MY FIRST CLUE THAT SOMETHING WAS AFOOT was at a dinner party in early February when my left-leaning, normie girlfriend proclaimed—seemingly out of nowhere—that Justin Baldoni had been framed.

At a time when most Americans had not yet heard the word DOGE, tens of millions were tuning in daily to debate the minutiae of a high-profile sexual harassment case filed by megastar Blake Lively against Baldoni, her director and costar on It Ends With Us.

Not so long ago, the default would have been to empathize with, if not straight up support Lively, who appeared to be the latest in a long line of actresses blowing the whistle on troubling on-set behavior. Instead, my friend whipped out her phone to play reel after reel of TikTok videos of women defending Baldoni and railing against Lively and her über-famous husband, Ryan Reynolds. Three reels in, a familiar name flashed across the screen.

“What’s Candace Owens doing narrating this case?” I asked.

“You know Candace Owens?” my friend replied, with the bewilderment of someone who just discovered their mom knows what an NFT is.

I did indeed. Owens’s career path reads like a right-wing Mad Lib. The one consistency is her continuing commandeering of the spotlight through spectacle and controversy. She first became prominent as a college dropout who won a racial harassment settlement against her high school, then launched a blog where writers opined about Donald Trump’s penis size and founded an organization to confront cyberbullying. After being doxxed—allegedly by progressives—she did a political 180, founding #RedPillBlack and the Blexit Foundation to encourage African Americans to abandon the Democratic party.

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“Discovered” by alt-right luminaries Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich during the first Trump administration, Owens skyrocketed through roles at Turning Point USA and the Daily Wire between appearances on InfoWars. She attended Paris Fashion Week, palled around with Kanye West, and even received accolades from President Trump, who called her a “very smart thinker” for her defense of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

But even the right has limits, and Owens found them. She was fired from the Daily Wire in March 2024 for peddling the blood libel and Holocaust denial, among other antisemitic conspiracy theories. She leapt into the crossfire between Jordan Peterson and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, with the latter praising her for waging a “full-fledged war against the Jews.”

Banished to the right-wing wilderness, Owens relaunched her solo YouTube show three months later. Early numbers were solid but not impressive; she hit a low point in views and subscribers after the 2024 election as she was casting about for new scandals.

Then came the Baldoni case.

After flicking at the controversy for close to a week, Owens posted her first video weighing in on the Baldoni/Lively drama on January 8. By that point, millions of consumers of celebrity gossip had already been voraciously consuming every morsel of information they could find on the case since it debuted in the pages of the New York Times shortly before Christmas. Owens slid right into the zeitgeist, with nothing distinguishing her from the hundreds of other hot-take artists and celeb watchers flooding TikTok and Instagram.

Perhaps because of her own opinions, or perhaps sensing the movement of the crowd—or maybe both—Owens established herself as a Lively skeptic. She also proved that she was a savvy social-media star. Splicing funny clips in with scathing commentary, she pounced on new legal filings, broke “news” from juicy sources, and found “clues” in clips from Reynolds’s new blockbuster movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, in which Lively had a cameo. Other posters breathlessly discussed these coveted “Easter eggs,” magnifying Owens’s visibility to a larger, apolitical audience.

To the new viewers flocking to her channel, Owens sounded like a credible, even insightful narrator. She speaks with confidence and self-assurance. She allied herself with an online cadre of Lively loathers dating back to the star’s days on Gossip Girl. She declared Lively a “mean girl” and a “brat,” repeatedly condemning her “modern feminism.” She sneered at white, wealthy women who, she argued, needed to manufacture hardships for women because they’ve never really experienced them. Her story’s assumed premise was that real feminists work hard, don’t have stuff handed to them, and prioritize truth over sophomoric allegiances. Real feminists, that is, look a little something like Owens herself.

As the case wore on, Owens went even further. She portrayed Lively as a backstabber of other women and Reynolds as a controlling husband driven to destroy Baldoni because of jealousy. They became symbols of anti-feminism in this pervasive narrative.

After posting a dozen videos on the case, Owens announced she had surpassed 4 million subscribers to her channel for the first time ever. She added nearly 400,000 new subscribers just in the month of February 2025. Standup comedian Whitney Cummings noticed: “Did not see this coming,” she said to open a TikTok. “That Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds would be the people that united this country. . . . The most liberal people I know are now obsessively following Candace Owens for her take and journalism on the situation.”

Soon, established influencers like “Steph with da deets” and the mega-popular DeuxMoi—known for hawking lip plumper and dishing on celebrity couplings, not spreading political invective—were citing Owens as a source on the Baldoni story. Her significance grew to such an extent that she was named—alongside Perez Hilton—as one of the content creators Lively sought to bar from case information. This is the celebrity gossip equivalent of making the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

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HOW COULD IT COME TO BE that someone too toxic for the Daily Wire had not only reinvented herself as an influential culture commentator in such a short time, but had risen to preeminence in her new role?

Owens’s appeal rests in her young, hip, and glamorous aesthetic. She bridged what many assumed to be an impassable divide—merging the trad-wife trend with the girl-boss ethos. Viewers saw something both authoritative and aspirational: a successful career, a hot husband, and three adorable kids with a fourth on the way. Removed from politics, she was more acceptable—and, arguably, more influential: She is shaping the viewpoints of millions of people who may just now be engaging in the MeToo debates for the first time.

Defenders of what Owens would deride as “modern feminism” noticed that she and others were doing real damage as public opinion shifted against Lively, which coincided with the start of a new administration hellbent on extinguishing the #MeToo movement. But Owens’s narrative has proven durable in spite of pushback. A recent Glamour story offered a look at the “mommy sleuths” behind the campaign against Lively. The piece only made people angrier. Content creators lashed back, accusing the reporter of using “mom” as a derogatory term and delegitimizing their experiences in the world of journalism and the entertainment industry. Popular sports podcaster Dave Neal did a segment repudiating the article’s attempt to paint all Lively skeptics as right-wing plants. (One of his commenters wrote, “Omg I’m a Democrat a mom of boys, and I don’t appreciate lies to destroy a man’s life Blake.”) Reddit threads proliferated criticizing the perceived condescension from white feminists in their coverage of the case.

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For Owens, this has undoubtedly been a triumph: Not only has this campaign given oxygen to her career but it has also served to advance a larger ideological project she’s been working on since before Justin Baldoni became a household name.

Owens was an outspoken early critic of the #MeToo movement. She launched her 2019 PragerU show with an interview about #MeToo with Roseanne Barr during which she claimed that the closest thing to white supremacy she had seen in her lifetime was the “radical feminist movement.” She and Barr agreed that women, and mothers, would have to be the ones to take down #MeToo.

Despite her noxious views, Owens is tuning in to a real shift in public opinion on these matters. Voters—many of them women and moms—have started to worry about a failure to define due process in sexual harassment cases. Democrats failed to address the skepticism head on. Instead, they appeared to retreat from the movement it once championed. That left a wide-open lane for political opportunists like Candace Owens and her more mainstream counterpart, Megyn Kelly, to roll in, get a handle on the debate, and pull it squarely toward the anti-feminism side.

This has all been compounded by the fact that a generation of young women who feel politics has failed them and that humanity is doomed are losing themselves in the permanent escape of pop culture and celebrity gossip. The characters are familiar and the storylines offer simplicity in a complicated new world. These younger women are connecting with Candace Owens.

One TikTok at a time, she has spoken their language and promised that they can be like her, look like her, have it all—but first, they should think like her. By the time they get to her more radical views, they have already bought in. The only question now is whether we’re witnessing a political realignment or just the world’s most bizarre passing episode of celebrity courtroom drama.