E.J. Dickson
Appearances
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She had a pretty high-profile experience with bullying when she was in high school.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
And there are some major far right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, if you remember that guy.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Yeah, and Mike Cernovich and they offer her their support and they defend her. And so she's kind of gets it into her head. It seems that like a lot of the backlash was led by leftists, which may or may not be true. But she said like them offering their support is kind of how she became radicalized, like virtually overnight.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So she launched her own YouTube channel, which got pretty popular.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
And then she went to this website, PragerU, which is, you know, a right-wing, you know, conservative think tank slash website.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
And then she kind of climbs the ladder to the Daily Wire, which is sort of like the conservative media outlet at the time. And she kind of says a lot of pretty controversial things, like since the very beginning of her career. Oh my God, Charlottesville.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She was anti-LGBTQ. She's called LGBTQ people like a sexual plague on society. She's been very critical of the Black Lives Matter
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So yeah, the list kind of goes on and on. She's sort of just like a professional provocateur.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
over the past year or so and started her own podcast.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Yeah, so she has been very focused on covering pop culture. And, like, to be clear, she always has covered pop culture to some degree. And she starts putting out these episodes about the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively scandal that just go everywhere. ridiculously, ridiculously viral. Okay, so basically, it centers around this movie, It Ends With Us.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
And when the movie came out last summer, there was a lot of negative press around Blake Lively and around the movie. But basically, last December, Blake Lively filed a lawsuit against her co-star and the director of the movie, Justin Baldoni, accusing him of improper workplace conduct. She said he made some inappropriate comments about her body that made her feel uncomfortable.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She alleges that he walked in on her while she was nursing and a bunch of other things. But she also alleges that the negative PR that she was getting when the movie came out last summer was actually orchestrated by Justin Baldoni's PR team because she had filed an HR complaint against him and he had anticipated that she would go public with her allegations.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So she basically alleges that Baldoni launched like a preemptive smear campaign. against her before she publicly came forward.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Baldoni has really, really strongly denied these allegations, and he's also launched a countersuit claiming, no, he never did any of this, like this was all a fight over creative control, over the movie, and that Blake and her husband Ryan Reynolds are trying to destroy his career and get him blacklisted from Hollywood. essentially.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
It's all super, super complicated and thorny and difficult to sit through, and everyone in Hollywood is taking sides.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. She's very good at what she does. Like, she's amazing at marketing. She has a way of distilling very complicated ideas into very simple packages. Yeah. Another thing that she's really good at is she can sort of, like, adopt the language of journalism without actually doing traditional journalism.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
So she'll do research, as she puts it, which is essentially, like, culling together a lot of different stuff that she finds on Reddit or stuff that, like, she calls them her... TikTok mommy sleuths, her fans sent her from TikTok. And she sort of presents them with the veneer of facts, even though she doesn't really like do the fact checking or the reporting to bear it out. So it's very persuasive.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
The fact that she's mainstream, I think, or like bordering on mainstream now is, I think, really reflective of the direction that the culture in general is going. And I also think that a lot of a lot of what we should take away from it has to do with like the erosion of the traditional media ecosystem and creators like Candice becoming more empowered.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
She's not delivering like the best information or the most reliable information, but it doesn't really matter because reliability is not really the metric anymore. The metric is who is keeping eyeballs on the page, who's saying the most shocking thing, who's saying the most extreme thing, who's packaging this in the best way.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
When I spoke to her, she was just launching a series that was sort of investigating the claims against Harvey Weinstein.
Today, Explained
The Harvey Weinstein apologist
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.