We need to talk about Andrew

Back at it again at the Jerry's Pizza

You hate to see it. I would like to be coming to you all with a roundup of better things, like an excellent recent article on revolutionary momentum on the right and left, Mother writing up her retrospective on January 6th two years on, and my own brief take on the hilarious Real Housewives drama in the halls of Congress this week. These things are still to come. First, however, I’m going to have to do perhaps my least favorite thing on the internet:

Talk about Andrew Tate

Talking about Andrew Tate

There’s a certain temptation to assume that some persons and scandals are simply so well known that they need no introduction, I certainly would have thought that Andrew Tate has made himself an awful, awful household name by now. I am, however, proven to be wrong by the sheer number of people commenting on articles about Tates’ long overdue arrest to express their pride in having no idea who he is. This would be the correct choice if Tate were a crass celebrity feeding on negative attention, certainly for the consumer if not for society. I will explain why I think that continued ignorance of Tate is the wrong move here, and why I believe Tate is a perfect case study of a much larger problem. But first, a brief overview of human trash:

Andrew Tate is a former competitive kickboxer who made his name and fame in the sleazy world of online Alpha Male life-advice-influencing. This is a lucrative but flooded market, there are only so many seats at the big boys table at Hooters to go around. Tate’s particular hook was to openly confess to sex trafficking, bragging about his developed professional skill at manipulating women into developing feelings for him so that he could bring them into doing erotic online webcam shows from which he would take all profit. If this sounds like digital pimping, congratulations because it is. Tate sold his expertise on the strength of teaching you, a feckless loser with no game, the secrets that only a pussy apex predator like Andrew Tate could master. Left out, of course, were the threats of violence and emotional abuse that kept his victims making money for him.

Tate would later move to Romania, in his own words because getting charged with sexual assault and rape is more difficult there, and blew up his online platform with viral clips such as the genuinely funny-for-the-wrong-reasons rant about how he cannot read books because his superior brain is too fast to focus and needs constant stimulation. Like a lot of people, this was my introduction to Tate. I laughed at him until Romanian police rescued captive women from his basement later that same year. Worse, all this time a lot of other people had been laughing with Tate. His particular style of bombastic short clip nonsense and viral arrogance made him a favorite of the TikTok and YouTube Shorts algorithm for single men and teenage boys, the exact people who do not need the opinions of a literal professional sex predator piped into their content feeds.

This gets to the crux of why Tate should not be simply ignored until he goes away: If that strategy was ever going to work in the algorithm driven New Internet, it’s far too late, and if all you care about is your own peace of mind then you need to be aware of the danger.

If my seriousness sounds far-fetched, do a simple experiment: Create a new TikTok account and see how fast following recommended accounts from the top of the default feed gets you to Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Andrew Tate. From what I’ve seen it will not take long, I know some younger people who have done this particular experiment multiple times and the sinkhole opens rapidly. The only caveat is that TikTok may be detecting that they are young men from its extensive spyware capabilities and injecting their feeds with Sigmega Pseudoman redpill bullshit as a result, but that really isn’t any better.

If you want to effectively speedrun filling a burner account with right wing toxic masculinity, the key seems to be Marvel movie clips. Zero to Tate Shapiro in less time than any other Pipeline yet tested.

This, of course, is not happening in a vacuum. Tate should have been finished when he was dropped from the British reality TV show Big Brother when rape allegations surfaced, he should have been finished when his business model centered on outright admitting to basing his entire lifestyle on the far-from-new and well understood “Loverboy Pimp scam” which is explicitly a crime, he should have lost support when he plainly stated that he moved to Romania because rape charges are harder to make stick there, Family Values conservatives should have never jumped on the bandwagon of an utterly self serving social darwinist pseudo-polygamist pornographer, and at long last his ardent fanboy defenders should have blinked when it recently surfaced that his victims had tattoos identifying them as his property.

Of course none of that happened, in large part for the expected reasons like Family Values conservatives being huge hypocrites and corporations being utterly motivated by profit regardless of any harm to children in their userbase. The effect of crass conservative influencers defending Tate cannot be ignored, but the main problem undoubtedly rests with the secret whispering machine intelligence that milks our collective teats on behalf of corporations and selects the daily entertainments.

Even when YouTube and TikTok finally had their hands forced by mounting criminal charges and banned Tate for his blatant misogyny, both platforms allowed reposted clips from fan accounts and content farms to populate their services. This is not even getting into the behavior of Elon Musk in his quest to antagonize his enemies by any available means.

The short form clips and segments work excellently for weaving Tate’s corrosive opinions and beliefs into the media consumption of impressionable youth while directing potential marks towards his varying nonsense business ventures and memberships. These platforms obviously know, and have allowed content sorting to group Tate with other bottom feeding grifters featured in Feminist Rekt compilations.

If media systems self regulated by profit incentive and fear of public backlash in any functional way, this would not have happened. The fact that video hosting and social media chose the engagement and controversy clicks of a confessed sex trafficker over any fear of possible consequences indicates that profit incentive is in fact dead set against us, and all that remains is forcing a solution.

Now I circle back to the point I began this rant with, that the natural impulse of many is to ask why we’re continuing to platform someone like Tate and keep exposing him to wider audiences in an attempt to dunk on him. To begin with, I am beginning to question this basic premise altogether: The sensationalist media coverage that people like Donald Trump engineer is a result of a broken system that we individually don’t influence all that much, the equivalent of haranguing the working poor to fight industrial pollution by washing their trash.

The automatic promotion of Tate, if it could have been stopped by people ignoring him and waiting for him to go away, is now long out of our control for one simple reason: He already has his audience.

Because the viral fame of too-fast-for-books Tate and his many toxic opinions on dating and relationships managed to circle the world before widespread awareness of his actual crimes, he is presently in the phones of absolutely everyone he wants to be reaching. Tate has reached market saturation of his target demographics through endlessly reposted snippets of content that feed into his much more toxic members' pages.

Tate is constantly attempting to creep into my content feeds whenever I follow a typical man interest page or view something with slightly edgy humor, and omnipresent in my little brothers’ school. Attempting to starve Tate of attention by looking away is pointless, he already has the hypnotic fixed gaze of your nephew, son, young coworker, and socially awkward classmate. If you’re not aware of Tate, it means the algorithm judged you unlikely to buy his shtick in the first place. From a perspective of gaining a platform, he has already long since won.

All this, despite the fact that he is actually very stupid.

I am reminded of the mass shooter manifestos I publicly stated should be buried and not boosted by the media, and I now question my own logic. Trump didn’t get his billions in free publicity because CNN was mean to him, he exploited a weakness in the GOP and seized the spotlight of a conservative media machine decades in the making that would have generated coverage for any controversial presidential candidate. Those 4chan mass murders are not reaching their target audience over the Twitter feeds of liberal journalists, their target demographic can be found in the crowds who repost PDF rips of their screeds on message boards because proliferating something the Liberal Media wants gone is a perverse mischief.

Nick Fuentes found his audience not in being criticized by liberal or centrist media, but viciously cannibalizing the audiences of other alt-right media until a world stage scale musician went off his meds and fell down the same rabbithole that all his early audience did.

None of these men are geniuses, they inhabited a niche created for them by a system that promotes authoritarian strongmen and toxic social behavior, whether it does this by malice or flaw. In each case, by the time people started saying that we need to stop giving critter attention the signal was already in the ears of everyone it needed.

At this stage in the game, attempting to starve Tate of views does nothing but starve pushback against his views and keep responsible adults blissfully ignorant of the scale of the problem while believing that choosing this ignorance is the right choice, a lot like plastic pollution really. Trying to high road this shit does absolutely nothing at this stage in the game but give the systems that promoted Tate to all of your vulnerable and naive young male relatives a free pass.

Meanwhile, the constant delivery of funny little clips and generic life advice will be building up an emotional understanding of Tate as that funny internet guy and, perhaps, a somewhat politically incorrect guru. Like with the trial of Johnny Depp, once this audience has put Tate in a box labeled ‘harmless,’ or perhaps even ‘unfairly persecuted,’ the temptation to argue down or disregard uncomfortable new information will take hold.

The recent attempt to cling to the skirts of conservative influencers, painting himself as targeted by the Deep State and persecuted as a cover for Epstein's clients, serves to add more noise to the outpouring of Tate sympathy. Even people who are unlikely to believe anything from Roger Stone will absorb a Tate-friendly headline generated by his support and file it in the background of the mind.

The path to success, fame, and shirking loss of your audience by blaming the child sacrificing cultists of the Horned God when pressed, has now been established. The next Andrew Tate will be worse, and as the algorithm reinforces itself in a feedback loop the delivery of newly minted professional rapist celebrities to the impressionable young men in your life will grow increasingly efficient. 

Unless there is a reckoning, and no outrage can gather force in silence.

We as a society are outrage fatigued by design, so very much is wrong and the volume of noise and care is overwhelming. We are, however, deluding ourselves if we think shutting our ears is a tenable solution. YouTube is selling a self confessed spousal abuser and sexual predator to your children, and it will do it again. The pushback must happen, it may be as dramatic as getting Tate and his ilk banned as aggressively from YouTube as Disney music is, or as simple as telling someone under the Fresh and Fit spell in your life that Tate fucking sucks. We each have a part to do, not just in throwing Tate in the trash where he belongs, but addressing the root cause of why he was able to get big enough that a Macro-scale thinker like Greta Thunberg had to take notice.

As you read this, someone in your life has Andrew Tate on one of their devices and he is already doing damage. You may not be able to ban TikTok, but you can talk to your son about why he should never trust a pimp who’s trying to look like Mr. Clean if he were a member of Trapt, and that’s a start.