Dom Bradley, a paralegal based in Kansas City, is obsessed with celebrity gossip. Last December, when the New York Times published Blake Lively’s bombshell allegations of harassment and misconduct against It Ends With Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni, it was like Christmas and New Year’s wrapped into one. She obsessively scoured DeuxMoi’s Instagram comments, looking for people to follow who were posting updates on the case. That’s where she came across a surprising name: Candace Owens, the far-right former Daily Wire host.
Bradley was skeptical. She vaguely remembered Owens as the woman who defended Ye after his many antisemitic remarks and appeared in public wearing a White Lives Matter shirt. “She was never anyone I would pay attention to,” Bradley, who says she’s politically moderate, skewing liberal, told me. “If someone brought her up as a point of reference, I would have been like, ‘There’s no way I’m listening to this woman. We don’t align in any way.’” Still, DeuxMoi’s Instagram commenters kept insisting Owens’s coverage of the Lively-Baldoni case was spectacular, so Bradley decided to give it a shot.
What she found on Owens’s podcast was hours and hours of analysis of the case: deep dives into court filings, tabloid news stories, even Ryan Reynolds’s recent appearance on SNL’s 50th-anniversary special. “She’s really been able to go in and pinpoint discrepancies in some of the things Blake Lively has said, rather than us having to go through it on our own,” Bradley says. Though she recognizes that Owens seems to have a pro-Baldoni bias, she doesn’t care: “She’s urging us to look past the fact that this isn’t a feminist issue at all, that it’s about getting justice for whoever is being wronged here,” she says. “She’s uniting the left and right.” Bradley has since listened to every single episode Owens has devoted to the case.
Bradley isn’t alone. Since Owens started covering the Lively-Baldoni case, her YouTube channel has exploded in popularity, allowing her to attract a much larger fan base than the audience of hardcore conservatives she has amassed over the years. Each episode about Lively and Baldoni racks up at least 1.5 million views; in the past month alone, Owens has amassed more than 450,000 new subs on YouTube, and her total video views have quadrupled since this time last year, according to data from the analytics platform SocialBlade. Over the past three months, her audience on YouTube has also started skewing 65 percent female, according to data provided by a spokesperson — a marked shift from her past fan base.
Owens’s coverage of the scandal is hugely popular in spite of the fact that she does not adhere to, as she puts it, “a traditional style of reporting.” Though she claims to have well-placed sources and quotes extensively from legal filings, she often culls from social-media rumors, previously reported stories, and tips from what she refers to as her “mommy sleuths.” In a recent stream, for instance, Owens read a letter she said she received from someone claiming to be Ryan Reynolds’s acting teacher when he was 12, quoting them as saying Reynolds had behavioral issues and was “obnoxious” in his classroom. Though the anecdote was of questionable newsworthiness and credibility (Owens says she was able to verify their identity, but didn’t specify how), she says she felt it was worth reporting on because it helped to explain Reynolds’s alleged “bullying” toward Baldoni and “well-established pattern” of anger issues: “It was an Easter egg, so to speak, in Taylor Swift lingo.”
Still, Owens can be sharp and dryly funny — in one clip, she refers to the actress Robyn Lively as “Blake’s sister who is more talented than her,” citing her performance in the “fantastic film” Teen Witch — and the way she delivers her analysis makes her extremely compelling. “I did not see it coming that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds would be the people that united this country,” the comedian Whitney Cummings joked in an early February TikTok. “The most liberal people I know are now obsessively following Candace Owens for her take and journalism on the situation.” The right-wing women’s magazine Evie also published a tongue-in-cheek headline about Owens’s bipartisan appeal: “How Candace Owens Is Uniting Conservatives and Liberals With Her It Ends With Us Coverage.” “People everywhere gearing up to listen to Candace Owens for hours on end because while we do not agree with her opinions, we cannot deny that bby grl did the research,” one influencer known for her legal commentary captioned a popular Instagram Reel.
Owens is welcoming her new audience with open arms. She has reposted praise from some of her liberal viewers, including an Instagram Story from Bradley. “I don’t care about her political views,” Bradley says in the video. “I like what she’s saying about this case.” On February 17, Owens tweeted a screen grab of her analytics showing an increase of nearly 60 million views from the past month. “Wow. Safe to say these past 28 days have been a record for us on YouTube,” she wrote.
Even in light of the culture’s recent turn rightward, Owens’s surge in popularity is jarring. Since debuting as a conservative commentator in 2017, her extreme views have led even those on the right to disavow her: On her livestreams and her social media, she has equated the Jewish religious practice of Kabbalah with pedophilia, nodded to the medieval blood-libel conspiracy theory that Jews ritualistically slaughter Christian children, and has referred to some of the historically documented atrocities of the Holocaust, such as Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins, as “bizarre propaganda.” (Her history of antisemitic comments is reportedly what led to her break with Ben Shapiro, the co-founder of the conservative platform the Daily Wire, which she left in 2024.) She’s also promoted the racist conspiracy theory that George Floyd died of a drug overdose rather than asphyxiation and claimed that “Black Americans are the most murderous group in America.”
In recent months, however, she’s clearly tried to rebrand herself as a more generic lifestyle influencer. Earlier this year, she launched a multi-platform brand, Club Candace, offering exclusive content to her paying subscribers, including a book club (recommended reading includes Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger’s debunked recounting of classic Hollywood scandals), and a fitness app targeted at young women, particularly newly postpartum mothers. A photo on the Club Candace website shows Owens smiling broadly, wearing a chunky gold necklace and a white sweater, her face expertly lit and framed in soft ringlets. She doesn’t look like the same woman who said on her show that the movement for LGBTQ+ equality is “satanic.” She looks like your garden-variety self-improvement expert with her own Dear Media podcast. Even on the cover of her upcoming book, Make Him a Sandwich: Why Women Don’t Need False Feminism, she looks casual and approachable in white fisherman sandals and cuffed jeans. If you cut off the title, you’d think it was a millennial self-help book, in the same vein as Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face.
Some fans have even wondered if Owens has had a real change of heart. She’s said on her podcast that she’s “getting a little apathetic on the topic of politics.” In a recent episode, she called out conservatives for their “hypocritical” treatment of Ashley St. Clair, the right-wing influencer who last week publicly claimed that Elon Musk was the father of her child. She also recently wiped her Instagram to promote Make Him a Sandwich, deleting years of old posts. “She seems very cognizant that she has more left people in her orbit right now and she is wanting to be more careful,” says Bradley. “Maybe she is course-correcting. A person is allowed to do that.”
Yet despite the perception that Owens is doing an about-face politically, she openly admits she hasn’t shifted away from any of her previously expressed views. “In terms of my perspective, I haven’t changed anything. I’ve been anti–Me Too since long before it was cool,” she told me in an interview. When it comes to the success of her Lively-Baldoni content, she believes her new fans on the left “have kind of just gotten wise to the fact that maybe women lie, just like men.” When I asked about the claim she made in her 2022 documentary The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose rather than police brutality, she said, “I stand by everything I did with that documentary.” (She also stood by her attacks on Black Lives Matter, saying she has seen an influx of Black followers: “They realized, ‘You know, she was right about BLM, and we owe her an apology,” she says.)
She was also unrepentant about previous comments she’s made about Jews, and argued that many of them, including her remark about Nazi experiments, were taken out of context and used by the Anti-Defamation League to “get Jewish people fired up.” She also denied being an antisemite.
“Are we to believe that the millions more people that are following me now are following me because any of that stuff is true?” she says. “Or are we to arrive at a more logical conclusion that they’re following me now because they realize the exact opposite, that the mainstream media lies?”
Indeed, Owens’s new appeal seems to stem in large part from viewers’ decreasing trust in traditional news media. The fact that she’s attracting a mainstream audience speaks volumes about the normalization of extreme right-wing views. But it might say even more about viewers’ openness to trusting information from even the most unlikely sources, provided they’re outside the establishment and the message they deliver is captivating enough.
Owens’s softer, more accessible image has already attracted viewers from opposite sides of the political spectrum, like Lilia, an aspiring beauty influencer from West Virginia. She had never heard of Owens before she stumbled on her coverage of the Lively-Baldoni case. It wasn’t until she checked out Owens’s Instagram that she realized she had been watching a far-right influencer. “I was surprised by some of her views,” Tanya says. “And as a woman of color, I’m terrified by the things I’m hearing about where our country is headed.”
But learning about Owens’s past didn’t make her any less credible to Lilia — in fact, it made her more interested in Owens. “I’ve always been curious about people who think differently from me,” Lilia says. “I want to know how the other side thinks with the intention to learn and not judge. I actually wanted to talk to her.”
Bradley, too, says her interest in Owens’s Lively-Baldoni takes prompted her to check out some of her other content, including a recent YouTube series where she peddles the transphobic conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron, French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife, was born male. Bradley wasn’t a fan, but she also doesn’t see much of an ethical issue with engaging with Owens’s monetized content in general.
“There is so much hypocrisy with the content we consume,” Bradley says. “We have people driving Teslas when Elon Musk’s out there doing a Sieg Heil. So it’s like, where are you gonna draw the line in terms of where your money goes?” She feels she can easily separate Owens’s Lively-Baldoni content from the rest of her brand. “I’m watching it to get what I want to get out of it,” she says. “I will eat the meat, spit out the bones, take what I want, and throw away what I don’t.”
For now, Owens is continuing to build her empire, though she’s moved onto other targets. Her latest subject: the sexual-assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. In a February 25 stream introducing the series, she revealed she spent months interviewing him from prison, concluding that he was railroaded and that the Me Too movement “consists of something of a criminal network.”
“I think people are going to be fascinated with it,” Owens says of the series. “I’ve built up a lot of trust with my audience. They know that I don’t lie.” The video has more than 1.3 million views.