The Silencing of Eve Barlow: When Honesty Becomes a Crime | Stories Of Us | PragerU

The second the tweet went out, I was vehematly attacked. I disagreed with them on this one topic and all of a sudden I just immediately went out of my dream into a nightmare. My name is Eve Barlo and this is my story. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. My dad was wild crazy about music. I mean, some of my first memories were being bobbed around the hallway listening to Elvis and Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra, but you know, I was like every kid just with my two fingers on the radio cassette player with a blank C90 cassette waiting for my favorite pop song to come on the radio so that I could record it. I can't leave out the fact that I grew up during the greatest time to be a British teenager during the height of Brit pop. Yeah, it was a really inspiring time. I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom looking at my bookcases and they barely had any books left in them because I had accumulated so many music magazines when I was growing up. And I was looking at my bookcases thinking, what if I became one of those writers that I was, you know, imagining myself living the life of when I was growing up? And it made sense for me because I loved writing. I had an opinion about everything. And I made a path for myself. I started bothering people at all of my favorite magazines. And eventually I got a yes. I was naive in the right way. I was naive about this being at all a possibility and I just didn't give up on it. I really knew that I had a voice and I was going to find it and I did. I had been writing for some of the top magazines in the UK but decided I wanted a change and moved to the States and there was a really cool punk hiphop indie scene in LA. I wrote for Playboy, GQ, Vulture, and everything was kind of, I would say, like impregnated with identity, politics. Everyone was becoming obsessed with frontloading all pop culture stories, with sexual identity, gender identity. Everything had become politicized. I was writing so many stories for GQ. And of all the topics I wrote about, the one that I was exposed almost immediately to as being one that I shouldn't touch was my identity as a Jew. And the tipping point was the death of George Floyd and the protests and me and my big mouth and my inability to stay quiet for more than 5 minutes. and I tweeted saying, "How dare you bring the Jewish nation and community into the killing of black American lives. I get that you're really angry, but there's no justification for vandalizing Jewish places of worship or any type of vandalism for that matter. Sounds really innocuous now perhaps to say, "Please don't graffiti synagogues." But that wasn't okay. Uh, for me to be doing anything other than posting a black square and keeping my mouth shut was extremely um offensive and racist and everything else that was thrown at me in that moment. And the second the tweet went out, I was vehemently attacked. I mean, I I suddenly went from being someone who was a champion of everyone to public enemy number one for a tweet about not vandalizing synagogues. I remember my editor at GQ, who I'd worked with for years, who had never said anything that wasn't 100% enthusiastic about how successful my pieces were, texted me and said, "Oh, wow. You've just done a major whoopsie." And I never worked for GQ again. I'd started doing this thing where I would go down the list of people I was following on Twitter to see who had stopped following me. I think they perceived me to be engaged in some form of treason. They went from desperately wanting an association with me and the magazines that I worked for and what that meant for them in their careers to, "Oh, no, no, no. We're not together in that picture. That's not from the Grammy party." You know what I mean? It was it was like that. Suddenly you're excommunicated. You're you're a ghost. I just immediately went out of my dream into a nightmare. And that was really confronting when I wasn't internalizing it as being about me and I was instead thinking about it being the fact that I'm Jewish and I'm a Zionist. Growing up in Europe and being told from post Holocaust generations to sort of keep your head down, I knew that my my Jewish identity was something I had to keep kind of close to my chest. It was like all of the conversations growing up that I'd had were sitting in the front of my cortex and I was thinking, are we being pushed out again? Are we is anti-semitism did it ever go away? I disagreed with them on this one topic and all of a sudden I was like a stain on someone's history. There was just something essential to what I was doing. It mattered. I think that's what helped me in some way during the darkness because it started to make what I had lost seem kind of frivolous. like that was really really fun and I was having the time of my life. But if I'm going to be a writer and if I'm going to become a thinker, I'm not going to do that writing about the Arctic Monkeys, you know? I'm going to be writing about why our society seems to be careening off the edge of common human decency right now. I went from caring about the latest album release to much bigger societal issues. I'd never have asked for this. I never planned it. I didn't want it. But I'm so grateful that it happened. Most people on the left who claim to be on the side of tolerance, I think it's all about the ego. How can you be a tolerant person if you're not prepared to have a conversation? There is a collective narcissistic disorder happening right now. And I was in the front row for that experience. I know it intimately that people don't have compassion, don't have empathy, and when they came after me, it left me politically homeless. I remember a couple of years ago, I think like one of the most popular things I published on Twitter was tweet like you've already been cancelled. And I think like that's kind of a mantra that I live by. Now is not the time to hold back on what you really think or what you actually want to say because this has affected too many people. This kind of mass silencing and conforming to an identity, an identicate, a group think. It's terrifying and it's the opposite of tolerant. The hypocrisy is unbelievable. After the murder and rape of Israeli women on October 7th, all of the feminists not only were silent, but proactively worked against gathering of evidence, against having testimony. It's not just that feminists didn't say anything. It's that they did say something. They denied that it happened. feminists who understand and every day talk about the ramifications of rape denial, of sexual assault denial. But Israeli women have been so dehumanized and there is no excuse for it. It's not pro Palestine. It's it's pro- jihad. the reason for what's going on in Europe with a rising Muslim population, decades of growing immigration policies for the sake of promoting multiculturalism and promoting these ideas that sound very nice but don't work in principle. And we're finding that the elephant in the room that we're not allowed to talk about or else we're Islamophobic or racist is that Islam only wants to engage in the culture of the countries it comes from. Do I think that Europe can be saved? It's going to take tenacious leadership in order to deal with the difficulties that have arisen. You can't get rid of a problem if you can't even name the problem or talk about the problem. So there needs to be leaders who are prepared to do that. Do I think a Muslim takeover could happen in America? I think under the current administration, no. But it's hard to say that it couldn't happen under future administrations. And I have the right to say Donald Trump is not my favorite person. But you don't need to like a person to know that they have a vision that aligns more with your views. I feel far more comfortable with the administration that we currently have than I predict I would have felt otherwise. You have generations of people in the UK, in France, in Spain, in Italy, not only diminishing their sense of pride about what their countries have achieved, but being actively taught to focus on the shame around the crimes of their nations. There's an active protest against historical figures. Winston Churchill being the first example I can think off the top of my head who's suddenly gone from becoming the man who saved the West to a racist pariah. Someone's entire story in the context in which they're understood can be totally flipped on its head. That's not progressive. I hope that America can learn lessons from Europe and understand where America has made mistakes. But don't poison a whole generation of American youth against themselves and make them feel guilty for the crimes of their ancestors because that makes no sense and it's not how you build a prosperous country. I wish that Europe had understood that and I think that that's where the failing happened. What am I doing now? I feel like I'm in my Kim Kardashian/P Paris Hilton era where everyone's decided what they've decided about me and I don't care and I feel freer to speak than I ever have. My Substack is called Blacklisted and it's all of the dangerous thoughts I think out loud on page. Now is the time to speak up and to tell people how you really think and to engage people in conversation and to ask questions. If people are not accustomed to being challenged, then where are we going? Where does that end? I reread Victor Frankle's man's search for meaning last summer when I was in a particularly difficult place. And what he writes about finding a purpose is everything. Purpose will keep you alive. Purpose will keep you motivated. And I feel like I have a purpose now where it's almost like what I was doing before was just cutting my teeth and getting experience so that I could really do what I'm doing now. And now I'm getting to the real work and the real meat of who I'm supposed to be in the world. Don't be afraid. Speak your mind. It's really not as scary as you think. [Music] Thank you for watching this video and listening to my story. And if you want to continue meeting people like me and hearing stories like this, please donate to Prageru.