The Rise and Fall of Andrew Tate, Part 1

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From champion kickboxer to disgraced cyber-pimp.

3,324 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here [2])

The more you retreat from actions into words, the more you will be tempted to lie to get rich. By “actions,” I mean the following: caring for people, engineering things, programming things, fighting off an enemy, and physical labor. And by “words,” I mean making money in more verbal ways. When Andrew Tate retired from kickboxing, he retreated from actions into words — specifically, sales and entrepreneurship. He succumbed to the temptation to lie, and he deceived people as an OnlyFans entrepreneur, a casino owner, and as a pyramid schemer — but through it all, he retained a weird tendency to be candid about his profitmaking activities. Oddly enough, because he makes much of his money from such seedy, secretive activities, he can afford to be honest about masculinity and gender while others enmeshed in polite society cannot. Because of this odd combination of honesty and dishonesty, he is not a typical self-made centimillionaire.

Tate’s combination of good and bad characteristics may be intentional, given that YouTube psychologist Todd Grande claims [3] that he wants 70% of people to like him and 30% to hate him. The unintended effect is that many people both dislike and like him depending on what he’s saying or doing.

Tate is popular with the youth. According to Similarweb, 29% of visitors to his website [4] are Zoomers aged 18-24, which is a high percentage for that demographic. Other Rightist political figures — and Tate is a Rightist — don’t even come close. Tied at 22% are Jordan Peterson’s website, Matt Walsh’s blog, and Mike Peinovich’s The Right Stuff. Tate is way ahead of them in terms of his demographic’s youthfulness.

Tate has a young audience partly because more young men in anglophone nations are non-white, and as a mixed race man, he appeals more to them.

Tate also appeals to Zoomers more because they watch his YouTube shorts and TikTok videos. He doesn’t post those videos himself, however; he lures others into doing it by suggesting that they can be as rich as he is if they join his multi-level marketing scheme called “Hustler’s University,” where he is essentially at the top as “Top G” and everyone else is at the bottom. Thus, it’s really a dual-level marketing scheme.

In contrast to Tate, political commentators who made their names in older forms of media such as television and radio don’t appeal as much to Zoomers. For example, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin attract low percentages of Zoomers to their websites. They get only 9%, 10%, and 11% Zoomers, respectively.

Tate reminds me of Milo Yiannopoulos because he’s an anti-feminist and is charismatic, but he’s a lot more popular than Milo ever was. Milo only had 388,000 Twitter followers before he was banned, whereas Tate now has over 5 million. His rise to fame has been meteoric. It makes one wonder where he came from.

Tate was born to an African-American father and a white British mother in Washington, DC and spent most of his youth in Chicago. His father, Emory Tate, is best known for being a great chess player. As a young man, Emory scored very highly on the US military’s IQ test [5] and was placed in military intelligence. He had an uncanny ability to learn and translate Russian. Emory lost his job, however, because he couldn’t get along with his superiors. Rather than find a way to use his genius talent, they simply wanted to dispose of him. They demanded that he sign a document admitting that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder in return for giving him a handsome lifelong pension, but he refused, stating that “my sanity is not for sale.”

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You can buy Fenek Solère’s Resistance here. [7]

Emory came to regret his decision after a lifetime of poverty, and tried to get the back pay he was owed in order to pass it on to his kids and their mother, who was struggling with arthritis while working as a dishwasher. According to Andrew, when Emory tried to get the pay, the US government claimed it was too late. Emory’s life experiences seem to have influenced Andrew’s notion that the world is against good people and that desperate acts are necessary to overcome this.

After Emory’s discharge, the Tate family lived in poverty until his parents divorced and his mother moved back to the United Kingdom, taking Andrew and his two siblings with her. While in the UK, Andrew adopted kickboxing and became a four-time kickboxing champion. His Wikipedia page lists his record as 76 wins and 9 losses, but I suspect these numbers are false, because such a record would give him more wins as well as a higher win-to-loss ratio than most of the top-ranked kickboxers, yet his name never appears alongside theirs. Wikipedia accounts for 23 of his wins and 8 of his losses. Another source [8] claims that his actual record may be 43-9. Regardless of which one is correct, his career was impressive, and few men can say they’ve kickboxed professionally, let alone won so many bouts. It would still be nice if he could try to substantiate those alleged 76 wins on Wikipedia, however.

Tate also had a thing for appearing on reality TV shows. On the UK’s Ultimate Traveler, a then 19-year-old Tate tried to deviously divide and conquer his opponents so that he could win the prize at the end, but an eye injury he had suffered while kickboxing became aggravated and he left the competition.

Ten years later, he got kicked off the UK’s Big Brother 17  because of video appearing online that showed him slapping and whipping a [9] woman. The two would later claim it was consensual, but it still looks disturbing. He seems to have a total lack of empathy and inhibitions in striking her. Other footage shows him yelling at a woman who had locked him out of a hotel room because he claims she knew he’d receive a beating for “misbehaving.” (Psychopaths often talk down to people like this.) His voice sounds creepy in these videos, like an African-American pimp from the 1970s or the abusive African-American man in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The odd thing is that when he read a poem about a lost lover [10], his voice took on similarly demented characteristics.

Another reason Tate was kicked off Big Brother is that he made some politically incorrect online posts. One reads: “If I wanted to see black people running, I’d just threaten them with jobs.” He can be very witty.

Perhaps in an effort to seek solace after being kicked off Big Brother, Tate jumped on the Trump bandwagon in 2016, appearing on Alex Jones’ show [11] to proclaim that white Christians were more persecuted than minorities. He seemed to be embellishing things to please the audience.

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Andrew Tate with Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage.

In a video from January 2019 [13], Tate appears with Uberboyo, an Irish Nietzchean having right-wing leanings. For some background on Uberboyo, he recently appeared on Keith Woods’s channel [14] to debate Nietzcheanism versus Platonism with YouTuber Aarvoll [15]. This is about as right wing as person can get and still be kosher enough for YouTube, so it shows Tate was frequenting fairly right-wing circles.  Tate tells Uberboyo that he agrees with Conservative Inc. pundit Candace Owens and InfoWars conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson on most everything. Moreover, he avers support for UK civic nationalist activist Tommy Robinson, claiming that the British were crazy to imprison the man who was trying to help them. He doesn’t merely support civic nationalist individuals but also their positions, opposing migrants and blaming them for terrorist attacks and stabbings in London. He also seems to be a Brexit supporter, because he claims Germany was exerting too much influence over the UK despite the fact that they had fought the Second World War to prevent that from happening. Tate’s views from that time could be summed up as civic nationalist and somewhat conspiratorial, but he tells Uberboyo that he disagrees with Owens and Watson that the West can still be saved, claiming he had given up on the UK and moved to Romania because it is more of a Rightist country.

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Andrew’s brother Tristan sporting a MAGA hat [17].

Tate was humbler and more relaxed in the video with Uberboyo from January 2019 than he is now. He related that he had just had some boxing sparring sessions the previous day, so that may have contributed to it, but overall, he seemed to be a humbler person then. He relates in the video that he makes $30,000 every two weeks [18], which amounts to $780k per year. At that time he was only worth a few million, but estimates are now that he’s worth $355 million. Perhaps being sort of rich didn’t go to his head, but being ultra rich did. His lawyer, Tina Glandian, claims his current TikTok persona is an act, but even in interviews with, for example, Piers Morgan or Tucker Carlson, he is colder, harsher, and in my opinion less likable than when he was poor and young. In acquiring his fortune, he may have gained the world, but he lost his soul. He also looked whiter in 2017, and in some sense perhaps he acted whiter.

Many people claim Tate is an incel leader, but in the interview with Uberboyo he suggests that many dissatisfied single men are merely ugly guys trying to date women who are out of their league. He does, however, offer the consolation to single men that he isn’t male model material but that he could still get women and suggests other men can improve their game as well and then tries to rope them into his online self-help shtick. People take Tate seriously as a self-help guru because he is ultra rich, but even when he was moderately rich, he was promoting himself as such.

He also admitted that his girl had just left him for a man as rich as Dan Bilzerian, but claimed it didn’t bother him. One wonders whether her going out with a richer man motivated him to try harder to get rich, because he claims in a more recent video [19] that for a man to make a woman regret leaving him, he must not feel sorry for himself but take big actions to achieve big things in order to make her sad.

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You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel Rising here [21]

 

Tate appears in a video [22] with a manosphere advocate in April of 2019 in which he admits that he has become a cyber pimp. The way he did this, according to one video [23], is that several years before 2019, he invited four of his former sex partners to come live with him. Presumably they each thought that they would be his only lover, but when they arrived and saw each other, they found out otherwise. Tate then explained that he had a plan to start a webcam business and wanted to make them to work as models for it. Two of them turned down his offer, probably miffed at being deceived, but two stayed and lived with him in his dinky little apartment to try out the venture.

Tate noticed that the women weren’t doing a good job of telling their male clients what they wanted to hear. For example, an old man would ask one of them what her type was, and they’d tell the truth: Prince Charming. Tate told the women to lie and claim they were tired of Prince Charming in order to lead the piteous old man into thinking that he was their type. Using this method, they could extract far more money from their clients. Tate eventually grew tired of trying to coach the women on what to say and gave them a fake keyboard, telling them to pretend to type on it while he would sit out of camera range and type what the man wanted to hear. This was how Tate, in his own words, “raked money out of the Internet.”

Tate claims to be straight, but most straight guys would think that doing this makes a man questionably straight. Assuming Tate is completely straight, then perhaps what enabled him to overcome his sense of disgust is the fact that psychopathic people get more dopamine in the nucleus accumbens [24], the brain’s pleasure center, when anticipating monetary rewards. Perhaps he simply wanted the money too badly to feel uncomfortable with it.

Tate soon scaled up his OnlyFans operation, recruiting many more women and charging them 50% (elsewhere, he claims 66%) of their earnings so that he could help them extract more money out of their male clients. The way he did this wasn’t always strictly professional. In one video he admits to taking some women into his house as part of an OnlyFans harem. He claims he was doing the women a favor because before joining him, they were only making low wages in jobs such as waitressing, but with him they could earn up to $100 an hour on OnlyFans — while he took a cut of $200.

Tate also expanded his efforts to monitor the women and their efforts to extract money from their clients. Andrew’s brother Tristan, with whom he shares all his resources, reports viewing a camera feed of 40 of their OnlyFans models, in addition to a feed of the men to whom they were speaking. Andrew and Tristan peeping on sexually-aroused men mirrors the conditions Andrew experienced as a contestant on Big Brother, which was modeled on the totalitarian state that keeps all citizens under constant surveillance in Orwell’s 1984. So keep in mind that if you go on OnlyFans and talk to a woman, there may very well be some ghoul like Andrew Tate just off-camera, silently laughing at you.

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A clue as to why men want to be like Tate, from his camping video [26].

To translate Tate’s activities into a twentieth-century context, he is a combination of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, and Gloria Leonard [27], a phone sex entrepreneur from the 1970s. The difference is that those two didn’t parade around claiming to be a man of God, as Andrew Tate now does [28]. Being a Hugh Hefner/Billy Graham hybrid requires dodging more scrutiny than a kickboxer requires dodging blows.

Tristan tries to whitewash the nature of their OnlyFans business by claiming the women sometimes helped the men through tough emotional times, serving almost as their counselor or psychiatrist. However, in other clips he admits that they “get their titties out” for the camera. We don’t know how often the women got naked versus offered life counseling, but if the Tate brothers really wanted to help the men, they’d start a non-profit rather than an OnlyFans business.

Doing the math, if Tate’s 75 OnlyFans hoes [29] worked 20 hours a week, generating $200 an hour for the Tate brothers, it means the Tates made about $15.6 million a year on it — and if they had been doing this since, say, 2018, then they would still fall far short of the $365 million he allegedly has. They obviously got some of there money from other means.

Tate used money from his OnlyFans operation to finance other ventures. In the video from 2019, Tate expresses interest in purchasing a casino in Romania. He arranged an agreement [30] with mafia brothers who owned 400 casinos in Eastern Europe, where he’d put up the money to build a casino next to their competitor’s with their branding in exchange for giving them a cut of the profits. They agreed to it, but after opening, business was slow, so Tate, noticing there was a Starbucks nearby, advertised free coffee, and thereby drew not only gamblers but coffee-drinkers to the casino, which he claims was a big success. Tate claims the government shut down his casinos during the pandemic, so they weren’t so lucrative then, but they seem to be up and running again now, there being 15 which collectively take in about $12 million a year [31]. Even with this money and his OnlyFans profits, it seems some of Tate’s fortune came from other activities.

The Tate brothers have money in NFTs and cryptocurrency [32] and seem to have made some shrewd decisions with them. For example, Tristan Tate recalls [33] withdrawing an investment from FTX, a cryptocurrency hedge fund which turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, because its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, fearfully waffled to a reporter as to why he only drove a Toyota Corolla despite being rich enough on paper to afford a Lamborghini. The Tates may now be profiting from wise investments, but the reason they had money to invest in the first place is because they were OnlyFans pimps.

One benefit to pornographers of operating in places like Romania is that they can get attractive white women for a cheap price. White women are the most popular on porn sites, but most of them live in expensive countries like the United States and Norway, where actresses demand high wages.

By luring women to OnlyFans, Tate has become a menace to the women of Romania. Romanian men see a mulatto/quadroon bragging about the wealth he made while turning some of their women into cam whores, and they probably get rather angry. This may be the real reason why the authorities imprisoned him. (Of course, the mafia brothers with whom they own the casinos are probably eager to become the sole proprietors as well.)

Once Tate’s stay in a Romanian prison is over, the authorities should expel him from the nation given he is not Romanian, let alone white. They should also confiscate most of his ill-gotten OnlyFans money and donate it to charities that might help the same sort of suicide-prone men from whom he got it. Ideally, they should keep him under some sort of house arrest to prevent him from using white women to make money via OnlyFans again.

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Tate is becoming blacker as he ages, which helps to explain his shift from Right-wing politics to converting to Islam in 2022. Tate may have chosen Islam because he has many Muslim fans, and probably also wants to cozy up to the Muslim rulers of Dubai given that it’s a safe haven for him if he gets kicked out of Europe.

Some Muslims are accusing Tate of being a grifter. It’s a fair accusation, as only a few years ago he was praising Tommy Robinson. Changing one’s beliefs frequently is correlated with attention-seeking, which Tate has spent his adult life doing, both in reality TV and then in his YouTube shorts. If Tate is a grifter, it’s only up to a point, because the reality seems to be that he is a mix of a Right-wing white man and an African-American pimp. Polygamous Islam seems to be his way of reconciling his tendencies.

Tucker Carlson is supporting Tate, claiming that he hasn’t been charged with any crime. I hate to say this, but I agree more with the neoconservative Jew Ben Shapiro’s take [35] on Tate, which is that while his criticisms of our anti-male society are good, his solution of becoming a polygamous OnlyFans pimp is bad. Shapiro instead advocates monogamy and taking a pro-social role in one’s community.

Andrew Tate is in fact a part of the so-called “Matrix” that he pretends to oppose. Elon Musk’s new Twitter allows him to have an account, for example. Likewise, while YouTube may have banned his channel, they allow his followers to post multitudes of his videos — while they are simultaneously and feverishly taking down nearly every videos of Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, and others of the dissident Right. Racial nationalists and white advocates are the real people who are outside the Matrix. Tate may be very honest regarding some aspects of gender, but he’s not honest enough overall to get himself banned.

People should not admire Andrew Tate. Those who never retreat from actions into words — i.e., those who do useful things for society such as engineers, software developers, scientists, nurses, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, etc. — are far more deserving of respect.

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Andrew Tate is not looking so dapper during his prison stay.

If Tate had laid low and not started casting himself as a self-help guru and social commentator, then perhaps he would still be a cyber-pimp. (There’s a reason why most pornographers lay low.)

Alternatively, if he had never become an OnlyFans pimp and had simply become an outspoken representative of what is politically incorrect, he may have been blackballed from lucrative employment, but he probably wouldn’t be incarcerated right now. Tate’s problem was that he didn’t want to give up the lucrative OnlyFans income or forego being in the public eye. His attention-seeking and greed got the better of him.

Regardless of his wrongdoings, Tate did a great thing in setting up a system that gets people to spread videos across the Internet. It is wrong for him to manipulate people into thinking they can become super-rich in the process, but it is nevertheless an effective way of getting one’s views noticed. People on the dissident Right should try spreading videos in a similar manner — not so much young men who need to focus on getting a good career and relationship, but rather established men who are already set up in life. They should take sound bites from dissident Right figures and try putting them on social media sites. They need to get themselves out there on the platforms that the youth consume, because if they don’t, then the future will belong to those whom the system doesn’t mind letting us see — such as Andrew Tate.

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