Sitting in a parked car outside a Buc-ee’s somewhere between Dallas and Austin, Brett Cooper made her first appearance as a Fox News contributor.

She was meant to be sitting in an air-conditioned studio, chatting live with the Fox host Will Cain. But she had blown a tire on the sizzling Texas freeway and missed her window. She offered to record a greeting on her phone instead, somewhat sheepishly explaining her absence.

Unceremonious as her debut last month seemed, it suited Ms. Cooper. She is a 23-year-old influencer. Filming herself comes as naturally as breathing.

On Instagram, where she has 1.3 million followers, Ms. Cooper’s life is a picture of young, domestic bliss. Married and pregnant, she tends to her farm in an oversize plaid shirt and a high, high ponytail. (This spring, she had 10 cows, 10 chickens, five pigs and three ducks.)

On YouTube, where nearly 1.6 million people subscribe to “The Brett Cooper Show,” she publishes twice-weekly monologues about celebrity and trending news with a conservative bent. She uses headlines about stars like Katy Perry or Simone Biles to argue against feminism and abortion rights, or the “trans craze with young people.”

Ms. Cooper, whom Fox News signed in late June, represents a new evolution of Republican commentators: an entertainer playing by the internet’s rules, rather than the established customs of right-wing media. Her speech is quick and jocular, like a red-state mash-up of BuzzFeed and “Gilmore Girls.”

She does not aspire to be a serious anchor, or a party leader influencing Washington policy debates. Though Ms. Cooper supports President Trump, her cause is culture — specifically, making conservatism look cool and normal to young people.

She has the grooming for it: Ms. Cooper is an alum of PragerU, the digital content empire that is designed to appeal to budding conservatives on liberal college campuses and prides itself on changing audiences’ minds. And she worked at the Daily Wire, a media company for right-wing news with a “woke-free” streaming entertainment arm.

Conservatives of the past, Ms. Cooper said in an interview, dismissed pop culture as irrelevant. (Or as a lost cause.) She takes it seriously.

“This is our real life, especially for young people,” she said. “The majority of our lives aren’t spent debating policy and debating political candidates. It’s spent engaging with social media, and that’s where we learn values.”

Ms. Cooper’s peers include Candace Owens and Jessica Reed Kraus, creators who lean right but have drawn female fans across the ideological spectrum through exhaustive analysis of celebrity, courtroom or political drama, such as Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni (on Ms. Owens’s podcast) or Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard (in Ms. Kraus’s newsletter).

Her supporters include conservative media figures with political persecution narratives: Gina Carano, the Disney actor fired over social media posts comparing the act of “hating someone for their political views” to Nazi incitement of hatred of Jews; or Riley Gaines, a college swimmer who has lobbied against allowing trans women to compete in the sport alongside other women.

But even stars on the left have shown respect for Ms. Cooper’s approach. While Hasan Piker, a progressive streamer, has accused her of copying his own internet-y cadence, he has complimented her “decent job” at covering apolitical topics with a “sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle right-wing tilt.” (Mr. Piker has a massive audience, too, with nearly three million followers on Twitch.)

“Brett Cooper is popping off spectacularly in ways that I could never even imagine for myself,” Mr. Piker, 33, said this year on his channel. “She’s cooking.”

Twenty years ago, hosting a cable show might have been a dream job for someone like Ms. Cooper or Mr. Piker. Today, with traditional television in decline, more on-air talent is going independent. Ms. Cooper is already under her own shingle, having departed the Daily Wire to start “The Brett Cooper Show” on YouTube in January.

That move freed her to sign her own brand deals, worth millions for top-tier influencers. Ms. Cooper recently joined the podcasting network Red Seat Ventures, which sells advertising for Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan.

Going independent also allowed her to widen her audience, reaching people who might be turned off by hard-right media brands.

“She’s not mean,” said Maggie Richardson, a 32-year-old fan from Nashville who identifies as conservative but finds herself getting “mad” at the tone of mainstream conservative news. “They’re just always talking bad about Democrats and making fun of them. And I’m like, ‘They’re people too.’”

So what is Ms. Cooper doing contributing to Fox News — the most mainstream conservative outlet of all, where the average viewer is 69 and politically siloed?

A Conservative Child Actor

On a Saturday this spring, Ms. Cooper made her way through a farmers’ market in Franklin, Tenn., collecting rib-eye steaks and paper-wrapped flowers under a sky that had been threatening for days to crack open with tornadoes. Ms. Cooper lives with her husband outside Nashville; she was raised partly in Chattanooga.

Four or five times, she was stopped in the crowd — by women in athleisure sets and men in camo hats who spotted a minor celebrity amid the organic vegetables and beef tallow skin care products.

“I’ll be honest,” said Joshua Hertz, 28. Approaching Ms. Cooper had made him nervous. “But I want to get out of my comfort zone a little more.”

No reaction could have pleased Ms. Cooper more. Underlying her work is a call for young viewers to be more self-assured. “Especially the young men,” she said. (Her YouTube audience is 53 percent male, according to her publicist.) She wants young people to “articulate your beliefs and stand strong in them.”

She learned this as a teenager, she said, while coming into her political identity and realizing it did not align with those around her.

Ms. Cooper was a child actor, home-schooled by her mother and emancipated at 15 amid her parents’ divorce. Her roles included Trailer Parker, a bullied high school student on the 2018 streaming series adaptation of “Heathers.” Ms. Cooper enjoyed acting but not the lifestyle. Filming locations and schedules were out of her control, and scripts were too “raunchy,” she said.

She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, but found herself socially alienated. Her peers embraced Bernie Sanders, protested racial injustice and could not tolerate her support of Mr. Trump, she said. She left her sorority in 2020 as it wrestled over whether to congratulate or condemn its alumna Amy Coney Barrett, the new Supreme Court justice who would later vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Ms. Cooper found community, instead, through PragerForce, the student street team of PragerU — a young conservative recruitment group. PragerU wanted to produce more right-wing content creators. A few months after her graduation, Ms. Cooper received a message from a member of the Daily Wire staff in Nashville, asking if she would audition for a new commentary video series tailored to a young audience.

“The Comments Section,” which featured Ms. Cooper reacting to daily celebrity news and internet trends, debuted in March 2022. It became “even bigger than we anticipated,” said Coby DeVito, then the Daily Wire’s director of social video. “For a lot of political commentators, it typically takes years and years to find your audience, find your voice.”

Within four months, “The Comments Section” reached one million subscribers, he said, occasionally outperforming the Daily Wire’s flagship properties, including “The Ben Shapiro Show.” (Viewers have remarked on the sibling-like resemblance between her and Mr. Shapiro, though there is no relation.)

Ms. Cooper also returned to acting at the Daily Wire. The company’s scripted projects were produced by Jeremy Boreing, who stepped down as the company’s co-chief executive in March to focus on such creative endeavors.

During the production of “The Pendragon Cycle,” a fantasy series filmed in Hungary and Italy in 2023, Mr. Boreing, who called himself the “god king” of the Daily Wire, pushed Ms. Cooper to continue her daily obligations to “The Comments Section,” she said. She was exhausted.

Her departure last December became part of ongoing speculation about Mr. Boreing’s management. Her star was rising, and media companies tend to place restrictions on their stars. “When I feel like I’m out of control, and I am not the one driving what I’m putting out in the world and other people are dictating that, that’s when I have to make a move,” Ms. Cooper said.

Curiosity about the drama remains high among Redditors and YouTubers. When the company announced that Mr. Boreing was stepping down, Ms. Cooper reposted the news on X with a gif of the “Tonight Show” host, Jimmy Fallon, smirking and nodding. (Mr. Boreing did not respond to a request for comment.)

Not a Feminist, Not a Tradwife

In early June, Ms. Cooper spoke onstage at a young women’s summit organized by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization, where participants pushed the message “less burnout, more babies.”

Her own message was more nuanced. She said she appreciated “tradwife” aesthetics: the stylish married mothers who post online about their “slower and softer” lives.

“That is objectively a good thing, but unfortunately it did not stop there,” Ms. Cooper said. She was referring to right-wing criticism of her and her husband, who sold advertising for the YouTube channel before the Red Seat Ventures deal, which was first reported on Thursday by Bloomberg. (Previous sponsors include Jordan Peterson, the men’s rights activist who teaches online classes, and Taylor Dukes Wellness, which sells “nontoxic” nutritional supplements.)

“They’ve told me that I’m crazy because I’m not stopping work entirely,” said Ms. Cooper, who is in her third trimester of pregnancy. She praised working women and criticized those who glamorized milkmaid sundresses.

“You don’t have to do that, I promise,” she said. “My sourdough starter is dead in my fridge.”

Much of Ms. Cooper’s experience of the spotlight has been informed by her gender and appearance. Men send her lascivious messages. Some of her videos have been turned into A.I. pornography.

It is unclear whether this rankles her more than the accusations from fellow conservatives that she is a “secret feminist” for pursuing a career. (Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist who has dined with Mr. Trump, has called Ms. Cooper’s voice “grating” and her channel a “hate watch” on his own show.) Sometimes, she said, commenters heckle her for lacking traditional values because her estranged father did not walk her down the aisle at her wedding.

Ms. Cooper has been critical of some prominent women in media, too. In a June episode, she listed a few “women who just need to shut their faces,” including Whoopi Goldberg and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. “Blake Lively, things would go so well for you if you would just sit down and stop talking and stop fighting,” she said.

The goal of feminism, she argued in another episode (about the actress Sydney Sweeney’s and the singer Sabrina Carpenter’s use of sex in their marketing), is not equality or empowerment, but to “make men angry and dominate them.”

A common topic on “The Brett Cooper Show” is what she refers to as “transgenderism.” In a July episode, Ms. Cooper reassured her viewers that they were not “hateful and bigoted” for questioning the science of gender-affirming care for minors — “in case you ever doubt yourself or feel insecure,” she said.

Ms. Cooper pointed out that she does have L.G.B.T.Q. fans. One came to her first live show, at a New York City comedy club in January. During a moment of audience participation, he asked for the host’s help in finding other gay conservative men in the city. (Afterward, Ms. Cooper’s publicist, who had enticed a whole row of reporters to the club — from Vanity Fair, NBC News, W magazine, Semafor and more — tried to set up the fan with a New York Post reporter.)

Why Fox?

Before the Fox News deal, Ms. Cooper was not so sure about television. “I think that there are probably other people who love news more than I do, who are better at TV than I am,” she said this spring. She had rejected overtures from Blaze Media and various podcast networks, preferring to work for herself, until Red State Ventures offered to allow “The Brett Cooper Show” creative oversight of its advertising. (Red Seat is owned by the Fox Corporation, although the partnership was negotiated separately from Ms. Cooper’s on-air contributor agreement.)

Ms. Cooper was more interested in merging media and commerce, true to her generation. MrBeast, the world’s most popular YouTuber, now generates more revenue from chocolate bars than from videos.

Ms. Cooper, who is working on a book of essays and brainstorming a consumer product — a subscription cookie dough business has been floated — did not cite political commentators or podcasters as her influences.

She named Reese Witherspoon, whose media company adapts book club selections into scripted projects, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who turned her wellness newsletter into the Goop retail brand.

“I know the feeling of what I want to put out in the world,” Ms. Cooper said. “I don’t know how that translates to something tangible yet.”

Still, Fox News executives believe Ms. Cooper could host a show on the network someday.

Lauren Petterson, president of Fox Nation and talent development for Fox News Media, praised her “fierceness” and “humility” — a combination people don’t always expect “in female talent.” She praised Ms. Cooper for speaking openly about her troubled childhood and complicated family dynamics, including her brother’s death from cardiac arrest when he was 17, and the major mental illnesses plaguing others in her immediate family, including schizophrenia and suicidal ideation.

Not everyone cheered Ms. Cooper’s leap into the cable news world; on social media, there was some disappointment that a star of independent media would go corporate.

It was clear, however, that both parties benefited from the multiyear deal. More specific terms, including her compensation, were not disclosed.

Ms. Cooper gives Fox News another fresh new face and, ideally, some of her younger viewers.

Fox News gives Ms. Cooper access to a larger audience — 2.6 million people in prime time, compared with her average June viewership of 500,000 — to better sell her future books and any other wares. (Ms. Cooper called Fox News an unrivaled “cultural giant.”) The job is also paid; Ms. Cooper declined to share her own YouTube show’s revenue figures, though her manager said it was profitable.

So far on Fox News, she has been asked to opine about the “strong, intelligent women” in Mr. Trump’s White House, and to explain Democrats’ generational divide as young progressives call for new party leadership.

For her generation, she said on Fox, nothing resonates more than people “who are big on social media, but actually feel like they are speaking directly to the public.”