We need to talk about Andrew Tate
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Andrew Tate isn’t a genius, he’s a two-bit grifter in designer sunglasses. His 'Hustler’s University' was a pyramid scam for gullible lads, flogging fake wealth and empty promises while he pocketed the cash. Strip away the cars and rented bling and what’s left is a brittle fraud whose only real product is misogyny. He brags about owning women, blames victims of rape, and stands accused in Romania of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Thanks to TikTok and YouTube’s profit-hungry algorithms, his poison has infected classrooms, turning boys into parrots of his sleazy 'alpha'act.
But Tate is more than just an online clown: he’s a symptom of a broken system. Neoliberalism has gutted jobs, housing, and hope, leaving young men angry and adrift. Instead of pointing that rage at landlords, bosses, or billionaires, Tate funnels it into hating women and acting like a poundshop mafia boss. Misogyny has always been the gateway drug to fascism, and that’s exactly where he leads. The truth? Tate is a fragile, performative fraud: a parasite fattened by despair. Smash his toxic cult, and smash the system that keeps breeding these slimy little tyrants.
TetleysTLDR: The article
Every era produces its bogeyman, a figure who so perfectly embodies the contradictions, hypocrisies, and festering wounds of the society that created him that he becomes unavoidable. Today that man is Andrew Tate. A swaggering ex-kickboxer turned internet grifter, Tate has styled himself as a messiah of masculinity, the antidote to what he claims is a 'feminised' culture. In reality, he is nothing more than a snake-oil salesman peddling old-fashioned misogyny, reheated in the microwave of YouTube shorts and TikTok clips.
But Tate is not just some laughable crank to be dismissed with a sneer. He is dangerous, because he reflects a broader crisis of masculinity in a neoliberal world where young men feel directionless, and because he weaponises that insecurity to build an empire based on exploitation, fraud, and hate.Tate is not an aberration. He is a symptom. His rise is a warning of what happens when toxic masculinity collides with neoliberal despair.
The Mirage of Success
Tate presents himself as the archetype of success: luxury cars, private jets, villas, and an endless stream of compliant women orbiting his Instagram feed. But scratch the surface and the empire crumbles. His wealth comes not from some disciplined genius or revolutionary business sense, but from pyramid-scheme 'courses' that prey on the desperate.
His infamous 'Hustler’s University' charged subscribers up to $50 a month to learn from self-styled 'experts' in crypto trading, e-commerce, and marketing: but in practice operated like a classic multi-level marketing scheme where affiliates promoted Tate’s content in exchange for referral fees [1][2].
This created a flood of short, viral clips that hijacked TikTok’s algorithm and made him inescapable. Like every con-artist capitalist before him, Tate sells performance rather than substance. The cars are often rented, the watches borrowed, the 'network' little more than smoke and mirrors. Yet for a generation of alienated young men raised on algorithmic dopamine hits, Tate’s braggadocio feels real.
Misogyny as a Business Model
Andrew Tate’s brand is built on hating women. He doesn’t even bother to dress it up. Women, he insists, 'belong at home', should obey men, and are partly responsible if they are sexually assaulted [3].
He brags about controlling girlfriends, about manipulating women into sex work, about treating them as property.
Romanian prosecutors allege that Tate and his brother ran an organised crime group beginning in 2021, using the 'loverboy method' to lure women into producing pornography under coercive conditions [4]. The charges include human trafficking, rape, and sexual exploitation. Whether or not his defenders want to believe it, these accusations are consistent with the very ideology Tate espouses: women are tools, and men are entitled to use them.
The danger is not confined to his immediate victims. Millions of young men parrot his rhetoric in schools and online spaces. A 2023 survey by Hope Not Hate found that 26% of British men aged 16-24 held a positive view of Tate, while teachers across the UK report a surge in misogynistic bullying linked directly to his influence [5]. This is how toxic masculinity metastasises: through the glamorisation of predators.
Let’s get one thing straight: “incels” aren’t some mysterious internet subculture that sprang fully formed out of the darkest corners of Reddit. They’re the logical by-product of forty years of neoliberal rot, a society that’s commodified everything, including sex, intimacy, and human relationships, and then left millions of alienated young men with nothing but rage, porn addictions, and their dad’s resentment for company. Into this void walks a POS like Andrew Tate, a swaggering pound-shop Nietzsche who thinks driving a Bugatti and trafficking women counts as philosophy. He markets himself like a 21st-century Thatcherite messiah for disaffected boys: 'get rich, get ripped, get women' What he’s really selling is the same snake oil Thatcher and Blair peddled, but with a shaved head and more steroids: ruthless individualism dressed up as liberation. Only it isn’t liberation; it’s a prison cell with gold-plated bars.
The incel crisis isn’t about men not getting laid. It’s about men being denied any framework for meaning beyond consumption. When your self-worth is measured in Rolexes and body counts, and the system is designed to crush collective solidarity, of course you end up with bitter lads convinced the world owes them a girlfriend.
He’s the Jeremy Clarkson of late-stage capitalism, but with added sex trafficking charges. Don't sugarcoat it: incel ideology is proto-fascism. It’s authoritarianism dressed up as dating advice. When Tate and his ilk tell men that women are property, that violence is strength, that empathy is weakness, they’re preparing the ground for the next generation of reactionary politics.
The Crisis of Masculinity in Neoliberal Britain
So why does Tate resonate so strongly, especially among working-class lads from Britain, the US, and beyond? The answer lies in the wreckage of neoliberalism. For decades, young men have been told that if they study hard, work hard, and keep their heads down, they will succeed. But the promise is broken. Secure jobs are gone. Housing is unaffordable. Wages stagnate while rent and bills soar. [6]
Into this vacuum steps Tate, offering a counterfeit brotherhood. He tells these young men their anger is justified, but he directs it at the wrong targets: women, feminism, imagined 'soy boys'. Instead of railing against landlords, billionaires, or the bosses who grind them down, Tate channels their rage into defending patriarchal domination. The tragedy is that masculinity itself is not toxic by nature. The crisis comes from the way capitalism has twisted male identity into something defined by domination, consumption, and competition. Tate is dangerous precisely because he offers a distorted solution to a real problem: he tells men they can reclaim power, but only by becoming tyrants in miniature.
Algorithmic Radicalisation
Tate would have remained a footnote were it not for the algorithms. Social media platforms, desperate for engagement, amplify outrage. Short clips of Tate shouting misogynistic 'truth bombs' spread like wildfire because they provoke strong reactions. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, TikTok recommended Tate’s videos to new accounts within minutes of joining, even when the users were registered as 13-year-olds [7]. Teachers report boys parroting Tate’s lines in classrooms, mocking girls, and ridiculing lessons on consent [8].
This is no accident. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube profit from attention, and Tate is a goldmine of attention. By flooding the feeds of teenage boys, he becomes inescapable: a digital drill sergeant barking orders in their bedrooms.
And because Tate frames everything as a battle between the 'red-pilled' enlightened few and the brainwashed masses, every criticism only strengthens his cult. He has weaponised conspiracy logic: if the media attacks him, it proves he must be telling the truth.
Why the Left Must Confront Him
Some on the left suggest we should simply 'ignore' Tate, that to engage with him is to give him oxygen. This is cowardice, ignore the threat posed by people like him and you leave them unchecked to grow stronger. The left cannot afford silence in the face of organised misogyny. Just as we take on racism, homophobia, and class exploitation, we must dismantle the ideology of toxic masculinity.
Tate is not just an internet personality; he is a gateway to the far right. His rhetoric overlaps seamlessly with nationalist movements, white supremacist talking points, and authoritarian politics. Misogyny has always been the entry drug into fascism [9].
If we fail to contest Tate’s narrative, we leave millions of angry, alienated young men to be scooped up by the alt-right pipeline. That’s not just a threat to women; it’s a threat to democracy itself.
Building a Real Alternative
Sexuality is a big thing with Tate but the irony with him is it isn’t about who he sleeps with. It’s about how desperately he performs masculinity, as if every shirtless pose and every 'alpha' soundbite is meant to drown out the gnawing voice of insecurity. There's been discussions about him being probably gay, not happy about it, not dealing with it very well and projecting it as self hate: The overcompensating, hyper-macho posturing, the endless obsession with proving one’s 'alpha' status, the fixation on controlling women, the bizarre castigation of men who enjoy sex. It all has the reek of someone who is not comfortable in their own skin. And the sad thing is that with the platform he has he could be such a positive influencer for LGBTQ+ but his choice was to take the opposite route - and instead of being a champion of equality he chose to be the poster boy of everything that stands against it. Here’s the important thing, his sexuality is irrelevant: whether Andrew Tate is gay, straight, or anything else isn’t the point. What’s revealing is how fragile his performance of masculinity is. The man insists constantly that he’s 'a real man' and yet spends his entire career having to prove it to strangers online. That’s not strength, that’s desperation. The pathos is that in the macho world he sells, being gay is treated as weakness, yet if he were secretly gay, it would only prove that his empire is built on lies and repression. He’s a poster boy for toxic masculinity because toxic masculinity is always performative: it’s about hiding vulnerability, hiding tenderness, hiding whatever doesn’t fit the script. If anything, Tate shows us that toxic masculinity doesn’t produce strong men, it produces brittle, pathetic ones who have to shout 'alpha' every five minutes to stop anyone noticing they’re hollow. Perhaps he'd be much happier if he just had a cuddle.
It’s not enough to say 'don’t listen to Tate'. We must build a real alternative for young men. That means addressing the root causes of their despair: insecure jobs, collapsing housing, lack of purpose. It means rebuilding spaces where men can find solidarity without domination: trade unions, community centres, youth clubs gutted by austerity [10].
We must also drag the tech giants into account. If platforms can algorithmically flood teenagers with misogyny, they can also be compelled to amplify positive voices. Regulation, taxation, and democratic oversight of Big Tech are not optional luxuries; they are urgent necessities.
Most of all, it means hammering home that women are not the enemy. The enemy is the system that profits from dividing us, that wants men to blame feminism instead of neoliberalism for their misery. Tate thrives because the left has sometimes failed to articulate a vision of masculinity worth believing in. We must do better.
The toxic digital prophet with real life consequences
Andrew Tate is not a genius. He’s not even original. He is a reheated cocktail of misogyny, capitalism, and con artistry, served up to a generation starving for meaning. He is dangerous precisely because he reflects the world we live in, a world where despair is monetised, where hatred is marketed, and where young men are easy prey for charlatans.
To dismiss Tate as a 'clown' is to ignore the damage he causes. To underestimate him is to abandon the boys he is radicalising. He is a canary in the coal mine of our broken culture, warning us of the abyss that opens when toxic masculinity goes unchallenged. The left must not just condemn him but offer something stronger, something real. Because if we don’t, then the Andrew Tate's of tomorrow will keep emerging: slimy, greedy, misogynist parasites, preying on the vulnerable and laughing all the way to the bank. And make no mistake, Tate is not just a man on the make, h e is a mirror held up to a rotten system. If we don’t smash both, then the rot will consume us all.
References
[1] Vice, “Inside Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University” (2022).
[2] BBC News, “Andrew Tate’s online empire and pyramid scheme tactics” (2023).
[3] The Guardian, “Andrew Tate’s misogyny and why teenagers are drawn to it” (2023).
[4] Reuters, “Romania indicts Andrew Tate on human trafficking charges” (June 2023).
[5] Hope Not Hate, State of Hate Report (2023).
[6] Resolution Foundation, Stagnant Wages in the UK Economy (2022).
[7] Center for Countering Digital Hate, “Misogyny’s Profit Machine: TikTok and Andrew Tate” (2022).
[8] National Education Union, Reports from teachers on Tate’s classroom influence (2023).
[9] Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (1983) – analysis of misogyny as a gateway to authoritarianism.
[10] Institute for Government, The Impact of Austerity on Local Services (2019).
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