If you’ve been on social media in the last year or so, you’ve probably had the opportunity to see Andrew Tate, an angry, bald kickboxer who has gained considerable attention due to his careless, misogynistic, sensational personality. He’s a self-help guru for a lot of insecure young males — almost like a watered-down Jordan Peterson, except he’s less pretentious. Fancying himself a messiah, Tate offers an alternative to the “Matrix,” a term he uses to describe mundane day-to-day existence. The man has come to represent a new era of toxic masculinity, ego-centrism and misguided traditionalism.
How did he rise to fame? The material visionary has an online “educational” program creatively called “Hustler’s University” (such a millennial and unfortunate name, but whatever). For the cheap price of $49.99 a month, you can get in on “an addicting formula” and “learn from our professionally trained millionaire professors.” Who would turn down such an offer? Logical people. Most of the stuff you ‘learn’ on this website consists of copywriting, digital marketing, eCommerce, investments and crypto — the most useless, petty and meaningless jobs on the face of the planet.
So, why write about Tate? Well, I was really intrigued after a crowd of men gathered in Athens, Greece to protest Andrew Tate’s detainment for human trafficking and rape allegations. What do they think will happen? Will the Greek government issue an international plea for the release of Tate? An instance like this shows that he’s moved from being some social media character to the focus of a full-fledged personality cult, complete with its own ideology. Grown men took time out of their night to walk in the streets of Greece chanting “free Top G” (cringe), and their stunt went viral.
After his arrest, Tate became somewhat removed from the public eye, though he is still active on Twitter. The circumstances of his arrest, like his entire brand, were bizarre. First, Tate made fun of Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate change activist. He asked her to provide him with her contact information so that he can send her “a complete list of (his) car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” to which she responded by saying “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.” Tate then responded by posting a video of himself mocking her even more, but in the video, he had a box of pizza from a Romanian-based chain. This allowed local authorities to track him down and arrest him for human trafficking. A best-selling fiction writer couldn’t have come up with a more satisfying chain of events. Nonetheless, Tate retaliated and said that “the Matrix is trying to frame (him)” — the Matrix being government officials cracking down on human trafficking and rape.
Tate offers his followers a vision of society that diagnoses real social ills, but prescribes a perverted cure — bear with me here. Tate acknowledges that capitalism is unfair and brutal: that working a nine-to-five job sucks, and people want to have more leisure time. I agree with that. But, instead of pushing for some change in economic policies or having any meaningful discussions, Tate encourages them to get in on this exploitative system. It’s the run-of-the-mill reactionary take: recognize a problem, but adopt a narrow-minded solution that requires accepting your lot in life and climbing over your fellow man. Structural, external change to the hand you’ve been dealt is out of the question.
Moreover, it’s ironic that many young men want to reinstate masculine values that predate them. Whenever someone says, “we need to bring back XYZ,” they’re probably wrong. Why? Because any nostalgic vision of the past is based on a denial of the present. It relies on a version of history that’s been stripped of proper context and seeks to reinstate something that has deteriorated for, more often than not, good reasons. Think of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan: When was America great? Should we go back to the Reagan era, marked by the war on drugs, systemic racism and a plethora of other social problems?
Tate’s message to his audience is to reinforce your inner toxic masculinity, although he wouldn’t call it that. In an interview with British media pundit Piers Morgan, Tate said “as soon as a woman or a man is in trouble … you look for masculine men.” An easy follow-up to such a claim is, “Andrew, why would a woman be in trouble? Is it maybe because of people like you, considering that you’re facing literal rape charges?” His message is reminiscent of the argument that we need more guns to prevent mass shootings.
Tate tries to moralize what he’s saying by essentially masking his ideas with a weird and outdated savior complex: “Masculine men have a duty to provide and protect those they care about.” This allows anyone on the fence about Tate to rationalize their support for him. He’s just looking out for everybody! But this is delusional. People have a general duty to care for and protect each other, regardless of gender identity. We’re not living in the Middle Ages anymore. It’s not like (sane) men carry swords. We need to cultivate a humane society that doesn’t feel threatened by the idea of being vulnerable and moving past idealized versions of traditional values.
But in the minds of Tate’s followers, vulnerability must be extinguished (or, more fittingly, repressed). Take one of Tate’s tweets as an example of his fan base’s almost erotic desire to be humiliated: “You are poor. You are unimportant. Men do not fear you. Your woman disagrees with you. Your lives are shit. If I was forced to endure a year of your life it would be the worst level of depression imaginable.” This has 15,000 retweets. Is that healthy? He’s simply capitalizing on the insecurities of his fan base. One response that I appreciated was, “I am poor. But I work with special needs students who love me and live a fulfilling life. I don’t need anyone to fear me, I am content being appreciated. I am spending Christmas with the woman I love and our three gorgeous daughters. We don’t agree on everything, and that’s okay.” Anthony here has the right idea. We should all be more like Anthony.
How do we combat this Tate-ified emergence of toxic masculinity? I mean, the guy posts videos of himself driving expensive cars and walking around mansions, so to his audience’s eyes, he’s the pinnacle of success. More importantly, he’s cool in their eyes: Women want him, he has expensive stuff and he’s confident.
We face a difficult, serious problem. How do we make social justice cool and digestible for the men who embrace Tate’s hyper-individualistic, dog-eat-dog worldview? In his brilliant essay titled, “Sociopathy as a lifestyle brand”, Nathan J. Robinson, Editor in Chief of Current Affairs, argues that we need to expose sociopaths like Andrew Tate as “living lives of depressing emptiness and insecurity,” and show that there’s “fulfillment and pleasure” that come “from taking part in collective action.”
Without a substantial pushback against the “attention economy” that allows ruinous, socially-degrading ideas to spread, figures like Andrew Tate will gain more and more prominence. Gen-Z prays to a large pantheon of celebrities (more accurately, influencers), and Tate, unfortunately, has found his place among them.
Ammar Ahmad is an Opinion Columnist from Damascus, Syria, and he writes about whatever he sees on Twitter. You can follow him here. If you’re a self-respecting individual who maintains a wide berth from Twitter, you can reach him at ammarz@umich.edu.