A rising-star journalist has shared how she was canceled by her colleagues and the internet for blasting BLM for vandalizing synagogues during summer 2020.
Eve Barlow was enjoying a soaring career as a music writer, with the journalist – who is Scottish, gay and Jewish – once told she was ‘magic’ by a senior editor for the quality of her copy.
But Barlow – who was on track to become one of New York magazine’s star writers – says she was shunned after blasting BLM vandalism days after George Floyd’s murder.
Recalling the editor who branded her abilities ‘magic,’ she wrote for Common Sense with Bari Weiss: ‘Well, I was. But now that I was a “racist,” none of that was real.’
The tweet that saw Barlow was posted four days after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, on May 31 2020.
She wrote: ‘Woke up to see that synagogues in LA have been graffiti’d during the riots with the words FREE PALESTINE and F*** ISRAEL, and that dua lipa is spreading antisemitic posts on her IG feed,’ she wrote in the tweet in May 2020. ‘how dare you bring the jewish nation and community into the killing of black american lives.’
Eve Barlow is a Los Angeles-based freelance music journalist who said she was branded as a ‘racist’ by her own industry
When synagogues in Los Angeles were vandalized, the Jewish journalist had enough and posted a tweet she said got her canceled: ‘How dare you’
Barlow wrote on Common Sense that she wished she could keep her mouth shut for the sake of her career, but that she could no longer remain silent.
‘Me being me I can never keep my mouth shut, even when I really wish I could, and I put my foot in it,’ she wrote. ‘I tweeted, “How dare you,” and all hell break loose.’
Since then, Barlow has faced a barrage of online hate. Editors stopped replying to her emails. Staff and fellow writers unfollowed her on social media.
‘I remember surrendering to the peer pressure to donate every single day, and to post receipts of those donations (like I was in trouble for something—oh yeah, being “white”),’ she wrote.
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She added: ‘I was performing,’ she wrote. ‘I was absolutely performing. And I am not ashamed to admit it. I was so scared. I was still a hired freelance journalist, and I knew the impact of staying silent. Freelance writing isn’t a joke. You cannot pay rent if you offend people.’
Synagogue Congregation Beth El in L.A. was vandalized in May 2020 during the protests
Black Lives Matter protesters are pictured in Hollywood on June 7 2020
‘It was decreed that I was a racist by my entire industry,’ she wrote for Common Sense. ‘And I remember talking to this woman, and talking to my former editor at GQ, who expressed empathy but said that I’d had a “mini yikes” moment.
‘Meanwhile, everyone else was having a major yikes moment, in my opinion, becoming indoctrinated en masse.’
For a period of time, Barlow was the music journalist to contend with, but after her tweet, she was, as she described ‘toxic molten lava.’
After 12 years in the industry, Barlow said she was ‘stripped of talent, conveniently dissociated from my own intelligence and popularity, and marked as a shameful member of the community—one who should never have gotten as far as I had.’
‘An outstanding record for 12-plus years no longer meant a thing. Everyone either hated me, or didn’t want people to know otherwise.’
But in her Substack piece, Barlow told readers that people move on and survive.
‘Know this: you’ll survive. It’s okay. Actually, it’s more than okay,’ she wrote. ‘The best relationships and the right opportunities handle the truth. The ones that can’t were never reciprocal. They were never real. They were never honest.
‘Be honest,’ she offered. ‘You won’t ever regret it. And you’ll always get through another sunset and experience a new dawn.’
The journalist wrote a substack on what happened that led to her being canceled
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