Andrew Tate’s Lost Boys

The popularity of Andrew Tate among so many young men, although tragic, is unsurprising. It is the result of a decades-long war on masculinity – one that boys, because they are younger and not fully formed, were always the primary victims of. Andrew Tate is many things, he is an abuser, a pimp, a degenerate, and a recent convert to Islam (for however long that will be). He cares nothing about others. Self-sacrifice, one of the key trademarks of healthy masculinity, is a completely foreign concept to him. He’s a man who views existence as moving from one fleshy pleasure to another. He is the posterchild of a hedonistic post-Christian West. No one on the Right should defend him.

But the fact that he has such a large following lays at the feet of a Left that hates all traditional notions of masculinity and has engaged in a never-ending campaign to destroy it. Tate’s young fans know nothing of a society that embraces healthy notions of masculinity. All they have ever known is a society that sees it as a negative force; hence, men constantly find themselves on the short end of the stick. DEI puts them well behind the eight ball in the job market, while the rise of dating apps has rendered the vast majority of young men as outcasts. Any complaint about their conditions, no matter how nuanced, will get them labeled as a “loser” or an “incel.” Even baseless allegations can ruin their life. To a significant amount of people, a false abuse allegation made by a woman against a man is a categorical impossibility, and, as a result, even an allegation can make them a social pariah. It’s no wonder then that Andrew Tate has managed to win such a following. He offers boys a chance out of a system that hates them. He offers them an opportunity to destroy the society that made them into villains.  

Television, especially sitcoms, just reinforces the notion that men are stupid and disposable. If you are too young to remember when The Simpsons debuted, you are too young to remember a world where sitcom fathers were largely portrayed as intelligent, hardworking, and vital members of the family. Instead, the dad became the dufus and a big, overgrown kid. Are there exceptions? Sure, King of the Hill comes to mind, but those are the exceptions. Now, several generations of men only live in a society that hates them. No wonder so many of them no longer care if that society survives. 

Important to note just how many boys were raised by a weak father. Mom was in charge, and everyone knew it. Dad was there to watch football. And those are the cases where the dad was even around at all, in many cases he could not even manage that. To be sure, there were/are always cases where the father is not around. Sometimes it was due to death, sometimes alcohol, and sometimes abandonment. But even in those cases, the society was overall healthy enough to survive because other local men could step in and provide leadership to young boys. Today, those are gone, far too many men are too busy to provide such leadership and one of the key institutions that did provide that leadership, the Church, has been heavily feminized.

Meanwhile, the traditional Western heroes that could provide boys someone to admire have been destroyed for being racist. When young boys can no longer look up to the likes of Charlemagne, George Washington, or Robert E Lee, they have to find someone. Someone must fill that void and, if it’s someone like Tate, well then that is better than nothing at all. The lack of real-life historical figures for boys to admire is one of the most important shifts in the culture that has occurred in the past 70 years and is also one of the most ignored.

I do not have an inherent issue with the use of a fantasy setting for entertainment aimed at boys. I’m a Catholic, obviously, I admire Tolkien. Fantasy settings have always been used, and can be used to impart important moral lessons, including traditional understandings of manhood. The issue is the complete lack of balance. There is a reason that toy soldiers would traditionally feature soldiers from actual wars, it was seen as giving something boys could actually aspire to. However, in the backlash against the Vietnam War, those traditional toy soldiers were banished and, in their place, came new heroes that could never exist. Those certainly had their own value and were cool looking, and they were certainly better than what we have now, but something important was lost in that shift, and now we are seeing the end results.

If the Left was serious about combatting the influence of someone like Tate, they would rein in the misandry. They would stop telling young girls that men are disposable, that playing with their feelings is hilarious, and that men are just playing life on easy mode. They would allow boys to have traditional masculine heroes again. They would realize that whatever merit Homer Simpson clones had 35 years ago as a backlash against the Father Knows Best/Leave it to Beaver archetype is now meaningless to, at least, two generations of men who know nothing but the stupid sitcom dad. But they have no interest in that, to them, what is happening to boys is great because of sexism.

Remember, the Left wants revenge, not justice. That is why is it so important for healthy men to provide that leadership. We are going through tough times now, and traditional, healthy masculinity is badly needed. We must provide that leadership. We might not be able to make many of today’s “men” turn off the NFL and become a better father, as much as I would like to do so, but we can provide leadership to young men that desperately need it. They will find that leadership, the question is whether it will come from well-adjusted men or from the likes of Andrew Tate.