Did the Matrix kidnap Top G? Or is Andrew Tate the Matrix himself, now unplugged and shorting out in a Romanian jail?
While his self-confessed crimes against women come home to roost, the online spectacle his arrest has generated provides a litmus test for just how fast the cognitive dissonance of culture war chaos can plummet.
Welcome to the broader “Tate crime”: a spectacle of acute reality-reversal, fueled by reactionary politics and driven by a cultic network of devotees and SEO managers, where culture war punditry is funded by bogus self-help courses and online pornography.
Show Notes
The PHD Program (“Pimping Hos Degree)
Andrew Tate said he broke a woman's jaw and that his business was a 'scam' ahead of Romanian charges
Tate admits to statutory rape
Part One: Andrew Tate, and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement - Behind the Bastards | iHeart
The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate
"From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism"
A Coordinated Group Of 4,500 Bots Tweeted In Support Of Andrew Tate
Teachers Warn That Misogynist Andrew Tate Has 'Radicalized' School-Age Boys
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And we're here with a reporting and editorial style conspirituality brief called Tate Crime.
Content note, we'll be talking about sexual violence and trafficking in this episode.
Remember, you can catch us on Apple Podcasts, Subscription Service, Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon, and you can pre-order our book through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
The picture of Andrew Tate's behavior and history is becoming clear.
These are his own words from the webpage for his The PhD Program, which stands for Pimping Hose Degree.
I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade.
I've had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners.
Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time, and of all my girlfriends, none were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me.
My job was to get women to fall in love with me.
Literally, that was my job.
My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she'd do anything I'd say, and then get her on a webcam so we could become rich together.
Whether you agree or disagree with what I did with her loyalty, submission, and love for me doesn't matter.
You cannot reject the results.
And the results are simple.
My girlfriends would do more for me than 99% of men's wives would do for them.
So, women are girls and he gets them into sex work, and that doing more for me, in his own words, included surviving his crimes.
He boasts on one podcast about breaking a woman's jaw, and on another he boasted about that time he was 21 and committed statutory rape of a 16 year old.
Tate was arrested at his Romanian compound on December 29th.
He'd previously been raided in April of 2022 over allegations that a woman was being held against her will and coerced into performing sexually on a webcam.
At that time, police found four female webcam performers who said that they were effectively prisoners.
In 2015 in the UK, Tate had been accused by two women of rape and a third of repeated strangulation.
Two of those women speak out in a recent Vice documentary.
At that time, the police did not bring charges, citing the difficulty of proving rape via
existing law.
Tate's self-confessed crimes against women are now a Romanian judicial matter.
But while that plays out, and he and his brother Tristan have just been remanded for an additional
month before proceedings begin, The online Tate spectacle provides a litmus test for just how fast the cognitive dissonance of culture war chaos can plummet.
Tate has roundhouse kicked his way into a maelstrom of algorithmic and political contingencies to become a culture war lightning rod, conducting the charges of 4chan, Gamergate, and anti-woke reactionaries.
And within his rise, we find echoes of conspirituality.
The belief on planet Tate that something both apocalyptic and promising is always afoot.
It's a world that soothes itself with the endless rage mantras of their hero and the ministrations of his clerical thug lieutenants, including the hypnotist magician Iggy Sommelweiss, who on Twitter goes by the moniker Priest Master of Wudan Monastery.
Apparently referring to the Chinese birthplace of Taoist martial arts.
We're going to focus this report on the psychotic nature of Tate's image and meaning.
We believe it might be a new category of media chaos that we can call the Tate Crime, a spectacle of acute reality reversal fueled by reactionary politics driven by a cultic network of devotees and SEO managers where culture war punditry is funded by online pornography.
Ground Zero for TateCrime is the Tate follower who says that all of the corroborated and self-incriminating evidence against him is a sign that the elites in the Matrix are intent on killing his liberatory message and him.
We're in TateCrime territory when day is night and night is day, when his aggression is taken as evidence of his altruism.
When his misogyny is read as heartfelt support for young men and peak knowledge of what women really want.
And when his every action and grandiose paranoia is delegated to unpaid TikTok spokeswomen who can instantly spin the news of his arrest.
Andrew Tate is out.
He's saying it's all bullshit.
There's some girl allegations.
But Matrix is not sleeping.
So watch your back.
We're in Tate crime territory when Candace Owens can disapprove of Tate's lifestyle to 1.3 million followers on YouTube because she's Christian, but then rain fire down on the slutty women accusing him of trafficking and unlawful confinement.
Sex is a power that women have.
Being beautiful is a power.
Being aesthetic, being feminine is a power that women have.
And women tend to wield that power heavily throughout society.
And so I want to be very clear that I do not agree with Andrew Tate's lifestyle, not whatsoever.
Not as a Christian person do I agree with Andrew Tate's lifestyle.
But, you can, two things can be true at once.
You can disagree with Andrew Tate's lifestyle, while also acknowledging that the women that involved themselves with him, right, the women that are now angry and turning their backs and saying, well, you know, I felt that I wanted, I thought I was going to be with him forever, I thought I was going to be the only one.
While also acknowledging that they also contributed themselves to this.
They did this intentionally.
They knew what they were getting into.
Perhaps it was for money.
Perhaps it was for fame.
It likely was for a certain lifestyle that he provided.
But that is what you call an exchange.
So Tate brags about statutory rape and breaking a woman's jaw.
Owens reduces his known behaviors to lifestyle and says that the women are benefiting through an exchange.
Not exactly a great endorsement of capitalism, really.
Or Christianity, for that matter.
The Tate crime seems to be at the peak of a growing wave of near-instant reality reversals.
We saw it in the idea that wearing a mask against COVID will make you sick, in the idea that the vaccine kills, the idea that Elon Musk is seen as the protector of the town square, or that trans people are a threat to the fabric of civilization, or that Jordan Peterson is a kind and competent psychologist, not despite the fact that he harasses fat swimsuit models on Twitter, So, what has given Andrew Tate the moral and philosophical immunity he now enjoys amongst a vocal fringe of conspiracy theorists who assert he's a noble and persecuted guy?
It's this.
Basically, in The Matrix, there's an artificial reality, a computer-generated reality, and
people are being harvested for their body heat in a real world.
Their minds are being occupied by this computer-generated reality.
The basic premise of the show is that their body is being used for what is important,
and they just distract their minds so their body can stay alive long enough to give the
machines what they want.
And I really, truly believe that's a perfect analogy for the world today.
We live in a world where...
People are being extracted for their value, their physical value.
Whether you're digging holes or carrying garbage or whatever.
And your mind is constantly distracted by garbage.
It's distracted by TV shows and concerts and clown world.
I call it clown world because it's a never-ending circus.
All this garbage they distract you with.
First it's COVID and then Putin cures COVID the day he invades and COVID's cured.
And it's all just a big scam from head to toe.
And the reason I call it the Matrix is because A false reality is being projected onto humanity and they do that by controlling narratives.
If they allowed people to have critical and open conversations about let's say COVID at the height of the pandemic it never would have lasted three years.
But the reason because they censor and delete one entire side of the argument And you're only left with their version of reality, and they're projecting a reality.
And they do that with nearly every subject.
There are so many subjects you can't have an open discussion on.
And if they only control, if they delete all of one side, and only keep one side there, then that's a false paradigm, it's a false reality.
And that's what they're doing, they're convincing people to act in certain ways and do certain things, which are not necessarily in their best interest.
Or necessarily true.
We live in a world where I don't think the average person realizes how much they are lied to.
From the way money works is a lie, financial systems is a lie, judicial systems is a lie, medical healthcare is a lie.
It's all a lie.
It's all a scam.
Just go to work, pay your taxes.
That's why I call it the Matrix.
So that is his value proposition to his followers.
And as he's being perp-walked, he says to the cameras, I've been attacked by the Matrix.
From jail, he says it's all political.
His fans say he's innocent, but too dangerous a truth-telling maverick for the powers that be to not shut him down.
The buzz in Tate world is that breaking free of the Matrix is akin to a spiritual awakening.
Now this, of course, raises a massive irony.
The Matrix film trilogy was written and directed by the Wachowski sisters, who are transgender.
Part of the symbolism in their movies was about escaping the exact illusion, or matrix, of rigid gender essentialism that Tate reinforces in just about every piece of content he produces.
This distortion, common among conspiritualists and QAnon proponents, allows Tate to foster the idea that he's the hero of the real world, far removed from the illusions of sense and order fostered by laws, governments, and the media.
But we can't ignore Tate's not-entirely-wrong indictment of extractive capitalism.
If we're wondering why he appeals to young men, we have to own that his diagnosis is not off-base even if his cures are cruel and illegal.
He's not original.
He's not saying anything here that's different than what Tyler Durden says in Fight Club.
And plagiarized or not, this is the material that places Tate at the black-pilled end of a decades-long tradition of male charismatic figures who bemoan the humiliating effects of predatory capitalism and nihilistic warmongering, but whose material and charismatic blessings can easily drift over into right-wing propaganda.
Robert Evans' first of three Behind the Bastards episodes on Andrew Tate situates the origin of his critique of capitalism's stultifying effect on men in the mythopoetic movement of Robert Bly, which pushed back against post-war Don Draper-style male conformity.
This is an interesting deep cut, but Tate is in his own media stratosphere, in which he's nowhere close to even wanting to make sense or expressing anything beyond aggression and resentment.
If the roots of Tate's legitimate grievances reach back into the forests of Iron John, they've also been brined by the misogyny of the Men's Rights Movement, Gamergate, and MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way, and the Manosphere dominance hierarchies of alphas, betas, sigmas, and incels.
Now, Tate's most direct inspo comes from the pickup artist scene of the early internet, where influencers mashed dodgy evolutionary psychology concepts about sexual dynamics with neurolinguistic programming techniques of subconscious control.
They deployed online marketing to scam even more fragile and insecure men into paying them to learn how to be charming but heartless players.
The movement peaked with a 2005 book called The Game that sold 2.5 million copies and led to a 16-episode 2007 VH1 reality show called The Pickup Artist.
The incel movement is related but distinct, having formed as a backlash against the failed promises of the game and resentment over money and hope poured into its grifters' programs.
As one researcher notes, quote, the incel movement grew directly out of the pickup artist fad, a storm cloud of disillusioned students who were ready to try more violent means of accessing female bodies, unquote.
Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan established a membership website that went a giant leap beyond the game, teaching the loverboy method to seduce and manipulate women into becoming webcam performers who submissively funnel sex and money back to them after they've had their spirits broken by the noble archetype of a self-actualized pimp.
By August 2022, their website had amassed over 100,000 subscribers, each paying $49.99 a month.
That adds up to $59 million for the year.
That money is separate from whatever premium online courses they're offering, as well as their own webcam sweatshops and what they're generating.
So from Bly to Tate we have a progression from men's and counter-group poetry to neuro-linguistic programming and brutal evo-psych deployed online, not to regain dignity but to control underlings.
Tate is really to the men's movement what Woodstock 99 was to Woodstock 69.
Only now it's 2023 and it's not Limp Bizkit inciting arson at a music festival.
It's an online rage machine that fantasizes about burning the world down.
And it has reached into the brains of very young boys.
Mainstream sources are mostly appalled by Tate and wondering how on earth such an obvious sociopathic misogynist criminal rose to such heights of influence.
But a lot of them sound like they're contemplating the German polity of 1934 and wondering how the cranks of the National Socialist Party came to power through legal and democratic means.
The truth is that Tate did exactly what capitalism encouraged and allowed him to do, period.
He pushed an envelope that never seems to tear.
But coming back to the notion of Tate crime, some of the most melted responses to Tate's arrest have brought us back to a moment of peak conspirituality.
August of 2020, Galactic Federation alien channeler Lori Ladd just asked an absurd question.
Is Trump a lightworker?
Of course he is.
Lad and her followers agreed.
The most powerful Lightworkers, she explained, can't show all their cards.
They'll appear clothed in abrasive personalities because they're tricksters, here to challenge the narrative, here to disrupt the status quo, to create a crack through which the Light will come in.
So, are the folks on our Conspirituality Beat rationalizing Andrew Tate in the same way?
Do they believe, as he claims, that the Matrix is out to get him?
Did he really just enrage the powers that be with his refusal to genuflect at the throne of feminist woke?
Are they going full Tate crime?
The answer is that the yoga and wellness conspirituality world that covered itself in shame throughout the pandemic is rationalizing Andrew Tate via their silence.
Outwardly, the conspiritualist sphere is very focused on the latest wave of anti-vax propaganda, anti-trans moral panickery, and cheering on Elon Musk.
They seem to know that however anti-woke, conspiratorial, and contrarian Tate is, he's too far beyond the pale to not be toxic for their brand.
Which begs the question of how exactly does Tate go too far?
If this is the demographic that embraced Trump as a personal and cultural savior, Trump trails behind him a string of rape and assault allegations, a parade of lawsuits, tax fraud, and fake business racketeering.
He boasts about winning by not paying contractors and by grabbing women by the pussy.
He's exploited far more people than Tate, so the deafening silence from this demographic indicates just how dependent it is on fantasies and perceptions of social power and acceptability.
New Age fascists can accept a lot of things, but they do not want the dirt of the bad boy to rub off on them.
They want their capitalism to stay normie.
The funniest iteration of conspiritual queasiness around Andrew Tait comes to us via QAnon massage therapist Bernard Gunther, who runs Transcending the Matrix workshops with his partner, psycho-spiritual coach and astrologer Laura Matsu.
You might predict the take here from the word transcending as opposed to Tait's escaping, which is lower vibe.
So Gunther posts an article from some right-wing site called Andrew Cobra Tait, Another Snake in the Matrix, and his comment is, I've had my suspicions that Tait may have been a plant all along, and this article confirms it.
How and why did he really become so popular so fast?
It certainly wasn't organic.
His father has an interesting background being a high-ranking military intelligence asset.
Gunther is correct that Tate's fame only exploded over the last six or seven months.
Vice News has tracked this to his affiliate marketing program he's been utilizing, in which his followers, some as young as 11 years old, are recruited to blanket the internet with posts about him in exchange for a whopping 40% of any sales of his online courses or website memberships that result from their affiliate links.
And all of this machinery is rolling Even after he was deplatformed from major social sites in August, and even now, as he sits in jail.
Friend of the podcast, Imran Ahmed, said that his organization, the CCDH, or Center for Countering Digital Hate, found 4,621 bots retweeting Tate materials, with activity spiking right after his arrest.
So there's a fearful symmetry to note here.
Tate's dominion of women is doubled by his domination of the internet.
It's like some new form of colonialism in which virtual space can and must be claimed and exploited as if it were the abstract feminine nature of the 16th century flowing with limitless resources.
Only now, it's not lumber and gold, coffee and sugar cane.
The commodities for extraction and attention are primal desire and endless stores of male resentment.
And here, those stores are overflowing, as Tate's supporters swarm through the streets of Athens after his arrest, shouting Free Top G, which is Tate's nickname coined by his father to indicate a man who can dominate everyone in all areas of life.
Free Top G!
Free Top G Let's repeat something.
Some of Tate's most loyal fans are as young as 11.
Here's where we get to the Tate crime that simmers offline.
How he managed to bring the culture war to tweens.
You guys know who Andrew Tate is?
Yeah.
Do you like him?
Yeah.
Tell me what do you like about Andrew Tate.
I like he's motivating all the young men in the world to like handle with their life and stuff.
What do you want to tell Andrew Tate?
Imagine he's in front of you right now.
I'll tell him to, like, keep going and to never stop, like, teaching men to be strong and rich.
For me, basically, also the same thing.
I want to thank him for everything he's done to help people.
So these boys in this TikTok are 11 or 12 years old and they've pulled up on their trick scooters to chat with a Tate stand who's pulled up in his car in a parking lot.
It all seems a little bit weird but also quite normal.
It's like they're talking about school or soccer or video games.
So what are their teachers saying?
Here's a 6th grade teacher talking about the impacts of Andrew Tate in her classroom.
So I'm a teacher and I teach sixth grade.
We've been in school for three days now and within these three days the amount of young 11 year old boys that told me that they love Andrew Tate is ridiculous.
This man is really affecting the minds of young men.
I had a boy today, 11, Turn to a girl and tell her that she's fat, women need to be thin, she sits at home and she eats all day, and that she's like every other girl in the world, and that she uses men to get money, and at least he's a hard-working man and he works for his money.
They're 11.
Okay.
You need to be aware of what your kids are watching, because this is ridiculous.
And it's really affecting kids.
Young kids.
It's disgusting.
In one very possible universe, Julian, this could be my son talking to your daughter in a few years' time.
So what's our deal?
What do we want to give them both instead?
The short answer is some kind of compass for identifying grift.
As we were preparing this story, a parallel drama unfolded in mainstream right-wing digital media, which seems more respectable than TateWorld, but is cut from the same cloth.
Shitposting YouTuber Steven Crowder launched a war With Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire outfit, which employs Candace Owens, Matt Walsh, and Jordan Peterson, Crowder felt insulted by an offer of only $50 million to join their team, and he ended his rant in that video by announcing he was starting his own platform.
We also found out this week that Fox News' senior anchors have now acknowledged, under oath, that they never believed Trump's big lie about election fraud, but they repeated it because it was good for ratings.
QED?
Culture war stances are driven more by greed than moral commitments.
And this is the Tate Crime alt-media landscape, where there's only one rule.
Contempt for facts, evidence, and human decency is always more popular than the boring mainstream story.
And it makes bank.
Tate Crime bosses use the digital marketing machinery already in place from personal growth gurus like Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and Marie Forleo of B-School.
These influencers run huge, lucrative, evergreen video courses that teach you how to sell video courses.
Tait's business model closely followed the arc of social media content, driving email list growth and membership site subscriptions, leading then to big upsells for in-person events and what coaches call elite mastermind groups with mentoring from the charismatic leader themselves.
Antivax Conspiritualists followed the same model.
Andrew Tait's greed merged this model with the even more lucrative space of webcam exploitation, and then he spiced it up with the non-stop manic energy of first-person shooter games.
And then he too presumed to create educational platforms.
The Pimping Hoes degree platform, later renamed The Real World, Which then intersected with his in-person training event, The War Room, in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.
The Daily Wire is following the same pathway.
Their subscription revenue and Facebook dominance positions them to offer premium online courses in which, one day soon, perhaps Jordan Peterson could Bible coach participants on conservative marriage and the protection of kids from woke gay Marxism.
Soon to follow, there could be big-ticket live retreats that train a new generation of reactionary activists, perhaps those 11-year-old boys.
In the Tate crime landscape, the revolutionary wants society to regress.
The edgy little guy has a billionaire pastor standing behind him.
The radical freethinkers are really pseudo-skeptic demagogues, hoovering up ad revenue and kickbacks from quack medicine peddlers.
Tate larps as Neo, but is really a bald and tattooed Agent Smith locking women into rooms where their souls are sucked into computer screens to initiate young boys and men into a relational prison that can never offer love, intimacy, friendship, empathetic parenting, or, for that matter, the dignity of honest work.
While alt-media competes with democracy and the very notion of education, It's up to us to push back.
The world we want for our kids is only possible if they are nurtured, not just with media literacy.
Maybe by lobbying for high school curriculum upgrades locally and nationally, but also the emotional intelligence that can distinguish confidence from sociopathy, and the kind of bittersweet illumination that sees the wreckage clearly and still feels compelled to create safety and belonging in the human family.
Thank you for listening everyone.
We'll see you here, in your podcast feed, or on social, or on Patreon.
