Candace Owens has found a new audience with her breakdown of the Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively saga. Her latest cause? Exonerating Harvey Weinstein. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Further reading: The culture warriors who say Harvey Weinstein is innocent by Constance Grady, Candace Owens Has Gone Mainstream by E.J. Dickson. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Candace Owens hosting a taping of her show. Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is Harvey Weinstein back in court?
Harvey Weinstein is back in court this week. An appeals court overturned his 2020 conviction in New York, saying he hadn't gotten a fair trial. And so his accusers must now testify again. Weinstein has always had very good lawyers, but the court of public opinion was against him. Until now, it seems.
Chapter 2: Why does Candace Owens support Harvey Weinstein?
After looking over this case, I've concluded that Harvey Weinstein was wrongfully convicted and was basically just hung on the Me Too thing.
The commentator Candace Owens, who has previously defended Kanye and Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate and his brother were actually a response to a misandrist culture, women that hated men. Before Andrew Tate, there was Lena Dunham. Has taken up Weinstein's cause, and it seems to be gaining her followers. Coming up on Today Explained, when Candace met Harvey.
We used to have big ideals and dreams when we were still in university. We wrote these beautiful application essays about how we were going to fix tax avoidance and tax evasion, how we're going to tackle global hunger and work at the United Nations. And look at us. What has happened?
What has happened? This week on The Grey Area, we're talking about our moral ambition. Where did it go and what we can do to get it back. New episodes of The Grey Area drop on Mondays. Available everywhere.
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Candace Owens is a 36-year-old far-right commentator who made her bones taking positions that are reliably aimed at owning the libs and occasionally spin out into country crazy. E.J. Dixon, a writer for New York magazine's The Cut, recently profiled Owens, whose telling of her own story begins with a terrible experience when she was quite young.
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Chapter 3: How did Candace Owens become a right-wing commentator?
She had a pretty high-profile experience with bullying when she was in high school.
One night I was sitting on the couch with my boyfriend and I received anonymous phone calls. And at the end of watching Talladega Nights with my boyfriend, I picked up the phone, I listened to the voicemails, and there were people, four boys, that were screaming back and forth, calling me a dirty a**hole.
saying we're going to tar and feather your family, saying we're going to do to you like we did to Martin Luther King, put a bullet in the back of your head, made references to Rosa Parks. It was really probably the nastiest thing that I've ever heard in my entire life. And it became like local news. Long story short, this was categorized as a hate crime. The FBI was involved.
I was out of school for about six weeks. And just imagine, like, I didn't even want to report it. And then having like what felt like your entire life, it was front page of newspapers for two months.
So that was sort of like her origin story was that she was actually the victim of bullying. And at first she kind of has a pretty standard trajectory for somebody that's interested in communications. Like she got a journalism degree. She interned for Vogue. And it seems like politically she self-identified as feminist. fairly liberal.
But then what happens in 2016, she launches this company called Social Autopsy that essentially publishes like the online footprint of anonymous people online. The goal is to sort of hold bullies and trolls accountable. What we do is we attach their words to their places of employment and anybody in the entire world can search for them.
And a lot of people get really mad about it because they think it's like a doxing tool. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. This is around Gamergate. Doxing is very much like omnipresent in the culture. So she gets a lot of backlash for it.
And there are some major far right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, if you remember that guy.
I sure do. I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll. You know, I'm doing God's work. Women are not an oppressed class in the West. There is no rape culture in the West.
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Chapter 4: What controversy surrounds Candace Owens and Blake Lively?
movement. They turned me into public enemy number one for accurately talking about George Floyd, not in the capacity of a hero, but in the capacity of a person who was addicted to drugs and who had enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse at the time that he died.
She's also weirdly very focused on Jews and Jewish people. She has said that Joseph Mengele's experiments, Joseph Mengele, you know, the famous doctor during the Holocaust in Germany, which are very well documented. She said, just slice a person in half and sew them together. That just sounds like bizarre propaganda. She's good friends with Kanye West.
She defended many of his anti-Semitic remarks. She wore a White Lives Matter t-shirt in public with him in 2022 at the time that it was thought to be sort of like a white supremacist slogan.
We put on a t-shirt to actually do something that was inclusive, to say, actually white Americans, you are allowed to be a part of this too, because literally all lives matter.
So yeah, the list kind of goes on and on. She's sort of just like a professional provocateur.
Once upon a time, a person spouting these kind of takes would have been broadly viewed as kind of deranged and probably not given a lot of oxygen. It's 2025 and it's been 2016 for about a decade now. How do people respond to Candace Owens? Like who's in her audience and do they think she's crazy but funny or do they think, yes, this woman's a truth teller?
Well, it seems like her audience has changed a lot. I mean, what's weird about this whole thing is that a lot of people in the right traditionally have thought she was quite extreme.
Like as recently as last year, when she was at the Daily Wire, she very publicly split with Ben Shapiro over some of her tweets, which he viewed as anti-Semitic and her views on Israel and her liking a tweet alluding to the blood libel conspiracy theory. She definitely has surprisingly gotten a lot more mainstream since she split from The Daily Wire.
over the past year or so and started her own podcast.
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Chapter 5: What is Candace Owens' stance on women's allegations against men?
Her belief has essentially been that any woman who accuses a man of harassment likely has an ulterior motive and women should not be automatically believed.
She is a modern feminist, which means that she grew up wealthy, her life has been perfect, and so she has to create struggle where there just isn't any, okay?
The videos go wildly, wildly viral. Like, just for context, I pulled up some data from the site Social Blade. She had 1.5 million YouTube subscribers last May, which is a lot, right? But now she has a little more than 4.2 million. And a lot of it has to do with the success of these videos. Last year, she had 132 million views total on her channel. This year, she has a little more than 688 million.
So it's just been tremendous, tremendous growth.
Why do you think her pro-Baldoni message is so popular, like popular enough to just jack up her YouTube following?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's part of a larger cultural shift. Right words. I think that she is capitalizing on this very strong anti-feminist streak among Gen Z in particular. I think that there's a lot of justifiable, frankly, frustration with my generation.
I'm a millennial, like my generation's brand of feminism, which was essentially very like girl bossy, lean in, like if you work hard, you can have it all type of feminism. I think that Gen Z, Women are sort of seeing that correctly to be a sham and sort of leaning into the opposite direction, like just going totally further on the other side of the pendulum.
And that's where a lot of this is coming from. I think a lot of a lot of the increasing conservatism is. for Gen Z women, it's this frustration with Me Too, this backlash against Me Too. And it's also this, I think in some ways, justifiable backlash against the version of feminism that they have been
So she's representative of something that is bigger than her. And her videos, the appeal of her videos goes beyond, hey, here's a woman saying a provocative thing about Blake Lively or a mean thing about Blake Lively.
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Chapter 6: Why has Candace Owens' audience grown rapidly?
Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, that story has kind of peaked. It's now on the downswing. So presumably she wants to continue capitalizing on this. What is she covering now?
When I spoke to her, she was just launching a series that was sort of investigating the claims against Harvey Weinstein.
I believe he was wrongfully convicted. I don't want to say Harvey Weinstein is a moral or an innocent man because that sounds like I'm saying he behaved well. But there is a difference between being immoral and being a person who abuses their power and being a person who was running the peninsula like his own personal brothel and being a cold-blooded rapist.
She sort of frames it as like I'm the one journalist who's brave enough to like listen to his side of the story.
E.J. Dixon of The Cut. Harvey Weinstein back on trial in New York, but this time the momentum behind Me Too has stalled and it may even be running in reverse. Coming up, Candace Owens and the Me Too backlash.
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Chapter 7: How does Candace Owens appeal to Gen Z?
It is actually an even more amazing answer from Jay-Z. Google that one. Fresh Air has an enormous archive. And with Fresh Air Plus, you can get curated lists of interviews spun forward for the issues of today. With Fresh Air, you can stay in the loop and dive deep into conversations on culture, crotches, news, and other issues.
You can tune in Fresh Air from NPR to hear some of the most insightful interviews anywhere, wherever you get your podcasts. Today Explained. Constance Grady, Vox senior culture writer. What's going on with Harvey Weinstein?
Weinstein is currently facing retrial in New York State. He was found guilty of rape and sexual assault here in 2020. But last year, the verdict was overturned because of a procedural issue.
Some breaking news now. New York's highest court this morning overturning Harvey Weinstein's 2020 rape conviction. Today's legal ruling is a great day for America.
because it instills in us the faith that there is a justice system.
In the 2020 trial, the judge allowed prosecutors to present testimony from women who had accused Weinstein of sexual assault but who weren't pressing charges against him in that trial.
While the trial centers on the accusations of two women, many other women who were victimized by Weinstein have attended the trial.
Each time an accuser is on the stand, they break down into tears. It's a consistent theme to see that they have to take a pause.
So at the time, the argument was that their testimony would establish a pattern of behavior from Weinstein. But in the appeal last year, the judge was like, if you don't have enough evidence to actually charge him with the specific crimes that these women say he committed, then you really just shouldn't be presenting testimony about it at all.
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