When podcaster Julia Mazur posted a TikTok about spending a slightly hungover Saturday learning how to make shakshuka, the initial response to her video was fairly normal. Mazur — whose podcast Pretty Much Done explores relationships and loving your life at every stage — often posts TikToks cataloging her life as a single 29-year-old to her 18,000 followers. But on Sunday, something changed.
“I started getting pretty hateful comments,” Mazur tells Rolling Stone. “And then someone commented that Matt Walsh had posted my video.”
Walsh is a host for the right-wing news outlet the Daily Wire. On X (formerly Twitter), he frequently reposts content from other people with his own commentary, which is often racist, sexist, or transphobic. In his tweet, Walsh called Mazur’s video “depressing” because her life didn’t revolve around family and kids, accusing her of being “too stupid” to realize how sad it was. And while people came to Mazur’s defense, it didn’t stop her from becoming the internet’s character of the day.
Mazur tells Rolling Stone that following Walsh’s tweets, she received thousands of harmful messages on TikTok and Instagram, with Walsh fans saying she deserved to die alone, telling her to kill herself, and even calling for her to be sexually assaulted. The messages came so quickly that Mazur says she deleted all of her social media apps from her phone to avoid them.
“I chose not to read a majority of them, so I only know the first hour of the comments,” Mazur says. “I had friends telling me not to go on Twitter. I was receiving messages on my personal Instagram calling me a whore. There were questions about my gender. They were threatening in nature and tone. I’ve slept with my alarm on every night since.”
Ironically, Mazur says, the hate she received is a perfect example of why she started her account to begin with: to convince single people that they aren’t worthless for finding power and joy in other things besides marriage and kids. Mazur grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant household, and she says her family put constant pressure on her to find a husband, settle down, and have children as soon as possible. But even when she found herself in “good-on-paper” relationships, she didn’t feel fulfilled. The problem, she realized, was that she was dating to check boxes, not exploring what made her happy.
“I think that there’s a fear of speaking out about [loneliness], and I think that Matt Walsh’s rhetoric and his followers’ rhetoric only amplified that,” Mazur says. She says that while she does indeed want marriage and kids someday, “I just don’t want to sit and wallow while I don’t have those things. That was really the impetus for why I started my podcast and the content that I create on TikTok because it’s called Pretty Much Done. I want people to be pretty much done listening to societal pressure and noise and be open to creating lives that they want to live for themselves.”
After Walsh’s tweet went viral, support for Mazur slowly began to build, spearheaded by her close friends and family. Even Shark Tank entrepreneur Mark Cuban chimed in, tweeting, “What any individual does in terms of having children or not is their choice. Full Stop.”
“I understand that with social media you put yourself out there to be judged and criticized. That’s kind of the nature of the beast,” Mazur says. “But I don’t believe that anyone has the right to spread hate. And I think that the way in which [the far right] spoke about me and to me was truly deplorable.”
Nonetheless, Mazur says the incident won’t change anything about what she posts or her messaging. She’s 29, single, and doesn’t have kids. For her, one Saturday looks like making shakshuka and watching reality television. There’s no shame in that. (And her food, she says, was “delicious.”)
“I think that the silver lining and all of this, if you can call it that, is that my content and my podcast did reach people who are single and figuring out the lives that they want to create for themselves,” Mazur says. “I would be doing my content a disservice by focusing on appeasing Matt Walsh and his followers when I have a demographic of people that I want to reach. For me, I’m very comfortable being vulnerable, showing people my life as a 29-year-old, single female. And I think that really what I want people to feel is comfort in the fact that they can live their lives as they see fit.”