We’ve completely lost the plot on Andrew Tate

By Kaeley Harms, Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Andrew Tate (left) poses for a photo next to his brother Tristan Tate while entering the Court of Appeal on October 15, 2024 in Bucharest, Romania. Social Media Influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are appearing in court to appeal a decision to proceed with their trial on charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women. The Tate brothers were arrested on December 29, 2022, alongside Georgiana Naghel and Luana Radu as part of an investigation into human trafficking and rape. | Getty Images/Andrei Pungovschi

In 2015, I started writing articles about why it’s a bad idea to pretend that men can be women. I remember thinking to myself, “My gosh, this is dumb. Of all the articles to have to write! This is basic common sense. Why does this need explanation? How many important issues are going to be overlooked while we are distracted by this ridiculous thing that shouldn’t even be an issue?”

I feel the same way as I sit down to write this blog. Everyone knows that Tristan and Andrew Tate are total reprobates, right? Like they’re objectively wicked men by virtually every standard.

For those who are not chronically online and who may be blissfully sequestered from knowledge of the Tate brothers, Andrew Tate burst onto the scene in the early 2000s as a British-American kickboxer, who’s been controversial from the start. The self-appointed “king of toxic masculinity,” he’s amassed a tremendous amount of influence in the manosphere by loudly trumpeting overtly misogynistic views as the proposed solution to the masculinity crisis in the West. He and his brother Tristan launched a webcam model business selling beautiful women’s bodies on the internet, and they supplemented this business by selling online manliness courses for socially awkward men. Their “Hustler University” quickly gained 100,000 subscribers.

To give you some scope of the Tate influence, Andrew was the third most googled person in the world in 2023, and he has over 10 million Twitter followers. By August of 2023, it was estimated that the Tates’ online ventures raked in $5 million in revenue each and every month.

All of these ventures are embroiled in controversy, of course. While they have yet to be convicted of anything, the rape and sex trafficking charges against them are many and should surprise no one. The Tates were recently released from house arrest in Romania, where they were being investigated for charges of rape, sex trafficking, money laundering, attempting to intimidate a witness, and forming an organized crime group to sexually exploit women. Their legal troubles extend across the globe into Britain, as well, where they’ve been investigated for rape and sex trafficking as well as tax evasion.

Nothing I can tell you about the Tate brothers could possibly condemn them as quickly as their own words do, though. Here are just a few gems straight from Andrew Tate’s mouth. Apologies for the language:

“Why would you be with a woman who’s not a virgin anyway? She is used goods. Second hand.”
“When I grab you (a woman) by your neck, and you start annoying me and try to resist, and I just (violently punches his hand several times indicating the beating of a woman) and then I grab you by your neck again, then what the fuck you gonna do when your face is collapsed and your fucking cheekbone is broken? You ain’t gonna do shit but cry.”
“Females are the ultimate status symbol. People think I’m running around with these hoes because I like sex. That’s nothing to do with the reason why I’m running around with these bitches. I got these bitches just so everyone knows who the don is.”
“How can I use these women to make me money? I don’t wanna put them on the track because they’re my women, I don’t want other people touching my chicks.”
“If a woman is going out with a man, she belongs to that man, that’s his woman, so she wants to do OnlyFans, she owes him some money, cause she’s his.”

Andrew Tate is the living personification of toxic masculinity, and he wears the title like a badge of honor. There are dozens of videos of the guy bragging about grabbing women by the throat, choking them, breaking their cheekbones, making them cry during sex, beating them, and pimping them out. Allegedly more than 30 women have been tattooed or branded with his name — a pretty standard occurrence amongst sex trafficking rings.

So why, oh why, oh why, are so many right-wing influencers — the very people who preach traditional family values and Christianity as the solution to the woes of the west — so unspeakably sympathetic to the Tate brothers?

Think I’m overstating my case? I promise I’m not. While I’m encouraged to see conservatives like Ron DeSantis, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, and Josh Hawley loudly denouncing the Tates, I have been absolutely stunned to see other major conservative influencers supporting him or responding to him through sympathetic eyes. A non-exhaustive list of what I’m talking about:

Tucker Carlson hosted Andrew Tate on his podcast in March of 2024 as a welcome voice pushing back against the alleged “war on men.”
Candace Owens invited Andrew Tate onto her podcast in August of 2024 to discuss, “The dangerous thinning of Western culture, the importance of street smarts, and what motivates the global elites.”
Benny Johnson interviewed Andrew Tate last month to seek his insight on Trump’s “political persecution.”
Trump attorney Alina Habba called herself “a big fan” of Andrew Tate and told him, “I sympathize with you because I think you go through a lot of the same ‘show me the person, I’ll find the crime’ that President Trump has gone through.”
Dana White welcomed the Tate brothers with literal open arms this week when they arrived in Vegas for a power slap contest.
Elon Musk, after reinstating Tate’s Twitter account early this year, replied to him, “Onwards with the mission.”
Last week, the Tampa Bay Young Republicans used their social media pages to formally welcome the Tate brothers to Florida.
Last year, Donald Trump Jr. co-hosted a Twitter space conversation about Hunter Biden. Andrew Tate was one of the event’s speakers. He called Don Jr. a “friend.” Don Jr. called him a “buddy.”
Yesterday the Hodge Twins tweeted a photo of themselves standing with Tate with a caption reading, “He wasn’t welcome in Florida, so he met up with us in Vegas.”
Joel Webbon said that Andrew Tate is “sinning in the right direction.”

What on earth is going on? When someone has repeatedly proven to be a complete and utter scoundrel, we don’t typically engage this kind of moral obfuscation and whataboutery to preserve their image, right? Imagine what would happen if, instead of denouncing Harvey Weinstein, we saw leading pundits saying, “No, he’s just really misunderstood and persecuted. He’s really innocent. He’s being targeted because the elite don’t like the truth he speaks. Would we tolerate that on the right? Of course we wouldn’t. And honestly, I still have to believe that the average conservative reader is completely appalled by the Tates’ behavior. I don’t think these men represent the average Republican voter — at least not the ones with whom I rub elbows.

But the unfortunate truth remains that the Tates do, in fact, represent a much larger base of voters than I care to acknowledge, and this is why we see such widespread whitewashing of their egregious behavior. A couple of things are important to consider here:

The Tates love Donald Trump, and they use their massive influence to endorse him. Votes are votes, and many people don’t care how votes are acquired as long as they’re loyal to the right people. Red pilled misogynists vote, too, and a lot of powerful people had zero compunction about leveraging the Tate influence for a red wave this past November.
It is objectively true that, abhorrent as they may be in their views, the Tates have incredible sway with young men in today’s culture. Wisdom asks why.
What void are they promising to fill? What marching orders should we assume in light of this knowledge? Tons of conservative men love Andrew Tate because he represents strength to men with an orphan spirit who are floundering around begging for someone to show them how to be men. Andrew promises to do this, but the masculinity he preaches is the type that got us in this mess in the first place. It’s rotten to the core. We need men who model their lives after Jesus, not Satan.

If we raise our sons to be like Tate, we should not be at all surprised to see our daughters behave like Lily Phillips. The way of Tate leads to broken homes and broken bones. It leads to incarceration and sexually transmitted diseases, to domestic violence and the inevitable rise of feminist resistance. How are conservatives possibly hoping to convince their daughters to choose the path of motherhood if the men they’re left to consider as fathers for their unborn children are men who treat them like slaves? Does anyone think this through at all?
The Tates have succeeded in weaving popular anti-woke messaging into their grift in such a way as to distract from their evil and convince people that the charges against them are bogus attempts to derail their important political agenda. This is not a new tactic. We see it in the church all the time, with pastors who are credibly accused of sexual offenses convincing their loyalists that the charges are false; they’re really just being persecuted for their righteousness.

We’ve completely lost the plot. Can someone explain to me how an Islamic sex-trafficking pimp pornographer who beats women and preaches serial non-monogamy is going to save Western civilization?

This whole time I thought those were the things destroying Western civilization.

For every semi-valid idea Andrew Tate has ever spouted, I can think of about a trillion people who aren’t misogynistic scumbags who said it first. There’s not an original thought in his head. We absolutely do not need him. It seems that, to a lot of men, the benefits of his anti-woke messaging outweigh the negatives of his overt and jaw-dropping misogyny.

The consistent message is this: “Women, your dignity and protections are a small price to pay for the advancement of our power.”

I reject this message. The people we choose to influence our thoughts should reject it too. Without equivocation.

Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.

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