Staring Into the Abyss with Andrew Tate

In the last few weeks online personality Andrew Tate exploded into public view. Tate is a former kickboxing champion and Big Brother contestant who reinvented himself as a manophere style guru to young men. He’s another guy who the word controversial doesn’t begin to describe. He purportedly has multiple girlfriends at the same time that he pimps out through some type of online cam girl business, for example. He’s been raided as part of an investigating into human trafficking. And he was fired from the Big Brother TV show after a video of him hitting a woman with a belt surfaced. (He claims it was consensual).

Tate created an online school he calls “Hustle University” in which young men learn from him how to make money online. If his claims about his number of paying customers is correct, he’s making millions of dollars per month, and he’s posted pictures of himself in private jet, etc. He also dispenses pickup artist style advice about women and seems to share the basic view of that community.

Tate built an enormous audience for himself. He had nearly five million followers on Instagram, his major social media platform. He encouraged his “students” to post video clips of him to Tik Tok, with the result that videos of him there were viewed nearly 13 billion times - yes, billion.

I’d never heard of this guy until a few weeks ago, and this is a space I monitor. It just goes to show that beyond people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, there are an army on online men’s influencers/gurus out there. These are the authority figures and mentors that young men are turning to today. And as you can see, they are frequently pointing those men towards selfish, hedonistic, and often evil lifestyles.

After an outcry about him, Tate has been banned from essentially every social media platform. Apparently you aren’t even allowed to post videos of containing him on Tik Tok anymore.

Back in July, Tate appeared in a one hour interview with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy. Portnoy is another big influencer, and the public face of a more hedonistically oriented “barstool conservatives” movement. His young followers are often conservative in a sense - voting Republican, for example - and opposing many of the left’s excesses. But they are also pro-abortion, pro-hooking up, etc. They show an emerging face of a post-Christian conservative politics in America.

If you are interested in taking the temperature or getting a sample of what young men in America are turning into, you this is a good video to watch. It’s a two for one special with both Tate and Portnoy. And it’s not especially graphic, though some of the views expressed may offend. It has over 1.8 million views so far.

Like or not, folks like these are shaping young’s mens lives - and the way they aspire to live their lives. While individuals like these two rise and fall over time, there’s a constant new supply of similar types coming up every day.

I’m not an expert on Tate, nor do I desire to be. But I did watch this interview and have some analysis based on it and some reactions to him I’ve seen lately.