The recent arrest in Romania of Andrew Tate has sparked a national debate about his toxic misogynistic content that resonates so effectively with young men and boys and how rapidly he rose from relative obscurity to one of the most widely accessed social media influencers in the world.
But there is so much more to this story. Let’s start at the beginning.
Who is Andrew Tate?
Andrew Tate was born on 1 December 1986 in Washington DC. His father, Emory, was an African-American international chess master listed amongst the top 100 chess players in the States. He died in California after a match in 2015 aged 56. The Alabama State passed a resolution celebrating his life and legacy.
Following their divorce in 1997, Andrew and his brother Tristan’s mother Eileen, a catering assistant, moved them to Luton, England. They lived in relative poverty and he later described her in one of his interviews as “mean and hard”.
Tate developed an interest in kickboxing and went on to achieve a level of success winning several national championships. This led him to be invited to appear in Big Brother in 2016. He was kicked out following the discovery of photos and video of him whipping a woman with a belt.
He evidently enjoyed the resulting attention and seemingly decided to turn himself into a social media personality based on his controversial Big Brother reputation. He started posting the deliberately controversial content for which he later became famous. He developed an identity as a self-help guru offering his mostly American and British male fans advice on how to make easy money and attract girls. His brand was overtly offensive, misogynistic, homophobic and dismissive of mental health issues.
However, at the same time, the MeToo movement was rapidly gathering pace, and Tate suffered a backlash resulting in his being permanently suspended from Twitter in 2017.
Tate’s contrived offensive output remained on the outer fringes of social media for years until last year when he went from relative obscurity to one of the most talked about influencers in the world within just a few months. What happened?
The US alt-right, Romania and the helping hand of Peter Thiel
Being banned from Twitter for offending liberal sensitivities (‘owning the Libs’) bestowed upon Tate a badge of honour amongst the American far right. He was invited to appear on Alex Jones’ Infowars, and started mixing with far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson and Donald Trump Jnr. He voiced his support for Donald Trump and the MAGA campaign. Tate, when back in the UK, was introduced to the usual suspects – Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), who has released a video in Tate’s defense – and, of course, Nigel Farage.
Tate’s output was by this point pure provocation and churning out conspiracy theories, big cars, violence towards women, talking about the ‘Matrix’ and the World Economic Forum
In 2018 the UK police started investigating various sexual abuse allegations against Andrew Tate and he made the decision to move to Romania. He stated that’s his decision to move was “40% to evade rape charges”.
In September 2019, American far-right influencer Mike Cernovich visited Andrew Tate in Romania. He pre-dates Tate by a few years, having made his name via similar social media content to Tate’s – obsessed with men’s rights, fitness and self-help. He is an anti-feminist promoter of the ‘manosphere’.
Andy Stepanian of The Sparrow Project claims that Cernovich is funded by American tech billionaire Peter Thiel via Thiel Industries. In 2022 Peter Thiel also went to Romania, to attend a party with his husband.
Romania was all the rage it seems.
A pyramid of hate
All of a sudden, in 2022, Andrew Tate developed social network skills he seems to have previously lacked. He repackaged old videos and set up a pyramid scheme whereby he manipulated the algorithms by instructing followers to flood social media with his most controversial videos. He tells the students of his Hustler University, for which they pay £39 per month, that controversy is the key to success and that a fan/hater ratio of 60/40 is optimal – “you want arguments, you want war”.
It pays off. Tate attracts millions of followers on Instagram and his videos clock 11.6 billion views on TikTok alone. Education bodies were driven to publish warning notices to families about the possible negative influence of Tate on young men and boys before he was finally shut down by all major platforms for offensive content and hate speech.
When TikTok, Facebook and Instagram followed Twitter and closed their doors to Andrew Tate, in stepped the Rumble platform, a YouTube alternative in which Thiel had recently invested, with its eyes wide open as to the nature of Tate’s material.
In August 2022, Tate broadcast his first livestream on Rumble with the obnoxiously named ‘Tatespeech’ stream. He attracted a record 130,000 live views.
Peter Thiel
Thiel is a multi-billionaire who was one of the founders of PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a right-wing libertarian who believes that the individual should have more power than governments. Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg journalist, has recently published a book about him called The Contrarian. Chafkin identifies Thiel’s aims as being to undermine the national interest and as hostile to the idea of democracy. (This is typical of the libertarian right, Steve Baker has stated that libertarianism is incompatible with democracy).
Thiel wrote a forward for the right-wing libertarian manifesto written by William Rees-Mogg, Jacob’s father, called The Sovereign Individual. He funds several online influencers who sow discord on a global level via the ‘intellectual dark web’, a term coined by Thiel Industries manager and dark web contributor, Eric Weinstein. According to the Sparrow Project, Thiel sets up shell companies to finance social media disruptors such as, amongst others, Tate, Cernovich and Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer, better known as ‘Weev’, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as a neo-Nazi, antisemitic, white supremacist.
Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz was a co-producer on one of Cernovich’s productions.
In 2016, Thiel came out in favour of Donald Trump, and spoke at the Republican Party convention. When the ‘Pussygate’ tapes were leaked, many Republicans abandoned ship but just one week later Thiel stumped up $1,250,000 for the Trump campaign. His bet paid off and Trump went on to win. Thiel seeded allies in the new administration and had a direct line to the Whitehouse. His data company Palantir, won substantive government contracts.
Palantir in Britain
Thiel also has his eyes firmly set on the ultimate prize: the largest employer in the world – the National Health Service, with a recent annual budget worth an eye watering £190bn.
He has already been successful in infiltrating the health service. In 2020, then health secretary Matt Hancock awarded Palantir £23mn in contracts with the NHS and Department of Health and Social Care. The government was later taken to court by Open Democracy and Foxglove, over the lack of transparency and competition for tender, forcing the government to end the data deal.
Winners and losers
Last week, Tate was arrested with his brother and two others in Bucharest. According to the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism:
“The four suspects… appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost.”
Rather ironically, Tate explained his move to Romania with these words:
“I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.”
Tate’s Rumble sponsor
As a libertarian, Thiel also likes to just do what he wants. It appears that what Thiel wants to do is to disrupt, divide, conquer and then profit from the resulting chaos and crises. As long as members of the public are kept busy fighting culture wars, they remain distracted, and easily malleable, by his army of social media soldiers.
In the meantime Thiel continues to be favoured by this government and his data company Palantir is currently the favourite to win a £360mn data-scoop contract to ‘re-shape the NHS’.
Patients will not be consulted or given the choice to opt out.
