In order to understand the reasons for Tate’s popularity, and to challenge his misogyny—and the manosphere more broadly—it is critical to understand his worldview.
Andrew Tate is not a garden variety misogynist. Nor is he a typical sexual assault suspect. Rather, he is a leader—and icon—in the global anti-feminist men’s rights movement who rose to fame and fortune over the past decade through a potent blend of personal charisma, overweening ambition and cynical opportunism.
And he is an alleged rapist and sex trafficker.
Tate is currently in U.S. federal custody in Miami, along with his brother Tristan, awaiting possible extradition to the United Kingdom on 59 criminal charges that include multiple allegations of violent rape and physical assault. So far, few of Tate’s supporters and friends on the American right have commented publicly about this latest development in his ongoing saga. This includes key figures in Trumpland who are friendly with Tate and have supported him in the past, such as Donald Trump, Jr., Barron Trump and UFC CEO Dana White.
As a right-wing political figure, Tate has vociferously and repeatedly attacked feminism, and has had an outsized influence globally in the normalization of overt expressions of misogyny by men and boys.
Much has been written about Tate over the years. A recent piece in The New Yorker that has attracted much attention is entitled “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” by Heidi Blake, which charts “How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.” The piece both illuminates the historical and cultural context for the rise of Tate, and contains deeply disturbing, graphic testimony from a number of women whom he allegedly assaulted. It includes previously unpublished details about Tate’s alleged sex trafficking activities.
For example, Blake writes that the Tates used the same aggressive method to recruit all the women who came to their Romanian compound, American Village. “You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business,” Andrew explained in a video sold to War Room members. “You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.”
Revelations from a new podcast interview with the Top-G
But for anyone who wants insight into the ways in which the former professional kickboxer has been able to assemble an enormous following of boys and men, there’s another valuable source of information: Tate himself.
Andrew Tate has long been an omnipresent figure in the online manosphere. Over the years he’s produced thousands of hours of online content, but he doesn’t do much writing. As a result, people who don’t listen to him online only know about the substance of his social and political theories from brief quotes they might read in a magazine article or a post on X.
But in order to understand the reasons for Tate’s popularity and to challenge his misogyny—and the manosphere more broadly—it is critical to understand his worldview. That’s why I’ve transcribed a recent interview he did on Jack Neel’s podcast and shared key excerpts below. Neel is known for interviewing controversial misogynous, racist and anti-Semitic right-wing figures, and giving them ample room to express their views. He rarely pushes back or asks critical questions—a reputation he did nothing to damage in this interview with Tate.
The interview took place sometime in the past few weeks and was released by Neel a couple of days after the Tates were arrested in Miami. Tate explained on camera that he wanted this interview to be released once he’s either in custody or something worse happens to him.
The overarching narrative arc of the interview is Tate’s story of persecution at the hands of the U.K. government, in league with the Romanian government, to silence and discredit him. Not because he’s a sadistic and serial abuser of women, which he denies. He barely talks at all about the charges against him, except to say he has never abused women and any accusations against him are false.
A main thread of Tate’s persecution narrative is that his business success poses an existential threat to the higher education industry, which he repeatedly mocks and dismisses as “a waste of time and money.”
Because the online e-commerce “school” he founded, Hustlers University, had signed up tens of thousands of young men who paid a $49.99 monthly fee, and was gaining more students daily, he claimed that he threatened the business model of “Big Education.”
His personal (and self-serving) story thus feeds the core right-wing populist notion of a corrupt elite exploiting and fooling the people. His special contribution to that populist narrative is his stunning claim that feminism is part of the conspiracy. According to Tate, not only are women doing better than men, but they are the tools/stooges of the corrupt elites helping them oppress men and stay in power.
His name for the nefarious elite is the Matrix—a shadowy entity that consists of government officials, intelligence services and business interests all working together, and using feminism—to oppress men.
The Matrix decided that he was too powerful and must be stopped, so they instigated fake criminal charges against him. However delusional this sounds, I’ve assembled a number of quotes from the Jack Neel podcast to illustrate his views and offer some insight into his appeal.
(Note: These excerpts from a nearly three-hour podcast interview have been lightly edited for clarity and to eliminate repetition, and are not presented strictly in order.)
Andrew Tate in his own words
On what happens when you’re a threat to the Matrix:
First they try and cancel you, then they put you in jail, and if that doesn’t work, they kill you.
On why he wanted to do this nearly three-hour interview at this time:
A lot of the intimidation tactics against me are intensifying, and I’ve realized that many people at home who have witnessed parts of this story haven’t seen or understood the entire story.
On why he’s being persecuted by the U.K. authorities:
That’s why it all started, cause that’s what they’re f…ing scared of. Me inspiring young men to tell these f….ing clowns to f-off, cause they are destroying society on purpose, destroying masculinity on purpose, because we are the last resistance against enslavement. We are the revolution which is coming. Young men are the revolution that is finally gonna overthrow this bullshit.
Why men (like him) are a threat to the establishment:
The more masculine a population, the harder it is to subjugate them, and they know this. So me saying ‘Go to the gym, stick up for yourself, get a Bugatti, work hard, whatever [is] considered an act of terror by the UK government.
Why he claims to be such a threat to the U.K. government:
The basic premise was that I had so much power over young men in 2022 that I could have caused a revolution. They’re probably right. I probably could have said fuck the Matrix, Westminster palace tonight, let’s take over, and it would have been the f…ing end.
Why he claims to be such a threat to “Big Education”:
Big Education is like Big Pharma… one of the biggest rackets on the planet. If I told everyone that I went up against Big Pharma and they came for me, they’d understand it. I went up against Big Education. ‘Oh the schools are good.’ No they’re not. The schools use the banks to enslave the populace. The schools are where they teach everyone these liberal ideas. The schools are indoctrination camps. Not only am I taking money out of their pockets by teaching our people, I’m also taking their ability to brainwash people away from them. Cause they’re joining my school and learning the opposite ideas.
Why feminism is not a threat but is instead a front for established power:
Please understand: the Matrix does not fear women. That is why they empower women. This is why they constantly attack me for being a misogynist. They want women to be as powerful as possible, ’cause you know what happens when women are powerful? Nothing! If women protest, if 100,000 women marched through this town right now in protest, it’s inconvenient. If 100,000 men marched through this town, everything burns, and the entire government changes.
Men can fight. Men are armies. Women don’t matter. They don’t give a shit if women protest. They don’t give a shit. So you want women at the top of the pyramid, you want women as powerful as possible, so that women are in charge of society, so you can just stay at the top of your castle, stealing and raping and pillaging from everyone. Just stealing all the money, destroying society, importing whoever, breaking all the laws, and what is going to happen? A bunch of women are gonna nag.
…When men get together it’s not called a ‘protest.’ It’s called a ‘revolution.’ Women don’t do revolution. They can’t. So they deliberately empower women to subjugate men, that’s why masculinity has been under such attack. And I came along and was the most Googled man in the world, promoting masculinity. Not realizing this was putting me at war against the Matrix itself. I wasn’t even political at that time. I didn’t even talk about political parties. I just said to young men: Stand up for yourselves! Go to the gym! Stick for what you believe in. You’re allowed an opinion. You matter, too. And that was considered so dangerous, I ended up on the terror watch list, and they wiped my entire phone.
On the funding source of an American woman who he claims visited his place in Romania and then falsely reported to authorities that he was running a sex trafficking operation, setting this prosecution in motion:
Who funds La Strada? [a highly respected anti-sex trafficking NGO, based in the Netherlands]…Other NGOs. USAID. The same f…ing Soros deep left Matrix bullshit as everything else.
What he’d do with that woman:
I’d put her on the stand just like Johnny Depp did with Amber Heard.
On the increased persecution he claims to have experienced after a BBC reporter interviewed him during his house arrest in Romania (Tate says he made the reporter look bad with his assertive replies to what he considered her inappropriate line of questioning):
That all started after I destroyed the BBC. Cause I beat them in their narrative war, and the entire world is just a battle for influence. That’s all it is. And I had more influence than the BBC. You can’t be one man with 28,000 fan pages and more influence than the BBC, causing young men to stick up for themselves in a state which has tried to extract resources from young men and ruin their lives. The average man’s life in England sucks. It’s shit. They pay taxes, they’re losing their country, they can’t do anything, go anywhere, they just build the roads, and they have to just die in a ditch in Ukraine. It’s over.
Podcast host Jack Neel asked him: “How much money could they pay you to shut up?”
(Long pause). Some men don’t want money, Jack. They just wanna watch the world burn. And the world which I want to burn is this f….in corrupt, scumbag, misandric f…ing shithole that we’ve built in these liberal democracies…Everything is corrupt.
What would be required to shut him up:
If they want me to go away, I want a minister for men’s rights in government. I want all these girls who make fake #MeToo accusations to go to jail. I want men to be treated like people. I want fair equal treatment, and that’s it. We talk about feminism and how women need equal rights. They have more rights than us in every single metric and regard. More men commit suicide, more men go to jail, men have the worst lives. We build the roads, we build the buildings, we dig in ditches, a woman can lie about us, destroy our lives at random, and I’m tired of it.
No. I’ve been through all of this shit because I was sticking up for men from the beginning, and that’s the only way it’s going to end. When they put in a minister for men’s rights, and they start jailing women for false accusations against men en masse…cause most of them are false. When they stop weaponizing the judicial system against men who simply want to see their own children. When they drop all this bullshit where men are being completely wrecked in divorce court, in custody court. If they would come to me with a proposal to drop all that shit, I’d shut up…it’s important. It’s bigger than me.
Jack Neel asked him: what is the one thing you want men to remember?
If I end up dead that’s fine, because I really believe there’s going to be some degree of karmic justice for the people who did this to me…[The U.K. authorities say]: ‘There’s nothing else left: we either kill him or let him win. Nothing else is working… ‘
[Well], I’m gonna force a decision. Either I’m gonna f…ing win, or you’re gonna kill me.
