Amazing as it is, people continue to have things to say about Andrew Tate. When he first surfaced on Twitter a decade ago, his open celebration of materialism, his rigid, over-the-top application of “red-pill” principles, and his hatred of women made me think his was a parody account, some smart aleck exaggerating the worst of the manosphere to make a larger point.
Turns out, there was no larger point. Tate embodied the worst of the manopshere’s ideology without so much as a whiff of redeeming irony. Whenever people talk about Tate, some seem shocked to think he means what he says and that his shtick isn’t a gross joke. You can almost hear them saying to themselves “Is this guy for real?”
Nevertheless, a certain segment of conservatives have determined that not only is Tate very much for real, but he is a natural inhabitant of the political and cultural right. He has appeared on The Tucker Carlson show and The Candace Owens show. Benny Johnson recently interviewed him. With news breaking in the last few weeks that the Trump administration may have pressured the Romanian government to allow Tate and his brother Tristan to come to the United States, Tate’s embrace by the popular right seems complete.
Tate apologists offer a couple of related justifications to anyone questioning the wisdom of this arrangement. The first is that Tate, we are told, “has cracked the code” on how to talk to young men, and by bringing him into the movement, conservatives stand to bring countless young men into the fold.
Not going to happen.
The idea that Tate’s success a few years ago at convincing a segment of young men to enter his Hustlers University to earn a P.H.D. (Pimpin’ Hoes Degree) will translate into convincing that same segment of men to commit to a movement aimed at preserving the best of Western culture and virtue seems fanciful at best.
Tate’s popularity with his audience has never been about conservatism in any form. His popularity rides exclusively upon the fact that he grants young men permission to act on their basest impulses while promising that doing so will make them rich. If anything, Andrew Tate cannot save the West because Andrew Tate is what the West must be saved from.
The second defense of Tate is that he embodies the true masculine spirit which has been driven out of the West by feminism, and whose disappearance has led us into torpor and decadence.
The response to this is simple: Tate is not masculine or, at least, he is no icon of mature masculinity. The spiritual maturity that causes men to endure hardship for the sake of The Good is entirely missing in him, and it is an outrage that leaders on the right eagerly gaslight those who point out that debauching a 15-year-old girl as part of your scheme to purchase a second Lambo may, in fact, not be the kind of manliness that will deliver the West from her enemies. Indeed, St. Francis in all his poverty, admiring the beauty of the flowers and preaching pointlessly to the birds is an emblem of greater masculinity than Tate will ever achieve. Perhaps this is why droves of young men, in search of a vision for their lives and a pattern by which their masculine souls might be refined, are turning to the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Any right-wing movement unable to offer men something other than what they could find at Hustlers University is a movement doomed.
That such excuses for Tate are taken seriously reveals that what once was “the dissident right” is fast becoming “the delusional right.” Tate is a sigil onto whom his right-wing supporters pin their hopes for continued cultural influence as if by magic the pimp might be transformed into a new statesman ready to found again a city that will act as a moral beacon on the corrupt hill of the common world.
Tate’s ascendency signifies not the triumph of the popular or dissident right, but the rot at its core. No movement not fundamentally adrift would embrace him. No movement rooted in the love of The True, The Good, and The Beautiful would countenance his crass and violent history and say, “You’re one of us.”
The promotion of Tate makes clear that in the eventual post-Trump era, the right will have to look deeper than social media numbers as a metric of quality if they hope to have lasting impact, will have to renounce what it has recently embraced, and will have to turn inward.
Above all, our culture needs an inward right. We need a right wing concerned with the soul and its restoration. We need a right wing capable of producing saints far more than we need one devoted to producing online influencers who, however popular they become, remain unable to discern between the power that makes men famous and the power that makes men good.
Image Via: Wikimedia Commons
Hello, I don’t disagree with any of your criticisms of Tate. I find his materialism, and snake oil salesman-ship extremely off putting, and I agree that he has the potential to be a very negative influence. Having said that, I still feel an impulse to defend him. The fact that people seem to fall into one of two camps – Tate is purely evil, or Tate is amazing – says a lot in itself. Very similar to how people seem to react to Trump, interestingly. If you can’t find a single positive thing to say about Tate, then there’s definitely no chance that you will be able to combat his pernicious influence. There are a few things that I can think of from when I first heard Tate speak –
-encouraging men to take responsibility for their lives, exercise, not blame their problems on others or get stuck in a victim mentality, etc.
-speaking out loudly against the injustices of covid lock downs and forced vaccinations.
-speaking out against the dangers of international finance and tech companies and their growing tendency to enslave people.
Now he may not have been the only person addressing these issues, and you may not agree with the solutions the he has presented, but he was one of the few people with an audience so large who was addressing these issues.
Like I said, there’s much you can criticize him on, but I think the deeper issue is not Tate himself, but the fact that we are all trapped in a world of screens, and this environment often rewards sociopathic behavior.