Andrew Tate
The first time I heard the controversial social media personality Andrew Tate speak on women, Western society, and masculinity, I immediately thought that he was a radical Islamic extremist. A defector from the Taliban, perhaps? Over the next few months I would hear Tate make outlandish remarks such as, "Women should shut the f**k up, have kids, sit at home, be quiet and make coffee." And more: speaking of women in general, Tate said, "If I have a degree of responsibility over her, then I must have a degree of authority... You can't be responsible for a dog if it doesn't obey you."

So, when we learned on July 18, 2023, that Tate, who last year converted to Islam, was hoping for, and celebrating the fact of the imminent Islamization of Britain, I cannot say that I was surprised.

In response to the news of a Muslim billionaire winning the right to turn the Trocadero, one of London's most famous landmarks, into a mosque, Tate (Quran in hand in the photo above) expressed his delight. Here is what he had to say on Twitter:
This building is literally dead centre in the middle of London's historic centre. Amazing news. The only alternative to Islam for the brits are pride flags as they no longer have any innate culture or patriotisim [sic]. Allah is the best of planners and I look forward to seeing The Islamic republic of Great Britistan in her final form. Alhamdulillah Britain will be fully Islamic soon.
Tate has always had a knack for diagnosing many of the legitimate maladies plaguing Western civilization, which explains his appeal to many conservatives. He is also known for delivering what often seem to be out-of-context solutions to some of these maladies. He understands the crisis in masculinity well and has, at times, offered commonsense advice to young men who are without a sense of purpose or direction in their lives.

The problem, though, is that Tate is himself like a directionless policy wonk, where policies are driven by pragmatism and expediency and not by fundamental principles. He is the embodiment of the very problems he decries. He lies, cheats, is a self-admitted philanderer and the unmarried father of what he claims is a "double-digit" number of children. His social media performances are hyperbolic, and he knows when to sound reasonable and when to be sensational. Moral consistency is a trait he has never possessed. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he is celebrating the further destruction of the West by promulgating the Islamization of Britain. This has always been part of Tate's strategy: to commit the fallacy of the "either/or," a type of argument constructed to mandate the necessity of choosing one of only two alternatives. For Tate, masculinity is in crisis: the problem is autonomous women. The solution is total domination of the modern woman. Western civilization is bankrupt in Tate's view; therefore, the only solution is to embrace a comprehensive and well-integrated worldview that so happens to embrace the subordination of women: Islam.

Tate would never think of re-orienting western civilization with its Judeo-Christian heritage because contemporary Christianity in the West comes affixed with an unassailable gender equality clause that, under the precepts of liberalism which secure the sovereignty, autonomy, and liberty of each person, does not permit human bondage, domination, coercion, and ownership of persons as we find in the primitive world of Islam.

But Tate was never about providing solutions for anyone. He is what I would call a "self-supremacist." He has said, if somewhat ungrammatically, "My unmatched perspicacity coupled with sheer indefatigably makes me a feared opponent in any realm of human endeavor." (I think he meant indefatigability.)

Tate fancies himself an Apex predator. He moved to Romania for years because, he has said, he believed the country to be corrupt and lawless โ€” which meant it gave him freedom to be above laws and regulative principles that govern civilized human behaviors.

Now that he has embraced Islamo-fascism, one hopes the world will see him for who he truly is: an amoral, malignant narcissist who will manipulate language and human beings to achieve power over others. One of his infamous quotes is: "I allow manipulation to find out where my enemy wants me to go. Then I use my mind to break the trap and punish the perpetrators."

He fancies himself a wordsmith who can dazzle, intimidate, and bully his critics into silence โ€” again largely because there is always a modicum of truth in many of his observations. He is a master diagnostician of the utter moral bankruptcy of modern civilization. The problem is, rather than articulate rational antidotes and even genuine moral feelings, if not ethical thoughts, Tate simply adduces himself as the solution to the nihilism out there โ€” both in word and deed.

But his utter contempt for women (one gets the impression that, like most conservative Islamic men, he does not truly enjoy the company of women at all) and his hypocritical moral inoculants against the debaucheries he thinks are annihilating the West, are mere shields. Behind the deceptive facsimile of hyper-masculinity and machismo lies a deeper veneer: a peeling, cracking, fading veneer that reveals a frightened child who fabricates a mythology about the man he thinks he aspires to be. Tate inflates his relevance and existential value by deputizing his late father as the eternal stand-in for himself. He describes his late father as a master chess player, a one-time CIA operative, and a genius. He has stated that he prefers his symbiotic relationship to his twin brother Tristan to any woman. The two are inseparable - preternaturally close for two heterosexual men who, reasonably speaking, should be living independent lives apart from each other.

Tate needs Islamo-fascism and its tightly structured law and rule-based system for the same reason he needed what he thought were the corruption and lawlessness of Romania: both provide him with a milieu in which to exercise his complete dominion over women, deprive them of their autonomy, and promulgate an ideology consonant with the idea that women lack self-governing agency.

Andrew Tate is less a misogynist and more of maniacal reactionary against the crushing power of female sexuality of which he lives in fear. One should not take his defense of the Islamization of Europe too seriously. To listen to Tate for any length of time turns one into a statistician of gutter trivia. His logic is inconsistent, and he operates from the position of pure self-serving expediency. He lacks the training of a raconteur or even the restraint of a self-sustaining sensationalist. Virile, cruel, unfettered and governed by an amoral ferality, he needs at all times to be ensconced in an environment where his unleashed impulses can have free reign and be left unchallenged, as was the case in Romania before his and his brother's arrests for allegations of rape and human trafficking - charges the Tates deny [1] - or now, in his newly imagined, Islamized Britain where a radical Hamas-like Caliphate will legitimize his primitive metaphysical view of women that belongs more in the 12th century than in the 21st.

Conservatives sympathetic to Tate should now be disabused of their affection for him. He has become a radical Muslim which means that he sanctions the destruction of a continent by extremist and illiberal peoples who largely remain hostile to assimilation and who wish to push their alien and primitive worldviews onto contemporary Europe. By supporting the Caliphate, he supports Sharia law. He gives voice to extremists who hate the West and whose vocational calling, among other things, is the destruction of the West. There are several ways to defeat the nihilism and post-modern ethical relativism of the West. Islamization is not one of them. I do not believe Tate means to shock anyone; nor do I believe this is a sensationalist move. Tate is a master self-preservationist and power luster whose priority is to unleash his primal sensibilities as his expression of unbridled freedom. His defense of Islam as a solution to the problem of the West is hackneyed, old-hat, and unoriginal.

Real men who are in traditional marriages and who lead their household do not disparage women and refer to them as bitches and whores as I've heard Tate speak of women in general on several podcasts. Quite the opposite. Real men cherish their wives. They honor them and take pride in the fact that coercion is unnecessary. Their magnanimity and authentic leadership qualities inspire their women to follow their lead. Tate leads by bullying. Real men lead by strength and consistency of moral character and a desire to provide and protect and leave an enduring legacy. What type of legacy and moral example is Tate leaving for the children he boasts of having out of wedlock?

Tate has women issues which, quite possibly, are traceable to his relationship to his mother, whom he rarely speaks about. Conservatives should not be besotted with a self-serving charlatan who uses disoriented young boys as pawns for a proxy war with the world in general. His tortured relationship to his own masculinity and to women are at the core of his neurotic life. When he stated in October of last year in a now-deleted TikTok video that ISIS members were real Muslims, one again could sense the desperation behind Tate's declaration, as well as the false alternatives. The world is going to hell. ISIS consists of men who are real men because they fight and stand up for what they believe in. So have criminal dictators like Stalin and Hitler.

The real challenge to pose to Tate, though, is this: in all the false equivalencies and either/or fallacies he has committed, why are his solutions always drawn from the lowest common denominator within a human being or their self-created systems? Why roll in the muck, the swill and detritus, and offer that sort of moral ugliness as some stylized version of oneself as alternatives when the West, by its nature, consists of a plethora of real solutions that, if taken up with imagination and creativity, might yet make a difference and a real turnaround in terms of the moral bankruptcy Tate has properly identified? The problem here is that the diagnostician is just as corrupt and bankrupt as the sickness he has identified.

Notes:

[1] In terms of the "trafficking" charges, Tate's version is that the charges involve accusations that he allegedly forced several women to give him money that they earned on TikTok, and he asserts that the women involved attest that he did not force or coerce them to do anything. See Tate give his version in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson: HERE. We will continue to carefully observe the facts and revelations of the case as they arise.