Maybe my title puzzles you. Perhaps you’ve never heard of Andrew Tate before. If not, count yourself blessed.

But your sons or grandsons have almost certainly heard of him. Millions of disaffected, rudderless young men follow him avidly. Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson, and Benny Johnson, all social media giants, have featured Tate on their shows. Russell Brand defends him. Tate vogues as a leader of young males rebelling against feminism and the emasculating effects of woke, post-Christian culture. As Jenna Ellis writes, Tate is

a former kickboxing champion turned internet personality. He is known for his opulent lifestyle, controversial statements and hyper-masculine persona. Tate has amassed millions of followers, particularly young men, through social media platforms where he touts success formulas rooted in wealth accumulation, sexual conquest and self-exaltation. While some might argue he highlights legitimate issues, such as the feminization of culture or the lack of strong male role models, Tate’s answers to these problems and his own personal life are far removed from anything any young man should emulate or aspire to, much less look up to as a role model.

Daily Wire’s Megan Basham emphasized this point on her personal X account, saying, “There’s nothing more pathetic than a man who thinks it makes him look tough to brag about choking women and shattering their cheekbones before raping them. There IS a religion that allows for such ‘masculinity’ but it sure ain’t Christianity.”

I’ve seen an alarming number of otherwise sensible people speak up against “canceling” or “censoring” Andrew Tate by refusing to give him a platform. They claim that Tate fills a need at a time when too many pastors are namby-pamby, gutless, and uninspiring to young men. So the cure for simpering David French is sputtering Andrew Tate? If I had to choose between them at gunpoint, my answer would be: “Shoot me. Twice, to be on the safe side.”

No Ordinary Pimp

By his own admission, Tate is not just an apostate from Christianity to Islam, but a pimp. Not just any old pimp, but an evangelist for pimping, who teaches young men online to psychologically control their girlfriends and prostitute them for profit — and who has been arrested for human trafficking. As The European Conservative reported:

It is June 2021 and Andrew Tate is teaching members of his exclusive on-line ‘War Room’ how to manipulate young women into sex work. He has recently hooked up with a girl and is working to get her onto Only Fans. Psychological manipulation is key.

“Remember what I said,” he writes. “When I’m away I go harder on my hoes.” …

Publicly, Tate describes the War Room as a network of men that “promotes self-discipline, motivation and confidence building while giving members access to thousands of professionals from around the world who encourage personal responsibility and accountability, emphasizing the importance of taking ownership of your choices and actions.” In private, the ‘PHD’ (Pimpin’ Hoes Degree) course is something very different. We were provided with pages of private War Room chat logs that highlight Tate’s methods.

One of Tate’s War room cohosts offers this advice:

If targeted girls push back, he says, they should be immediately ghosted. He shares a motto he calls the “Uncle Ben is a PIMP proverb,” which goes like this: “Pimps throughout history were responsible for the well-being and safety of their hos. In return the hos worked hard for their pimp and broke themselves (gave him ALL their money.)” That is the goal here: break the girls down, persuade them they are loved, turn them into sex workers producing revenue. In law enforcement circles, this is referred to as the ‘lover-boy method.’

If you have the stomach for it, go read the whole article, which details the grooming of one girl in Romania named Jasmina — who doesn’t know that thousands of resentful young men are peeping along as her “boyfriend” (Tate) trains her to became an OnlyFans pornographic model, for his profit.

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Recently, Tate made an announcement (we don’t know if he’s serious) that he wants to be Prime Minister of his native Great Britain, now in a crisis over mass rape by Muslim immigrants. It’s doubtful that Britons will hire a professional arsonist to put out their fires. But then again, as I like to tell my friends, “Put nothing past anyone.”

How Screwtape Plays Us

You might just throw up your hands at this point and despair at the idea that conservatives and Christians would have anything to do with someone like Tate. But that would be to miss the deep theological lesson here about how the Enemy manipulates us into madness, false religions, and sin. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis advises (on behalf of a demon instructing his nephew) that souls should be deranged by the embrace of desperate extremes: “The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”

The Enemy likes to get people addicted to one variety of evil, then use the misery that inevitably results to goad them into the opposite form of evil, which brings a misery all its own. And he has done this to us since Genesis: He spoke to Eve and provoked in her a sense of distance from God, an envy of His status and knowledge. The serpent offered her a way to be “like God.” Of course, when she and Adam succumbed, the outcome was the opposite — a profound and enduring estrangement from God, plus suffering and death. When the Gentiles suffered from this alienation, the Enemy taught them to worship idols, which of course only drove them further from the divine presence they craved.

I wrote my best book, The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins, about the need to embrace the Golden Mean of virtue instead of sinful extremes. Our fallen world’s political history bears out this Aristotelian insight. Just look at the 19th century: When wealthy elites cited Darwin to justify their neglect of the poor as “unfit to survive,” Marx offered a remedy: a savage class war that promised the working class a “dictatorship” all their own.

After Marx’s false gospel came to power in Russia and menaced the rest of Europe, the fascists and Nazis stepped up as the only bulwark against the Communist threat. In turn, Communist parties around the world painted themselves as the only effective form of “antifascism.” And so on, with online right-wingers today rebelling against “antifascist” woke indoctrination by embracing “revisionist” forms of Nazi ideology.

Feminism as we now know it is profoundly flawed, socially destructive, and addicted to abortion. As Carrie Gress documents, feminism’s roots tap into the occult. Wherever feminism takes root, the birth rate plummets and never really recovers. I like to joke, “If feminism were a plot concocted by envious dolphins who hope to inhabit our emptied cities, how would it look any different?”

De Sade: the First Pro-Choice Philosopher

Of course, the Enemy chuckles when the browbeating, hectoring, gaslighting harpies who dominate our institutions and media goad young men into becoming the very bogeymen of abusive, toxic masculinity that feminism obsesses over. It’s a very special irony that Andrew Tate seems to channel the worldview of infamous aristocrat (and torturer of prostitutes) the Marquis de Sade. As I’ve noted here before, Sade is the father of the pro-choice movement, the first thinker to advocate abortion since ancient Rome. His argument for legalizing it was simple:

[M]en were perfectly justified in using women sexually, and refusing to support children they’d fathered. But it was only fair, he said, that women enjoy the same “natural” privilege. The only way for them to do that was to license free abortion. Sade wrote a philosophical dialogue (Philosophy in the Bedroom) asserting this, which is only slightly less sickening to read than most of his pornographic oeuvre. …

A typical work by Sade reads like a slasher movie combined with kiddie porn. It’s impossible for a sane, normal person to read more than a few pages of Sade without his stomach turning, to the point where he throws it down. If someone admits to having read any more than that for any reason, take that as a warning to stay far away from this person.

But pioneering feminist, and long-time mistress to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir had no trouble reading Sade. She admired him as a major thinker, and wrote an entire book defending him, entitled Must We Burn Sade? That was a coy, cute title which pretended to counter censorship. But in fact, her thought on human sexuality was deeply influenced by Sade’s. So was Sartre’s. While most of his Being and Nothingness is a cheap paraphrase of Heidegger, the section on love and sex is a cheap paraphrase of Sade.

De Beauvoir said outright in the bible of “Second-Wave” feminism, The Second Sex, and elsewhere that women deserve the right to abortion so that they can be as irresponsible (“free”) as men.

And that, in a cleaned-up form, is what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said for decades on abortion: that it is key to “equality” between women and men. Here’s the ACLU, compiling her quotes to that effect.

The feminist notion of reproductive equality comes straight from a wealthy psychopath who was addicted to torturing women.

The Enemy can use Andrew Tate to corrupt young men into misogynists and abusers — who in turn will inspire young women to embrace feminism’s cult of sterility and suspicion, just as Nazis and Communists serve each other as recruitment tools for people desperate to fight one evil by means of embracing its “opposite.”

Well played, Screwtape. Well played.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

The post Is Andrew Tate Grooming Young Christian Men to Be ‘Pimps’ Who Batter Women? appeared first on The Stream.



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