The Rise and Fall of Andrew Tate, Part 2

3,723 words

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

Popular YouTube shorts personality Andrew Tate is a man of contrasts. He claims to be a man of God, yet persists in earning income as an OnlyFans tycoon. He implores women to have children as they did in the past, but advocates for men to make outrageous displays of wealth to attract them. Because of these extremes, he’s part sage and part pied piper.

Tate as a Sage

Tate appeals to zoomers because he has many wise things to say. For example, he claims women hate frugality. This is best witnessed in the price of weddings, as they’ve been going up in recent decades. Tate additionally says that women hate cowardice. This may be true, but the only ways men are allowed to show bravery these days are by playing full-contact sports, joining the military (to potentially fight wars for Israel), or policing black criminals to stop them from killing each other. Hence, one must be thickheaded in one way or another to capitalize on bravery.

Of course, one could bravely expose elite Jewish power or advocate ethnonationalism, but then society will blackball you from lucrative employment, and then you’ll have no choice but to be frugal.

Tate accepts the fact that we no longer live in the warrior age and embraces “the war of all against all”[1] ^[4] in consumer capitalism. Deception is the art of war, and Tate has vanquished the simps of OnlyFans with his efforts to manipulate them into parting with their money. He essentially did this by getting the women to pretend as if they liked their male clients, and/or pretended that they needed money for desperate reasons. Little did their clients know that the women actually despised them, and not only didn’t need their money but that it would go to the Tate brothers so they could drive supercars, wear Amani, and eat fine cuisine in Dubai. Tate is therefore a great capitalist warrior, and exhibits great acumen so far as getting rich is concerned. Call me a practitioner of slave morality, but I couldn’t do it.

Tate also believes that men should be masculine and women should be feminine. For him, men should be hardened by life while women should be protected from it. There is some wisdom in this, as women who are exposed to a lot of stress have elevated cortisol levels, which may negatively impact their child’s brain in utero ^[5] when they are pregnant.

Tate’s boldness is infectious and inspires men to be more outspoken. Many mimick his coarsely frank manner of speaking. Tate gets away with it because he’s rich, however, while ordinary men will probably drive women away if they act in a similar way, unless the woman concerned is very submissive.

Like many tough-guy self-help gurus, Tate admonishes people for indulging in self-pity and suggests that they should instead use their grief to fuel self-improvement efforts. They won’t always feel like exercising, studying, working on their business plan, and so on, but they must persevere to win out over others who won’t take a day off when they don’t feel good. Some young men have taken this advice to heart, and Tate serves as a kind of voice in their head telling them to do their duty. For example, a zoomer man filmed a skit for a YouTube short in which Andrew Tate comes to his door and asks him whether he’s been working out, whereupon the zoomer man begins fearfully doing pushups.

Tate believes people should welcome adversity. He claims ^[6] that there is a study which shows that when  people believe adversity is good for them, they benefit from it physically; if they believe it to be bad, they suffer physically. This is all well and good, but taken to an extreme, it borders on magical thinking. For instance, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail the Black Knight refuses to admit he’s lost ^[7] as he’s in a swordfight with King Arthur, and continues losing limbs until he has none left. Even then, when Arthur finally departs, he accuses the King of running away instead of continuing to fight him, threatening to bite Arthur’s legs off. While it’s good to persevere through hardships, it’s also good to know when to cut one’s losses. There’s a happy medium between both tendencies that’s optimal.

Tate also has some keen observations on Muslims versus whites. For example, he notes ^[10] that when he was growing up in Luton, he observed a young Muslim friend driving a Ferrari sports car despite the fact that he was working in a fast-food restaurant. Tate asked him how he could afford such a car on such a salary, and the Muslim replied that he and his nine brothers shared a property, lived there with all of their wives, and pooled their resources in order to purchase the car. They had also pooled their resources to purchase a property that they could then rent to whites.

Tate supports the communal family unit as opposed to the modern Western individualist way. Society benefits economically when everyone is independent and suffers when people operate in family units and are unable to scale up to institutions beyond it. When most people don’t have these family inclinations, everyone benefits, but when invasive groups do, they can exploit the native population’s individualism. Middle Eastern nations that lack oil reserves are usually poorer than white nations because their people are less individualistic and everything is tribal. Family-based tribalism harms the group overall, but helps those who use it against other, more individualist groups.

Tate likewise critiques the injustices of modern feminist society. He exposes the folly of female overemployment, once telling a story ^[11] of how female police officers to whom he had reported a stolen supercar wanted to do nothing besides take down a statement, tediously asking his name, date of birth, and so on as if they were working at a call center. They also refused to retrieve his car after he learned where it was, claiming they weren’t trained in how to do it, likewise threatening to arrest him if he tried to do it himself.

As women slowly take over many white-collar professions, it’s becoming popular for men to posit “world without men” scenarios. For example, Jordan Peterson asks women to consider where the roads, bridges, and pipelines would come from without men. Similarly, Tate asks women to consider what would happen if men stopped protecting them from physical harm, believing that they will immediately remember men’s value in such situations.

Given declining birth rates in the West, it’s also popular to try to convince women to become mothers, and Tate discusses it as well. He counterposes motherhood to careerism, asking women to consider which is more important. He says ^[12] of his grandmother on her 93rd birthday:

There was a room full of about 70 people who came from that one woman. Isn’t that remarkable? Nobody cared about her career, nobody asked what job she did, nobody asked how many times she went to the club, nobody asked if she had time to go to festivals. You had 70 sentient beings, including myself, full of life from one woman who dedicated herself to being a mother and a good wife. That is beautiful.

Jordan Peterson echoes Tate, claiming his female clients started wanting kids in their late 20s, when they would lose interest in their careers.

Tate as a Pied Piper

Tate claims that psychology’s insights fall short of the precision of mathematics, and that as such they’re irrelevant. Ironically, his opinion also falls short of the precisions of mathematics, and thus it is self-refuting. Psychopathic people often contradict themselves, and as we’ll see, Tate is a rather psychopathic individual. He dislikes psychology for the same reason a kid might get mad at a line indicating the minimum height required to ride a roller coaster. He doesn’t measure up to the norm, so he dislikes the tool that exposes him.

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised is how psychologists judge whether or not an individual is a psychopath. Each item is scored between 0 and 2, with 0 meaning no resemblance and 2 meaning strong resemblance. In the United Kingdom, the cutoff for psychopathy is 25/40. Let’s carry out a hypothetical evaluation of Andrew Tate:

1. Glibness/superficial charm (1/2). He has enough glib charm to be popular on YouTube. He also has a coarse way of speaking. According to criminologist Matt DeLisi ^[14], psychopaths “talk over you in a brusque, aggressive style.” That’s Tate, all right.

2. Grandiose sense of self-worth (2/2). As a self-described “Top G,” he exhibits a grandiose sense of self-worth. To be fair, he identifies as such in a semi-comedic fashion, but jokes are often a way of admitting truths that the joker is uncomfortable with facing. Studies show that power turns people with high testosterone into narcissists ^[15]. As a champion kickboxer, Tate had high testosterone, but he didn’t have much power outside the ring until he got rich. Perhaps acquiring his fortune is why he is less humble today than he was in a video ^[16] from 2017.

3. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom (2/2). A young Tate claims in an interview ^[17] that he became a boxer because he found schoolwork to be boring and he preferred the thrill of someone throwing punches at him. He therefore has a high need for stimulation and proneness to boredom.

4. Pathological Lying (2/2). Tate lies a lot. He got rich feeding flirtatious lines to his OnlyFans clients, who believed they were coming from the girls they saw on camera. But his lies don’t stop there. He has confessed to lying to sales clients by telling them that certain products were subpar and that he was withholding it to protect their interests. According to Tate, this made them trust him more and that he could therefore make more money from them in the long run. These schemes only work for a short time, however, and they erode societal trust among everyone.

Tate doesn’t just lie to get money, either. He claims in one video to have 12 kids, but a confidante has ^[18] claimed that Tate told him he has four. And in yet another video, Tate claims to have three. He has a lot of enemies, so maybe he wants to protect his kids by keeping the figure ambiguous in order to discourage people from trying to hunt them down and harm them.

Tate also lies just to see if he can get away with things His dishonesty was televised for all to see when he  lied to Chloe on The Ultimate Traveler ^[19] in order to avoid giving her a decent percentage of his prize winnings while still looking like a nice guy. He later said it wasn’t about winning the money, but merely seeing if he could pull it off.

We don’t know whether Tate is guilty of the human trafficking charges for which he’s currently under investigation, but he’s lied so much that people aren’t being quick to believe that he’s innocent.

5. Cunning/manipulative (2/2). Tate had to manipulate dozens of OnlyFans hoes into letting him manipulate their clients into sending more money in exchange for 50% of the profits. This must have taken a lot of effort, but it comes naturally to him.

He instructs his sales protégés to claim that products are on the verge of being sold out so that they can close deals quickly. This happens in advertising all the time, where potential customers are advised to buy things “while supplies last,” so this is nothing original.

Tate isn’t unique among entrepreneurs in manipulating people into giving him money; in fact, that’s more or less what it means to be an entrepreneur. But he also likes to lure people into buying things by promising them that the item in question will improve their life. He sells the “need” by rationalizing how the item in question will fulfill whatever needs a person has. This is how he gets people to join Hustler’s University, but instead of making them rich, it merely forces them to post videos of Andrew in order to make him rich.

6. Lack of remorse or guilt (2/2). Anyone who starts an OnlyFans business and runs casinos almost undoubtedly lacks these traits. Tate clearly has no qualm about encouraging women to become sex performers, even when the images of their activities are going to be circulating around the world on the Internet for years. And as far as casinos are concerned, they encourage people to gamble away their life savings.

7. Shallow affect (0/2). Tate seemed to have something of a shallow affect on the reality TV shows he was on when he was younger, but nowadays he’s more theatrical and strident.

8. Callousness/lack of empathy (2/2). Tate is callous and lacks empathy for the woman he is shown beating on one video ^[20]. Physical abuse is associated with callousness and lack of empathy ^[21]. In another video, he similarly lacks empathy for a woman when he mocks her for being a slut — despite the fact that it is womanizers like him who facilitate this. Psychopaths are often harder on other people than themselves, and in this sense Tate adopts it in a categorical sense, saying that men can be womanizers and also be good people, but that women can’t be sluts and also good people

9. Parasitic lifestyle (2/2). As an OnlyFans pimp, casino owner, and multilevel marketing beneficiary, Tate has quite the parasitic lifestyle. None of these activities improve the lives of the people who engage in them, and his OnlyFans girls do most of the work

10. Poor behavioral controls (0/2). Tate seems to have fairly good behavioral controls. He regularly preaches self-control to his viewers, and seems to practice it himself. However, he likes to tell a story ^[22] about a time when he lost his cool and punched another man for not having his back. He claims he stole the guy’s girlfriend, who in anger showed up at his place with six other guys demanding an apology. When Tate refused, he claims that they became afraid because they had expected him to buckle under pressure. A friend of Tate’s who was standing by his side then became worried and began to apologize on his behalf, whereupon Tate hit him and knocked him out cold. Frightened by Tate’s fearlessness, the group of guys confronting him left. According to one study ^[23], fearless dominance is correlated with factor 2 psychopathy, of which poor behavioral controls are a part. Tate’s friend shouldn’t have apologized on his behalf, because the masculine thing to do in that situation is to cooperate with one’s friends and oppose one’s enemies. Tate seems to be high in testosterone as well as in psychopathic personality traits, so the story he told seems to have been a natural outcome of this combination. This lone incident doesn’t mean that Tate is impulsive overall, however.

11. Promiscuity (2/2). Andrew notes ^[24] that he and his brother Tristan would “clean up” with hot girls in the Slovak city of Košice, claiming that all the hot girls for many miles around moved there. He claims they’ve left that city now, however, having all gone to Dubai to look for (mostly white) expat sugar daddies.

Nevertheless, Tate has discussed ^[25] how he’d have been better off economically if he had stuck with one woman rather than going with the ten he claims to have been with in recent years. This remorse can be linked to a type of status-seeking, but it’s remorse nonetheless.

12. Early behavioral problems (0/2). Tate doesn’t seem to have had behavioral problems, with the possible exception of one incident. He recounts ^[26] about having complained to his father when he was a child that older kids on the school bus were picking on him. They were seven and he was five. His father told him to deal with it himself. Tate objected that they were bigger than him, so his father said, “You have a lunchbox, hit them with it.” After what Tate claims were weeks of abuse, one child smacked him in the face. Filled with pent-up rage, Andrew turned around and swung his lunchbox in the child’s face and hit him in the eye. Just then the bus had arrived at Tate’s stop, so he fled from the vehicle and ran all the way home. Upon learning of the incident, his father Emory took him to Walmart, bought him a new lunchbox, and said, “I’ll buy as many of these as you need.” It’s good that Emory taught Andrew to practice self-defense, but hitting a child with a lunchbox may be too much of an escalation.

13. Lack of realistic long-term goals (2/2). The craziest thing Tate does is to suggest that everyone who fails in his Hustler’s University is lazy, stupid, or arrogant. There are probably millions of people who could serve as better entrepreneurial mentors than an OnlyFans pimp, but even assuming he is a good one, he discounts other variables for success. For example, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had wealthy families who helped them to develop their businesses. In Tate’s case, his OnlyFans hoes enabled him to get rich. He didn’t do it all by himself.

What’s more, Tate’s claim that everyone should become a rich entrepreneur is not realistic for most people. There isn’t enough wealth in the world for everyone to be rich. There are 724 billionaires in America out of a population of roughly 331 million. Thus, a person has about a one in 500,000 chance of becoming a billionaire. It’s not a realistic goal for most people.

Tate also isn’t honest about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Not anyone can succeed at it. Studies show that successful entrepreneurs are often moderately high in dark triad personality traits. Psychopaths in particular have been shown to have increased brain activity in their nucleus accumbens due to anticipation of monetary rewards. This may be why Tate subordinates all matters of taste to giving the customers whatever they want — even if it’s junk, fake affection, or whatever, just so long as they’ll buy it. He isn’t the sort of man to engineer, say, one of those everlasting Volvos that were made in the 1980s or 1990s. Instead, he wants to sell something worthless and then run away. He carried this mentality into his preferred fighting style, claiming that punching and running away is a better strategy than sticking it out to see how things go.

Tate likewise doesn’t discuss how personality traits influence entrepreneurial success. For example, those who correspond to types ENTJ, INTJ, and ISTJ on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator seem to do better as entrepreneurs. INTPs, on the other hand, do worse (see graph below).

Moreover, people who are exposed to lower levels of prenatal testosterone, as evidenced by having a higher 2D:4D ratio (those with a long index finger relative to a long ring finger), are reportedly ^[31] less likely to be entrepreneurs. This doesn’t necessarily mean individuals have a lower 2D:4D ratio are better entrepreneurs, but simply that they are more disposed to it. Tate has a very low 2D:4D ratio, and is therefore a natural entrepreneur.

14. Impulsivity (0/2). Like many ultra-rich people, Tate doesn’t seem to be very impulsive because he works a lot and is very disciplined.

15, Irresponsibility (2/2). While Tate offers some keen insights and sage advice, he offers a lot of irresponsible advice as well. For example, in one video he tells people to do 500 pushups in one day and says that they’re weaklings if they don’t ^[32]. Tate is probably just being outrageous here to get attention, but what if some poor sap takes him seriously and really tries to do it

Tate has also been irresponsible in the personal advice he gives, telling one man that it was fine to spend $100,000 on a sports car he desired. To be fair, he has practiced what he preaches, because before he was rich, he and his brother purchased an Aston Martin for $80,000 with all the money they had. They made it work, but this style of conspicuous consumption is foolish for most people because the average person can’t accumulate that much money that quickly — especially if they aren’t willing to stoop to the level of becoming an OnlyFans pimp to make money or using deceitful tactics in sales. For most people, it’s better to invest $100,000 than to spend it.

A final example of Tate’s irresponsibility is the fact that he has not been paying taxes in the United Kingdom. He has never offered an ideological defense of it like some anarcho-capitalist or neo-transcendentalist might. It looks more like typical African-American irresponsibility.

16-20 (0/10). I can’t say whether Tate is guilty of human trafficking, but he does seem to have a quasi-criminal knack for making money via the sleaziest legal ways possible. This isn’t enough to warrant any scoring above zero here, but it may be in the future.

According to my provisional assessment of Tate, he rates a 21/40 on psychopathic personality traits. That’s close to the average score for prisoners in the United ^[33] States, which is 22/40, but it’s too low to be psychopathic, because one must score a 25 or higher in the UK to be considered one. He has expressed fear of being attacked in public, so he has emotions, even if his seem shallower and less pronounced than most people’s.

Sin hierarchies have manipulative people like Tate at the top and impulsive people like his OnlyFans clients at the bottom, with those such as his e-girl strippers in between. Sin hierarchies might seem like a closed loop, but to some degree, every human hierarchy is a sin hierarchy; it’s just that some are more sinful than others.

Part of why Tate can afford be so honest concerning gender is that he is devious and cold-hearted enough to make money outside of polite society. If he were working a normal job, he’d have to play the politically-correct game like everyone else. Perhaps to have the luxury of being able to be particularly honest in one area, one must be particularly dishonest in another. Hence, he’s part sage, part pied piper.

What’s sad is that the developed world has become so corrupt in its understanding of gender that it takes a psychopathic cyber-pimp who advocates reckless consumerism to tell us the truth about it, because he lives outside the system that silences it.

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[1] ^[35] I’ve seen the phrase “war of all against all” in Tom Sunic’s writings.