing modified.
“I began getting fairly hateful feedback,” Mazur tells Rolling Stone. “And then somebody commented that Matt Walsh had posted my video.”
Walsh is a host for the right-wing information outlet the Daily Wire. On X (previously Twitter), he steadily reposts different peoples’ content material along with his personal commentary, which is usually racist, sexist, or transphobic. In his tweet, Walsh known as Mazur’s video “miserable” as a result of her life didn’t revolve round household and children, accusing her of being “too silly” to comprehend how unhappy it was. And whereas folks got here to Mazur’s protection, it didn’t cease her from changing into the web’s character of the day.
Mazur tells Rolling Stone that following Walsh’s tweets, she acquired hundreds of dangerous messages on TikTok and Instagram, with Walsh followers saying she deserved to die alone, telling her to kill herself, and even calling for her to be sexually assaulted. The messages got here so shortly that Mazur says she deleted all of her social media apps from her cellphone to keep away from them.
“I selected to not learn a majority of them, so I solely know the primary hour of the feedback,” Mazur says. “I had buddies telling me to not go on Twitter. I used to be receiving messages on my private Instagram calling me a whore. There had been questions on my gender. They had been threatening in nature and tone. I’ve slept with my alarm on each evening since.”
Ironically, Mazur says, the hate she acquired is a excellent instance of why she began her account to start with: to persuade single those who they aren’t nugatory for locating energy and pleasure in different issues apart from marriage and children. Mazur grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, and he or she says her household put fixed stress on her to seek out a husband, calm down, and have kids as quickly as attainable. But even when she discovered herself in “good-on-paper” relationships, she didn’t really feel fulfilled. The downside, she realized, was that she was relationship to test bins, not exploring what made her comfortable.
“I feel that there’s a concern of talking out about [loneliness] and I feel that Matt Walsh’s rhetoric and his followers’ rhetoric solely amplified that,” Mazur says. She says that whereas she does certainly need marriage and children sometime, “I simply don’t wish to sit and wallow whereas I don’t have these issues. That was actually the impetus for why I began my podcast and the content material that I create on TikTok as a result of it’s known as Pretty Much Done. I need folks to be just about carried out listening to societal stress and noise and be open to creating lives that they wish to dwell for themselves.”
After Walsh’s tweet went viral, help for Mazur slowly started to construct, spearheaded by her shut family and friends. Even Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban chimed in, tweeting, “What any particular person does when it comes to having kids or not is their selection. Full Stop.”
“I perceive that with social media you set your self on the market to be judged and criticized. That’s sort of the character of the beast,” Mazur says. “But I don’t consider that anybody has the best to unfold hate. And I feel that the best way during which [the far right] spoke about me and to me was really deplorable.”
Nonetheless, Mazur says the incident gained’t change something about what she posts or her messaging. She’s 29, single, and doesn’t have children. For her, one Saturday appears like making shakshuka and watching actuality tv. There’s no disgrace in that. (And her meals, she says, was “scrumptious.”)
“I feel that the silver lining and all of this, in the event you can name it that, is that my content material and my podcast did attain people who find themselves single and determining the lives that they wish to create for themselves,” Mazur says. “I’d be doing my content material a disservice by focusing on appeasing Matt Walsh and his followers when I’ve a demographic of those who I wish to attain. For me, I’m very snug being susceptible, exhibiting folks my life as a 29-year-old, single feminine. And I feel that basically what I need folks to really feel is consolation in the truth that they’ll dwell their lives as they see match.”
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