According to this worldview, his money, his cars, and his poisoned relationships with women are all evidence of his virtue. Tate also owes his success to the skill with which he has navigated the attention economy and understood the moral outlook that underlies it. Why believe anything else in a world in which the charisma-free, sweatpants-wearing Sam Bankman-Fried is able to con his way into a fortune? Underlying this worldview is a kind of egalitarianism: shouldn’t the common man, too, have a chance to get in on the hustle? What Tate offers is a way to hack the system, to make the scams work for you. So, too, is the traditional nine-to-five job. We are, according to Tate, living in what he calls “the Matrix.” The economy: a scam the media: a scam politicians: also a scam. (Lil Wayne’s adage that “ Real Gs move in silence like lasagna” is not one embraced by Tate.) Tate’s grift is to use this image to market an unoriginal synthesis of outrageous misogyny packaged with pseudo-spiritual wisdom to hawk his various obvious scams. His view of what counts as a marker of success - waving a sword around, smoking a cigar and posing next to his supercars - is unaspiringly crude. Tate’s entire persona is based on what an insecure adolescent boy imagines to be success in today’s world. Tate is the most toxic and popular figure to surface from the swamp of the so-called manosphere, which includes the likes of the steroid-enhanced, raw offal–chowing Liver King, and Gonzalo Lira, the pickup-artist-turned-geopolitical-“expert” living in Ukraine. For Tate and his followers, the whole system is a scam and the only way to succeed is by pushing others down and clawing your way to the top. He is a symptom of a new brand of capitalism unincumbered by any illusions about progress. Predation, exploitation, and relentless clout chasing are the tools with which he has won fame and fortune. Unlike, say, Elon Musk - a repellent figure for very different reasons - he does not even claim to owe his fame to his ability to actually produce anything. What makes Tate more than a particularly unpleasant creature is his widespread appeal. Why believe anything else in a world in which the charisma-free, sweatpants-wearing Sam Bankman-Fried is able to con his way into a fortune? Teachers are reporting that Tate’s influence is directly changing the behavior of boys, who have taken to asking their instructors “what color is your Bugatti?” as well as parroting Tate’s sexist routines to girls and women. According to one study, 74 percent of British males between ages eighteen and twenty-four had consumed some sort of Tate content substantially more boys have heard of Tate than of UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, a perhaps unsurprising fact given the relatively short shelf life of recent PMs. His “expulsion” from social media only served to increase his appeal among his target demographics. On the dark corners of the internet, Tate managed to speak directly to an audience of boys and young men. Spurned by the social media establishment and the media, he managed to expand his influence and presence despite only posting his content directly on Rumble and other right-wing “alternative” social media platforms. But something strange happened - the Tate machine proved too big to fail. Momentarily, the Tate saga seemed over after major social medial firms “canceled” him. There, reports of teachers complaining about the juvenile sexism inspired by his ceaseless stream of social media soundbites have become ubiquitous. Now in prison awaiting trial, his influence over young boys in his native United Kingdom has not diminished. For a brief period in 2022 Tate was the most Googled man on the planet he continues to drive internet traffic and rack up billions of TikTok followers. Residency in a Romanian jail cell on suspicion of human trafficking, rape, and money laundering, has not, it seems, reduced the popularity of the self-proclaimed “Top G,” kickboxer, professional misogynist, and grifter extraordinaire Andrew Tate.
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