He has profited off the commodification of women and taught young men to do the same. The boys lost to our culture’s rot need better role models.
He has profited off the commodification of women and taught young men to do the same. The boys lost to our culture’s rot need better role models.
A notable portion of the Right is intrigued by former kickboxer and current masculinity influencer Andrew Tate for the amount of rage he provokes from the Left. Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are the most recent examples. Last week, Carlson posted an over-two-hour interview with Tate on Twitter, which he had to fly to Romania for because Tate is currently being held under house arrest on charges of human trafficking and rape. In the interview, Tate was asked questions about hot-button issues many on the right care for, from Covid-19, Ukraine, and climate change to transgenderism. Tucker was evidently pleased and expressed his agreement throughout. In an interview released Friday, Owens treated him similarly. Unlike Carlson, she threw Tate some hard questions, but for the most part the interview was sympathetic.
It is easy to understand why so many are fascinated by Tate. He has grown wildly popular over the past two years for talking about issues plaguing young men, issues many people on the left either scoff at or ignore. He rightly recognizes the current crisis of masculinity. Far too many men lack purpose, a reality that shows up in statistics about drug overdose, pornography consumption, suicide, and education. He is filling a void.
But voids should not be filled with just anything. While Tate does promote some good things, such as personal responsibility, individual initiative, and physical health, his flaws are so monstrously critical that anyone with an ounce of moral fiber should reject him. And while he does motivate some people to get out of bed, whatever virtuous qualities he possesses are easily outmatched by his wholehearted embrace of sexual promiscuity, vapid materialism, and his power-centric vision of masculinity. He is hardly a “positive cultural force,” as a piece in the Federalist recently argued.
To learn the truth about Andrew Tate, one need look no further than his own words. He built his wealth by starting what he called a “little attempt at a webcam empire.” When kickboxing was not making enough money, he evaluated his “assets” of five or so girlfriends and asked, “How can I use these women to make me money?” Tate convinced two of these women to start a webcam business with him and his brother Tristan in their two-bedroom flat. While the brothers would create their schedules, provide housing, and recruit new models, the girls performed for and interacted with men online. Their business grew until at one point Tate claimed to have had 75 women working for him in four locations, generating $600,000 a month. It was a hard business to run, he said, because “women have to want to obey you.” But because of his “supreme competence” and the money his business paid, girls allegedly were clamoring to get in. Tate has claimed he made his first million via the webcam industry.
On several occasions, Tate has admitted to running his business exploitatively. In one video, he explained how he kept 70 percent of an employee’s profits despite her thinking the money was being split 50/50. If his “girls” asked him questions, he told them the difference was going to “tax.” In another video, he discussed the ins and outs of the webcam business and how easy it was to exploit men. He encouraged his girls to flatter their male customers. “You’ve got to lie to him,” he said, “Make him think that if he’s serious about you, nothing else matters.” At one point in the business, Tate expressed that he became so frustrated with the camgirls that he “unplugged their keyboards” and hired “ice-cold hustlers” (i.e. professional, male chat agents) to convince men they were talking to the actual models. It worked: “We were taking their money . . . all of it. We were milking them dry.” The women couldn’t do this because they “don’t have any of the intellect.”
And he felt no remorse. Asked once if he did, Tate promptly replied, “F*** no,” and gloried in his entrepreneurial skills. He succeeded not just because of the “beautiful girls” but because he “put together an apparatus of genius behind the avatar of beauty.” As Tate himself admits, the webcam enterprise was about his ego. It is not a coincidence that some of his camgirls were branded with tattoos that said “Owned by Tate.” Not only was “the game” about money, it was about amassing power.
Tate’s vision of masculinity centers around power. To him, power is a status contest. And being respected and honored is key to being a “high-value male.” According to Tate, men “desire respect like we desire oxygen.” Real men must deal with the hand they are dealt and build their own value — earn their own respect. That’s part of why Tate regularly brandishes his collection of wildly expensive vehicles. It’s also part of why he thinks wealth is so important to masculine self-esteem: “Once you are rich, you are free.” Wealth provides an escape from what he calls “the matrix,” enabling a life of dignity and the space to find one’s true masculinity in a world that would repress such an instinct.
For Tate, the entire point of female companionship is the recognition it gives a “high-value” man, as “sexual access is an easy indicator of status.” He has even claimed that, at one point in history, the highest-value men got all the women while the lowest got none. Thus, he holds that the real reason societies have historically promoted monogamy is that it “destroys the spirit of a man.” It represses masculine strength and undermines man’s natural inclination to conquer through absence (i.e., the inability to get laid) and pain. “Why did Genghis Khan wake up and want to conquer the whole world?” Tate asked on a podcast. “Why did Napoleon conquer the world? Why did Alexander the Great conquer the world? Because they just woke up and said, ‘Give me this and give me this.’ It’s intrinsic. That’s the purpose of life.” In this worldview, life is a cosmic power struggle. And women are but pawns in the game.
The reasons to distrust Tate go well beyond his words. The nature of his business enterprise is also instructive. Eventually it expanded outside of his webcam “empire.” He founded Hustlers University (also called “The Real World”), which promises to give men the tools to “make money online from everywhere.” According to Tate, true freedom means “being able to do whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.” Fifty dollars a month grants access to a Discord server with multiple channels dedicated to teaching various moneymaking methods. A former HU member noted that, for many people, Tate’s lifestyle was the selling point: “People were buying into it trying to become successful like him, with the flash cars, jets, and houses.”
In reality, Tate was selling a mediocre product and profiting off the naÏveté of young men.
One HU course was titled the “Ph.D. Program,” which stood for the “Pimping Hoes Degree.” While the program was removed in 2022, its content is archived. The purpose of the course was to reveal the secrets behind his webcam “recruitment system.” On the program page, Tate described himself as “the most competent person on the entire planet to teach you about male–female interactions.” Over 50 percent of his employees were once his girlfriend, he stated, and none of them were part of the adult-film and prostitution industries. Tate said his job “was to get women to fall in love with” him.
In one video for the Ph.D. program, he detailed his process. “You cannot get a girl to work for you you haven’t f**ked,” he explained. You have to make sure the girl wasn’t in it for the money, but to “be with you.” Or else she would “skank you and leave you when she realizes you get a big cut of it.” If a girl isn’t convinced to join you after a few dates, Tate recommended taking her out to dinner with your “bottom b****” (your female co-partner) and have her “do the selling.” Then you have a threesome, put her and your co-partner on a stream, and get her drunk. According to the website, the program contains hours of similar video content on how to text women, determine who is “high quality,” use social media to recruit, and bed girls — all for the small price of $450.
One of Tate’s personal selling points is that he is unafraid to advocate for traditional values in a world hostile to such views. Yet he is anything but traditional. Take his views on marriage, for example. As previously noted, Tate believes monogamy is essentially a conspiracy to repress the male spirit. He also believes that, in the Western world, marriage is “suicide and doesn’t make any sense at all.” It is “designed to destroy the man the second it doesn’t work out well.” With the rise of feminism, marriage “basically destroys all men in the event of [the wife] leaving.”
Naturally, Tate detests traditional sexual ethics. While he condemns pornography, he does so only because it emasculates men and deprives them of real sexual experiences. And so it is not a surprise that he openly brags about having sex daily. Nor is it a surprise when he promotes male promiscuity while condemning women for the same behavior. “A man having sex with multiple women is not nearly as disgusting or degrading as a woman having sex with multiple men,” he once claimed. For him, the difference between a man and a woman is: “I can love my woman with all my heart. I can die to protect her. And I can still f*** another b****.” But women who cheat are “just running through life being a hoe.” In Tate’s ideology, men are accountable to no sexual ethics at all.
This not a healthy masculinity. Healthy masculinity honors and respects the dignity of women. Tate sees women only as servants to masculine power. He believes that they are inherently “programmable” and born as “blank slates,” and that “they are either programmed by you as a man or they are programmed by society.” According to Tate (who has never been married), a good “programmed” wife is someone “who obeys her man and cooks for him and cleans for him.” That is, a good wife is an undignified slave.
The most disreputable aspect of Tate’s public persona is also, currently, the most disputed. He was recently detained in Romania, along with his brother and two others, for creating “an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing, and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost.” It has yet to be seen whether the charges will lead to a conviction. He deserves due process, as we all do. But his behavior and statements have not exactly made the charges difficult to believe. Just this past Tuesday, a report revealing leaked Telegram messages from Tate appear to show the process of how he manipulated one of his alleged victims. “She’s broke. And she can’t go home. And she can’t leave the house,” he said in one message, “Man, I sound almost evil. But I’m not. I’m a Shephard. Leading the sheep. She doesn’t realize that following me makes life better for her.”
Conveniently, Tate claims the charges against him are a “matrix attack“ designed to combat his influence. Some on the right agree. But this is not the first time he has been accused of a crime. In 2015, Tate was arrested by U.K. police after two women accused him of sexual assault and physical abuse. The cases were dropped because there was “no realistic prospect of conviction.” (That doesn’t mean the alleged event never happened. The U.K. notoriously under-prosecutes rape.) A third woman who also filed a complaint shared dozens of messages and voice memos allegedly from Tate. In one text message, Tate told the woman, “I love raping you.” In an audio clip, he told her: “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it. I f**king loved how much you hated it. It turned me on,” and then asks, “Why am I like that?”
Thankfully, many conservative voices are starting to understand the danger Andrew Tate represents. In a society that couldn’t care less about cultivating the virtues men need to lead healthy lives, and that increasingly lacks genuine male role models, it is inevitable that people such as Tate would seek to exploit the vulnerable. People like him will prey on men’s worst insecurities about themselves and profit off their emptiness and despair. But men need more than expensive cars, six-packs, and cheap sex. They need purpose. And Tate offers nothing but a hollow, misogynistic, corrupt, and power-obsessed vision of what it means to be a man. He has profited off the commodification of women’s bodies and taught young men to do the same. He is no role model. Young men deserve better. And it is incumbent upon all of us, and especially conservatives, to give it to them.