Want to counter Andrew Tate? Reclaim the BMW (basic moral wisdom)

Top G Andrew Tate, currently complaining in a Romanian prison-cell

It’s every liberal parent’s nightmare. One day they happen to glance at their 14-year-old son’s laptop, and they see he is watching videos by Andrew Tate, the mullah of misogyny. They start to notice red flags in their son’s conversation: ‘bitches’, ‘choke-holds’, ‘feminism is cancer’, ‘Hitler wasn’t all bad’. Could their sweet little Quentin have been radicalized by the online far-right manosphere?

Andrew Tate, in case your teenage son hasn’t told you, is a British-American online influencer with millions of followers. A former chess prodigy turned kick-boxer and ‘top G’, he found notoriety by becoming a preacher of a certain type of masculinity: fast cars, abs, cigars, bags of cash, and obedient women desperate to do your bidding. In his case, he persuaded girlfriends to perform sex online to make them (and him) money. He’s a 21st century pimp, in other words. Earlier this year, he and his brother were arrested in Romania for sex trafficking.

The liberal twittersphere laughed at Tate for his failed attempt to mock Greta Thunberg (Thunberg accused him of having a small penis) and sighed with relief when he was arrested. But Tate is still extremely popular and his ‘martyrdom’ to the ‘matrix’ has only increased his allure in some followers’ eyes. Schools are now apparently scrambling to introduce courses on ‘toxic masculinity’ to try and counter his influence, according to one teacher who (ahem) sells courses on how to counter toxic masculinity.

To counter Tate’s influence, we need to understand his appeal. We live in a moment where an easy way to achieve influence online is to affirm masculinity. Some of the most popular online influencers do just that: Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate all affirm masculinity, in a culture where masculinity is increasingly seen as pathological, especially CIS white masculinity.

And there’s no doubt that masculinity is in trouble and prone to disorder. Boys are doing worse than girls in schools, and no group performs worse in British schools than white boys. They’re brought up in schools where 75% of the teachers are women. If they behave badly, they’re sent to therapists, 70% of whom are female. 30% don’t live with their biological father. And their culture (‘mainstream liberal culture’) loves to…