OPINION: The toxicity of Tate: What color’s your Bugatti?
Young, teen boy at his desk while watching an Andrew Tate interview.
Opinions expressed in the Op/Ed section of The Knight Crier are not necessarily reflective of the views of the entire staff of the KC.
During the summer of 2022 two bald men rose to fame. One is Gru from the Despicable Me franchise, and the other is an entrepreneur influencer, Andrew Tate.
Tate, 35, was formally a kickboxer and contestant on the reality show Big Brother (Season 17) before being kicked off. He turned into an entrepreneur/influencer, being featured on podcasts and live streams with controversial misogynistic statements about how men can be successful.
Popular on Instagram and Twitter, before he was banned in August 2022, Tate’s image became classy suits, luxury destination vacations, and his Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport.
Most of Tate’s recent fame came from clips of the live streams or podcasts being reposted on TikTok rather than his own YouTube channel with only 744,000 subscribers. Which is nothing compared to his Instagram with 4.6 million followers. Even though these clips are not directly from him, they still give him a platform that spreads his toxic rhetoric.
One of Tate’s most popular interviews with 11 million views was on Stand Out TV’s YouTube series Grilling Season 2 Episode 7 with host Chian Reynolds, where he spewed his harsh ideals on relationships and society.
“As long as a woman obeys like she’s supposed…the truth is about the masculine-feminine dynamic is that females like men who are completely in charge and run their life exactly how they want and comply and bend to the mans’ wills,” stated Tate
Grilling is primarily a show centered around the host, Reynolds’ dating life. But her set-up date with Tate quickly turned into a debate, with her fighting off his double standard comments about how men and women differ when it comes to dating.
“I can do whatever I want. I’m a man, women can’t do those things, it’s disgusting,” said Tate referring to infidelity, but he later stated, “I don’t want people to look at this and think I’m disrespecting females.”
Tate also profits off of people wanting to know how to make big money in online courses, which he deemed Hustlers University. People pay $49.99 a month to learn the business and money-making skills from Tate. The program was shut down when Tate was banned from a variety of social media platforms.
So why is Andrew Tate deemed “toxic”? Living in the 21st century, social media plays a very prominent role in our lives and can make people extremely impressionable, especially when it comes to ideas of how to live our lives. With many young minds on the internet, specifically young male minds, Tate’s message sticks with them and could be viewed as inspirational.
His ideas about uplifting men and how they can be successful wouldn’t be as harmful if he didn’t also speak of bringing down women. Young male minds need encouraging role models who uplift them, but not someone who makes them think it’s okay to disrespect women and treat them like we are back in the 1950s. Women today are still fighting for equality and human rights and Tate is taking steps backward with his ideals when it comes to men supporting the women’s rights movement even by saying “first things first men and women are not equal,” referring to the dynamics in relationships and “it’s much harder to be a man than to be a woman.”
Even though Tate was banned he is still frequently talked about, mostly as the butt of a joke, but there were some people seriously disappointed by Tate’s ban from the internet that supported and agreed with his views. People like that are still on the internet and can unfortunately still say and do misogynistic things, but clearing the internet one sexist at a time is a start.
