The first time Andrew Tate nearly came afoul of the legal system for his treatment of women was in London during 2015. Tate, then a kickboxer and c-list celeb, was arrested on accusations of rape and assault. No charges were brought and, believing he would have more agency abroad, he relocated to Romania.
In December of 2022, along with his brother Tristan, he was arrested in Bucharest and placed under house arrest while prosecutors investigated complaints against them involving 35 women, not the least of which was that Andrew Tate had sex with a 15-year-old. The Tates were charged with human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal group to sexually exploit women using physical violence and coercion to make them appear in pornographic films. They strenuously denied the charges, their version of the story corroborated by at least two of the women involved. Authorities seized a fleet of 15 luxury cars, 14 designer watches and cash worth £3m. As this was unfolding a request was made by Bedfordshire Police for the brothers to be extradited to the UK to face multiple charges of rape and human trafficking dating back to 2012 and 2015. These charges were also strenuously denied. At the time of publication Andrew Tate is facing six legal investigations – four criminal and two civil – in Romania, the US and the UK. While finishing edits for this feature, Tate has just been named in another potential assault case for allegedly choking a girlfriend to the point of unconsciousness only two weeks into his recent stay in the US.
If you’d never heard of the Tate brothers before you might assume them to be hated by anyone who knows who they are. Instead, these men are heroes to millions of young men around the world, because they are some of the most successful influencers in recent history; and misogyny is baked into their game plan.
Many of Andrew Tate’s fans feel downtrodden in terms of romantic and financial success and see him as an aspirational figure. One such man is Enys, who took Tate’s advice in order to become successful at earning money online as a TikTok influencer who runs boxing courses. He and other fans downplay Tate’s violent misogyny… it’s a joke they say, not to be taken too seriously, while openly agreeing that what women really want is a man to take control.
Until recently Tate was much better known by teenagers and 20-somethings than he was by their parents. The recent success of the Netflix show Adolescence however has radically changed this picture.
The plot of this mini-series concerns a 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) who is arrested under suspicion of a shockingly violent act. Investigations by a forensic psychologist reveal he was the subject of bullying by peers influenced by “80/20” and incel ideology via social media; although none of this is initially realised by investigating police officers due to the highly coded manner in which it happened. Andrew Tate is mentioned by name by characters in the drama as a representative of the “manosphere” movement.
Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s four part drama – each episode shot in a single long take – has broken UK viewing records by becoming the first streaming programme to top the national charts compiled by Barb. The show has recently been front page news and has sparked debate in Parliament.
This series understandably will have created a powerful emotional response in many of its viewers, not the least those who have teenage children in their lives. Many will have found themselves thinking, ‘If I was Eddie Miller [Jamie’s father played by the drama’s co-creator Stephen Graham] these are the actions I would have taken to stop my son from believing these grotesque things.’ But these actions that might seem natural – the obvious right course of action – might not necessarily be so. And to understand why that is, first there needs to be an understanding of how we have found ourselves in this position.
Tate, as heinous as he might be, is only the tip of an iceberg. He and others like him are part of a connected global network to get young men to think and act both like misogynists and fascists. This network is succeeding beyond all possible expectations. Andrew Tate may not be a neo-Nazi, but as has been alleged by credible experts, he is capitalising on a global rise in fascism and from association with influential far right figures. He’s a vital link in a worldwide network that connects policy architects, YouTubers, fascist paramilitary gangs, and millions of young men
During this century there has been a shift on the part of the right wing to make its messaging palatable. This began on the smaller fringes of the internet, places like 4chan, but has spread to mainstream society. Right wing messages are hidden in memes, they’re packaged in otherwise innocuous podcasts and Youtube videos, and they’re sprinkled in along with the jokes and horseplay that make up much media aimed at young men.
Dozens of influencers pushed these points but few were as successful or open about their goals as Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website named for a fascist propaganda magazine. Anglin and others led the push to make their vile content memeable and shareable by making it funny, just like any of the other content you might come across online. Anglin has made it clear that his goal is to make the right wing cool and relatable for boys as young as ten years old.
In the mid-2010s the first major success in pushing youth culture rightwards was Gamergate, an online campaign by misogynists to verbally and physically harass women and non-binary people working in the video game industry. Their campaign, the fallout of which can still be felt today, forced several key figures to change addresses due to death threats, and were harassed in other pernicious ways.
But Gamergate was merely a symptom of the broader rise of the alt right, a hybrid online/offline white supremacist movement centered in the United States but with international ramifications. The alt right was a neo-fascist movement which both admired and aided Donald Trump’s first Presidency – the admiration was often mutual – and it combined extreme right wing online messaging with real-world political action, such as the Unite the Right rally and the attempted coup on 6 January 2021, both of which ended in murder. Parallel to the world of partisan politics the extreme right wing has expanded online, mostly via sexist and gendered social movements like the manosphere and forms of incel culture, which focuses on the insecurities of young men who want to be sexually active but aren’t. Both of these subcultures blame women for many perceived woes, and treat the idea that they don’t want to have sex with them as a social oppression on par with racism or homophobia.
There are examples of the influence of these networks all over the news. Mass shootings in the US are frequently perpetrated by men who subscribe to right wing misogynist propaganda, ranging from the well-publicised case of Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara to the relatively unknown yoga studio shooting committed by Scott Paul Beierle. Aside from physical violence there are countless cases of verbal and online abuse that involve these ideologies, from fringe websites to the algorithms which push teenage boys towards influencers such as Andrew Tate. Law enforcement and extremist experts have long known that young men create and are vulnerable to online right wing content, but the recent victory of Donald Trump in the United States means that the US government is no longer funding this research or any of the preventative measures that are sorely needed to counter their efforts. In the UK the National Crime Agency recently released a report highlighting these dangers, but even major government efforts won’t be able to root out every threat of online extremist organizing.
Many of these influencers are extremely successful and popular, and much of their audience doesn’t really understand the extent of the danger they pose. Even the examples offered in this article can’t fully explain just how normalised much of this extremist messaging has become, especially since only a decade or so ago much of it would’ve been considered beyond the pale.
If you aren’t very active online all of this might sound baffling. How could these efforts at propaganda be so successful? What’s become of the world today that could inspire young men to be so attracted to violently sexist and neo-fascist ideas? Unfortunately, the answer is cold comfort.
The fact is the present moment makes it a perfect time for the rise of toxic, fascist and other extreme political ideologies, especially the many that peddle misogyny. Right-wing movements have always appealed primarily to downwardly-mobile young people, and especially young men, as their first major recruits. German Nazism began as a movement of WWI veterans who were persuaded their home country had changed in their short but incredibly difficult absence.
Young men in the UK and the rest of the developed world today have had no such experience, but they do have one thing in common with those veterans – the youthful successes they expected were taken from them (in this instance by economics and by COVID-19). One of the central problems in dealing with the extreme right wing is that it has correctly identified a status quo which isn’t working for young people. Good jobs are scarce, housing is unaffordable, and further education is both expensive and of ever more questionable value to those of limited means. In most Western countries no mainstream party offers anything other than the continuation of this apparently broken system, giving young people nothing to look forward to as they enter and leave adolescence. Left adrift, young people have little to plan ahead for.
The right wing offers easy “answers” to these problems. It blames Jewish people, Muslims, immigrants of every colour, Black people, Brown people, trans and gender non-conforming people, travellers, gay and bisexual people, the disabled, the long-term ill, the homeless and other supposed “parasites” for so-called “legitimate concerns” and proposes that the economy be taken back by the “deserving” producers. Either implicitly or explicitly, they suggest that today’s problems exist because white men are no longer in charge. As a result, feminism is another major target of right wing ideology, arguing that after women gained more power in society this necessarily resulted in men having less.
It’s important to acknowledge that on a very basic level they are right about the last part, which is one of the biggest problems faced by anybody who hopes to stop the rise of right wing misogynist influencers. Increasing the degree of social power wielded by women and non-binary people means a reduction in the number of socially powerful positions held by men, an important and just goal. But read from the perspective of a young man who has no social agency he can recognise, this can sound like selling him a future where he’s less powerful than his father and grandfather. Without the provision of context it could understandably feel like injustice; as if the rug is being pulled out from under him and his friends. Why wouldn’t they listen to politicians and influencers who tell them that they’re the victims here?
Our world is full of young, downwardly mobile young men who correctly identify that mainstream politics as usual isn’t working for them or other people like them. They have less life experience than the people criticising them, and this can be a problem. In some cases they lack the kind of rigid and sophisticated education in these specific matters that would allow them to better understand the systemic connections that progressive arguments for social justice rely on. Or they simply choose not to believe this information, spurred on by influencers who make their points in a much more forceful and attractive way. They have, in the recent past, been cast by powerful opinion makers as modern folk devils: hoodies, chavs, louts. They’re surrounded both by mainstream media and by influencers that either intentionally or unknowingly spread sexist and racist ideology, with few magnetic and persuasive mainstream or alternative sources to counter them. We have placed them between a rock and a hard place. What could we expect to happen but that many young men would fall under malign outside influence?
For most young men this might not alter their behaviour all that much – they might tell some more off-colour jokes than they would have done otherwise, or they might share some more challenging content, but be otherwise unaffected. Others however might fall deeper into this subculture and change their lives accordingly by voting for extremist politicians and only associating with other people who’ve fallen under the spell of the far right. Still others might get more involved and join a right wing movement, either a political party or a violent organisation. And a small number of those young men will participate in violence against women and people of colour, immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and so on, in accordance with their new ideology.
But none of these steps are guaranteed. At every point there are interventions to be made to stop a young man falling further rightwards.
Here are some ways you can take to keep young people, and especially young men, out of toxic, fascist and other far right movements. Some of them might initially appear counterintuitive, especially since confronting fascism is the best way to stop it in the public sphere. In the private sphere, though – at home, in a place of worship, in your neighbourhood – this will not work.
First, I want to highlight what you shouldn’t do to keep young people away from fascism and fascist adjacent movements. You won’t be able to keep them from seeing this messaging, unless they live life completely offline in an isolated egalitarian commune, so don’t think that any amount of parental controls on their devices will stop them. These systems simply don’t work, because this kind of toxic messaging is intentionally packaged in products and materials that they won’t catch. And even if they did work, that would only serve to make this content more alluring and mysterious for your son, especially if he has friends who are allowed to access it wherever they choose.
So, isolation doesn’t work. The only thing left is inoculation. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s better to wait as long as possible for your son to hear these terms or concepts. The fact is that he will encounter them, with or without you. You have to get out ahead of fascist messaging and talk to your son about it before he sees it online or hears about it from his friend. You should do this in the same way that you might talk to your son about sex and the dangers of rape culture, or in the same way you might talk to him about race and privilege. These conversations will be uncomfortable, but they’re necessary to keep your son and your community safe.
If you hear a young man you’re close to expressing sympathies with the right wing, especially about right wing sexist views, you’ll need to challenge his beliefs without making him feel like he’s being attacked or scolded – this would likely only drive him further to the right. Instead you have to engage with him as if you were curious about his perspective, as if you were both adults discussing something you disagree on. Be firm about your position, but hear him out. Ask where he’s heard the joke he just shared, or where he encountered the meme he just sent.
No matter what his answers are, your first reaction must be empathy rather than judgement or exclusion. Treat his being captured by the right wing the same way you would if a teenager in your community developed a serious drug problem – in these cases, experts agree that confrontation has to be a last resort. Start by reaching out and talking with the young person who is falling for right wing propaganda, and ask them what they find appealing about it. What’s happening in their lives that made them react positively to something so hateful? Are they upset about losing a potential love interest? Are they worried about their future, or the future of their community? Do they feel alone, and these communities give them a place to belong?
Hear them out, and talk them through why the right wing isn’t the answer to their problems. Learn about what the right wing has done, together. Show them examples of young men who’ve fallen prey to this kind of propaganda and pulled themselves out. Watch or listen to the testimony of people who have been the victims of right wing misogynist violence, such as the women Andrew Tate very likely raped and assaulted.
Lastly, make sure the young person you’re reaching out to knows they aren’t alone. You’re here with them, and still love and care about them. There need to be boundaries for this – if they put themselves or others at risk – but if they come to see their mistake and do what needs to be done to make up for it, then invite them back into your community.
This work is uncomfortable, and hard. But the alternative is to leave the young people in your life vulnerable to falling down a right wing rabbit hole with no one to help them out.
