Andrew Tate Owes Me a Cup of Coffee.
Discussing the dangers of 'alpha-male' rhetoric and the result of non-condemned misogynistic behavior.
Andrew Tate. Oh, what to say, what to say? The first time Tate came across my cell phone, I was sitting in the comfort of my suburban home, mug in hand, ready to catch whatever the day was going to throw at me. My expectations included a new Ukrainian-Russian update or a report of public outrage over a two cent rise in gas prices. Maybe even a less-frequent headline on the WNBA. But no. Not that day.
Instead, a bald-headed, cigar-smoking, less fun Charlie Brown strolled leisurely onto my screen and began blabbering obscenities into my unprepared ears. The crime committed: making me choke on my coffee. My beautiful, delicious coffee.
And for that he had to pay.
There he was, perched on his golden throne, as if he owned the world, discussing the culture of dating and masculinity. He was confident and dressed like a man with money. Simple dark or neutral colored clothing. The occasional suit. Absolutely nothing that could confuse him with a “beta” man. He’s the type of guy that wears sunglasses indoors and talks without moving any muscle that isn’t required to execute the point of his conversation. Often times, his mouth is the only thing that moves like an eerie, misogynistic robot. And to top it all off, Tate talks like a man who is deathly afraid of being interrupted: fast and with vigor. Almost as if he wants to delude you into thinking that he can outrun any underlying evidence you have that could possibly oppose his perspective. And out of his mouth comes insane prejudicial theories on women and relationships - so crazy, that some of them honestly made me laugh harder than I have in months.
But the more I watched, the more my laughter dwindled because I realized that beyond his icy exterior, Andrew Tate is the shell of what a masculine man is supposed to be. His desire to be strong and independent has thrown him into a bottomless pit of self-hatred and judgment.
Like when he gives out unprofessional medical advice on depression saying, “If you’re depressed, you’re living inside of your mind. You’re obsessed with how you feel. You don’t care about anything outside of yourself. You’re an exceptionally selfish person… Let me tell you something - depression is not real.”
When I hear this, I wonder who could possibly be listening and nodding their head in agreement. And how oh-so-lonely this little bald-headed man must be.
“For men like my father, being “macho” meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us…Today’s machismo has doubts about his ability to feed and protect his family. His “machismo” is an adaptation to oppression and poverty and low-self esteem. It is the result of hierarchal male dominance” - Gloria Anzaldua, ‘Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’
It seems odd to me how the “Alpha-male” community is on the rise in this century. After the “#MeToo” movement and countless feminist activists popping up all over the globe, I had thought that maybe - just maybe- hating women was a trend of the past.
But every wave of feminism has had a lengthy list of critics; from Ernest Belfort Bax with his essay on the The Fraud of Feminism to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, New York Magazine’s belligerent and deafening applause for Sol Wachtler, which honestly left me running to the hills, screaming, “Not him! Not him!”
Being anti-women is not new and the retaliation that contemporary feminism is facing is to be expected.
However, the aspect that continually shocks me is the vast amount of men that take to the internet to voice their opinions on this matter. And how this conversation has ventured over to topics that are also found in the root of white supremacy and Nazism.
Andrew Tate on Piers Morgan Uncensored. The irony.
If you go to YouTube and type in the words ‘alpha male’, you will find thousands of videos of decent looking men with content on how to respond to a woman’s texts or pick up women on the street. All of it laced behind a finance-bro front. Which is exactly how Andrew Tate expands his beliefs: on his website- where he promotes a $49 course on trading stocks called “Hustler’s University.”
So many jokes, such little time.
Also on the website: a highly convincing two minute video on how to ‘escape the matrix.’
Yes. Really. Think of how sad Keanu Reeves must be.
But there go those words again, floating by our heads - jam-packed with allegory. The alpha male community is obsessed with the 1999 movie, The Matrix, and the idea of ‘red pills’ and ‘blue pills'. Essentially, taking the metaphorical red pill will give you the ability to embrace the “painful” reality of being a white male in America and see the world for what it really is, while the blue pill will allow you to live in ignorant bliss.
For a specific demographic on the internet, this serves as a foundation of a set of established beliefs. Incels (involuntary celibates) embrace the idea of taking the red pill. In their world, the reason they are not in healthy, loving relationships is because feminism has brainwashed women into hating men. They represent what we all think of when we picture life in America in the early 1800s: husbands who won’t let their wives wear pants, let alone vote or have any type of bodily autonomy. A typical day for an incel would include micro-editing subpar manifestos that could maybe contest Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, and hiding from any ray of sunlight that seeps into their mother’s basement.
And Andrew Tate feeds off this community like a vulture circling the carcass of what once used to be great. The people who buy his courses are lonely, depressed, single, greasy-haired, broke men who are mad at the world for turning its back on them and desperate to get revenge.
People like Tate and YouTube duo, The Roommates, flash their Bugatti, pieces of their luxurious life, and promise their drooling fans that this too could all be yours for the small, small price of your sanity and well-being. And these days, morality and peace of mind are a miniature price to pay for the woman of the hour and nights filled with endless parties.
To me, this is what’s dangerous about this kind of rhetoric. It’s too attractive and shiny to ignore, yet damaging at the same time. Impressionable young men absorb this content and fall into the rabbit hole that leads to a twisted world of messed up morals, sexism, and violence. Tate is teaching our sons and brothers to hate their mothers and sisters.
He, and every influencer like him, presents the moral compass of the alt-right first rather than the political aspiration of the movement. Similar to how Nazi Youth indoctrinated German children into being anti-Semitic through interactive lectures and self-preservation rather than political activity.
But at the end of the day, both Nazism and Tate’s videos are rooted on violence. The only source of communication that Nazis know is violence. And because modern-day white supremacist groups can’t present direct violence to mainstream media, they hide it behind loose moral concepts and man’s desire to own and dominate so they can easily infiltrate the ever growing vacuum that is a young man’s mind.
And when I say violence, I do not mean a cause and effect relationship or a result of certain actions, but rather a spectrum of violence that exists throughout the entire process of indoctrination. Their violence is the amplification of well-structured and ingrained beliefs.
To explain how this would lay out in real time, content like the Fresh & Fit podcast and Andrew Tate’s videos are first presented with improper moral guidance. Misogyny is then created in an environment that does not support or condone it. When the viewer realizes that people don’t agree with their beliefs, they become defensive and then attempt to convince people they are right by turning to politicians or politically relevant people with degrees who represent their ideologies. Examples of people like this are Ben Shapiro and members of the now disbanded group, Identity Evropa.
As the viewer descends further into the rabbit hole, they turn to algorithm based platforms like YouTube and anonymous messaging boards like 4Chan for more information. There, they will get introduced to known white supremacists groups, such as the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, etc..
While in discourse with characters in those organizations, the viewer will become radicalized much more easily due to the underlying moral compass they have spent time tinkering on (thanks to Andrew Tate and friends) and will find like-minded people. Phrases like ‘Day of the Rope’ get tossed around. Confusion and identity crises become flat-out hatred. From here, the viewer will slowly, but surely, become an extremist. They will eventually join a community that cheers on their behavior. They will get provoked into putting their thoughts into action from peer pressure and/or herd mentality, which in turn results in the nation’s next mass shooter who rains bullets on someone’s kid in the name of public good.
Need proof? Ever heard of Payton Gendron, the racist that carried out a shooting at Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York that killed ten people? He spent months planning out his attack on Discord and discussing the efficacy of body armor in a weapons group called Plate Land. While he enacted the shooting, he live-streamed the tragedy for his followers on Twitch via GoPro. To go along with his grand event - a 180-page manifesto that he posted online discussing the “great replacement”, a theory on how white people are being eradicated through interracial marriage and immigration (New York Post). How about Robert Crimo III, the Highland Park shooter who viciously murdered seven people and injured forty-eight? He was plenty busy discussing mass murder, nihilism, suicide, positing videos of people being beheaded, and complaining about “commies” [communists] on YouTube, Twitter and Discord (NBC News). Both shooters inspired by the fog of toxicity and fascism that is spreading through the internet like mustard gas.
This is why I believe that the new anti-women crusade is like the red pill community on crack. And the scary part is that it’s not only about targeting women and practicing sexism anymore; because I can live with the thought of incels creeping around in the dark, waiting to swipe their calloused, dewy fingers over their keyboard. But the idea of people like Andrew Tate being the waiting train station for a locomotive that breeds new Nazis is by far what I consider to be America’s biggest homeland security threat.
And, yes. I know that this sounds like a stretch. This might also be something you take offense to because it seems hard to believe that the kid who cracks a few sexist jokes in your math class is going to turn into a white supremacist one day. Or that your son who holes up in his room taking dating advice from literal human traffickers on the internet is going to become a skinhead. But the more young people absorb this content, the more vulnerable they will be to forming hateful attitudes. And strange interests that blossom with new mindsets are tell-tale signs of dangerous behavior. No one can tell you that better than Jamie Arellano, who went to high school with the Robb Elementary School shooter, Salvador Ramos. “He would go to the park and try to pick on people and he loved hurting animals,” says Arellano, “…I remember there was one time that I saw him beating a little dog senseless.”
So I guess it comes to this: how many more times do our loved ones need to be victimized for us to finally wake up and smell the coffee? We know who these shooters are. We know their stories. We know where they come from and how they came to be. And somewhere, somehow, there is a treasure chest filled with all the information needed to put an end to the issue. Understanding the complexities and influence of this content is the key.
Apple News aired a podcast episode on how the internet is birthing mass shooters and other dangerous people. In the middle of the episode, the narrator states that there is nothing that we can do to stop them. I wholeheartedly disagree.
I see no reason why Andrew Tate's videos should not be banned off of TikTok and other social media platforms. TikTok is the same app that deletes the videos of black content creators for saying the “N-word” or discussing a racial topic. If they have the audacity to shadow ban and block the voices of people of color for no adequate reason, they should be able to take misogyny and sexism off their app also. Great measures must be taken to deplatform the hell out of this man.
For parents: I advise that you pay closer attention to your children. What media are they consuming? What do they spend their time doing? Who are their friends at school?
In addition, our congressmen should be looking at this issue through a homeland security and homegrown terrorism lens. And for the love of God, let’s all please come to the consensus that it takes a village to raise a kid. Parents, schools, and community members work together to tune the future leaders of America, so it only makes sense that a certain part of our nation’s congressional budget be designated to guiding children in the right direction. There must be money allotted to forming a yellow brick road that leads to academic and personal success in a land far, far away from Andrew Tate and his mediocre existential reflections.
In fact, when I began writing this article, President Biden’s administration was still in the works of forming a compact and extensive legislative agenda. According to the New York Times and the Office of Management and Budget, over $440 billion was proposed to be sought off for education. This money could have been used to fund free community colleges, which would help reduce the school-to-prison pipeline and give students a future to look forward to. It could have helped pay for adequate counseling in schools to help troubled kids find a way to improve their lives.
What ended up being passed?
$0.
A baffling, ugly zero that cowers next to the massive $168 billion passed for energy production.
These numbers reflect the total and complete ignorance of our government when it comes to the safety, education, and well-being of American children.
Our baby brothers, sisters, kids, cousins, and friends are being indoctrinated right in front of our eyes.
We must do better. We can’t let Caillou the “Cobra” win.
1 Note: Some of the videos attached to this entry were posted from accounts that have been terminated from YouTube, thus, I have opted to retract them. These accounts and names have no affiliation with any of my work nor any of the aforementioned people. In addition, no valid claims, accusations, and/or indictments have been made in this entry about the occupations, businesses, and/or personal lives of any of the aforementioned people.
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