The Ballad of Andy and Greta
A Moral Tale for Sour Times
For those who believe in karma, or those who would simply like to believe that every once in a while some seriously bad people actually get their comeuppence, Twitter served up an unexpected spectacle in the dying days of 2022 that would be out of the reach of most Netflix scriptwriters.
This is a story that begins on Twitter but does not end there, and it begins on November 17, when Elon Musk reinstated the Twitter account of the notorious social media influencer Andrew Tate.
For those who don’t know, Tate is a former kickboxer-turned self-help male ‘influencer’, who has established a lucrative career as a savage and brutish exponent of the toxic antifeminist ‘manosphere’. In 2012 he was removed from the Big Brother tv show after a video surfaced showing him slapping and beating a woman with a belt.
Viciously sexist and anti-feminist, Tate has boasted that he sleeps with a machete which he pulls out when a woman accuses him of cheating. He has also engaged in victim-blaming, and accused women who get raped of bearing responsibility for what happens to them.
Earlier this year Tate suggested that he had moved to Romania partly in order to avoid being entrapped by fake allegations of rape. “I’m not a fucking rapist,” he declared in a video rant, “ but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.”
Tate contrasted Romania with a West overrun by feminism, where
“Any fucking bitch who works at Greggs you bought a pasty from, at some point in the future can destroy your life. This #MeToo bullshit has not protected women. It has destroyed the safety of men.”
In 2017 Tate received a permanent ban from Twitter for expounding views like these, but in November last year Elon Musk invited him back, as part of the billionaire’s personal crusade on behalf of humanity and civilisation.
In the month that followed Tate swaggered back onto Twitter and beyond. On GB News Dan Wootton invited him on his show to discuss his views on, and Piers Morgan also solicited his views on Markle during a longer interview on his programme.
You might expect even quasi-respectable pundits to maintain some distance from someone with Tate’s record and reputation, but when it comes to Meghan Markle, anyone will do, and Andy did exactly what was expected of him.
He dismissed Markle’s allegations about racism on the grounds that he was mixed race and it has never happened to him. He accused Markle of an unwillingness to be ‘perspicacious’ and ‘self-reflective’ which had led her to engage in gratuitous attacks on the ‘age-old institution’ of the Royal Family
Wootton - a presenter who would be quite happy to solicit a negative take on Meghan from Jeffrey Dahmer - beamed happily as Tate told him that Markle was using racism as a ‘cop-out’ to conceal the fact that she was merely a ‘dislikeable person.’ If Markle was not a victim, Tate assured Wootton that he was, having escaped attempts by ‘the Matrix’ to silence him:
Once the mainstream media decides that you are a dangerous person because you inspire people to think. They’re going to come along and they weaponize virtue, they’re going to choose a buzzword you can’t argue against and slap it on you, whip it up in the media machine and try to convince the world you’re somehow a dangerous person, a bad person, and that your ideas should be ignored.
Yep, that’s what happens when you ‘inspire people to think’, the Matrix will come for you. Not that the Matrix would have had much trouble locating a man who seemed determined to use his Twitter platform to beat his chest in public, while bullying random Twitterati with messages like this:
Many people would consider that Anthony won this unwanted exchange, but these are not the people Tate appeals to, and so he decided to have crack at Greta Thunberg. At this point, things went suddenly pear-shaped for Andy, producing an exchange that has already reverberated through the furthest reaches of the hellscape that is Elon Musk’s Twitter:
Ouch. Many people laughed a lot at this deft response, which went straight to the heart - ok maybe not the heart exactly - of Tate’s alpha male posturing. As things stand, Greta’s tweet has become the most popular tweet in the history of Twitter, with 3.9 million likes.
As perspicacious as he is, Andy clearly sensed that he had lost face as a result of his exchange, despite efforts from his fans to make him feel better:
Such witticisms were not enough to redress the balance of power, and so it came to pass that after more than 12 hours, the Cobra came up with this video response - part-prize fighter/part Hugh Hefner redux, but mostly idiot - in which he smoked a VERY big cigar and bragged once again about his ‘dinosaur-destroying’ car collection, while seemed to believe that Thunberg had given him her real email address:
If this gruesome posturing was intended to be the last word, it wasn’t. Within hours of this tweet, Tate and his brother were arrested by Romanian police on suspicion of sex trafficking and led away in handcuffs. There were rumours on Twitter that the pizza box in Tate’s video had alerted the police to his presence in the country, prompting another droll observation from Thunberg:
Whether or not the pizza had anything to do with it, the charges against the Tate brothers are serious. If proven guilty, they face some serious jail time. Needless to say the way, this not the way Tate is spinning it.
Some of Tate’s followers needed no invitation:
Everywhere. It’s going on everywhere, I tell you. Even the Taliban are supposedly worried about Andy, according to the former Miss Jersey-turned ‘anti-woke’ journalist Sameera Khan:
And let’s not forget the feminazis
Maybe one day Andy will write a book entitled ‘Feminists Made Me a Pimp’ or maybe not, but his antics have posed something of a problem for the many people on the right who loathe Greta Thunberg. Even before Tate’s arrest, Julia Hartley-Brewer took time out from skinning Dalmatians to attack a teenager who she has attacked many times before:
Brewer’s spleen clearly got the better of her here, because she later deleted that tweet and removed the word ‘autistic’, followed by a mealy-mouthed explanation which seemed to blame Thunberg for the fact that she had used the word as an insult.
Leaving that aside, why would rightwing pundits ‘choose’ the lifestyle of a known misogynist and alleged sex trafficker over a teenager who wants to save the planet from environmental devastation and has become the voice of her generation?
It’s a difficult one. Let’s consult one of our foremost moral philosophers, Professor Brendan O’Neill, from the hallowed Spiked University. O’Neill grim countenance can generally be found on tv talk shows, muttering imprecations about ‘metropolitan elites’ regardless of the issue at hand, but even he struggled with Tate.
In a tortuously-argued piece in the Spectator, O’Neill rejected any notion of ‘moral equivalence’ between Thunberg and a ‘proud misogynist’ arrested on suspicion of human trafficking, before reaching the conclusion that Tate and Thunberg are both equally ‘nihilistic’.
After briefly flirting with the idea that Tate and his followers might actually be a danger to society and trying on a sincerely-felt moral position for the first time in his life, O’Neill effortlessly shrugged it off and reverted to his default position, concluding that Thunberg and the Greens are in fact worse than Tate and his followers:
Three billion human beings still live in dire poverty. To oppose economic growth in such circumstances – as the Greta-inspired green movement does – is far more reckless and threatening to humanity than Tate’s posturing could ever be.
There is worse where this came from. On Fox News, the loathsome Tucker Carlson has repeatedly defended Tate and sharing his conspiratorial allegations. No one should be surprised by this. Tate is the most googled man on earth. His TikTok videos have millions of followers. A number of teachers have issued warnings about the impact his videos have had on young boys.
Tate is a particularly depraved and cunning product of our networked era, who has pushed the absence of regulatory boundaries to the limit. But he is also a creature of the right.
There is a reason why he has spent time with men like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and why these men like him. As Hope Not Hate and others have pointed out, Tate’s misogyny blurs seamlessly into homophobia, antifeminism, anti wokeism, and other foundational nostrums of the far right.
For these movements, Tate is always going to be preferable to Greta Thunberg. Some will ignore or play down his toxic views on women, but others will support him because of them, just as they did with Donald Trump.
This because some men - maybe many more than we like to think - actually want to behave with the ‘freedom’ that Tate and Trump embody, whether such freedom applies to the way they treat women, or the right to drive cars with ‘huge emissions’ across a dying planet.
Tate appeals to the same sense of shackled majoritarian victimhood that feeds into so many of the new culture wars, and he also appeals to a certain notion of male victimhood, and the idea that men have been emasculated and ‘feminised’ that goes with it.
His ranting about ‘the Matrix’ reaches into the same dank conspiratorial pond that has spilled over into extreme right and ‘mainstream’ conservative politics in the last two decades. In constituencies that regard ‘virtue-signalling’ as an insult, monstrosities like Tate will always prosper.
And that is why I said at the beginning of this article that this is not simply a Twitter story. On the one hand Tate is a living argument for regulation and de-platforming. But he is also a symptom of societies that are in danger of losing their moral bearings, that celebrate power and domination over empathy and equality; of reactionary movements that cannot accept women as equals or even as fully human, and would rather embracer to the most primitive notions of masculinity in order to put them back in their box.
They will fail, but it’s the task of those who believe otherwise to make sure that they fail quickly, before they can cause any more damage. Because even if we can celebrate the downfall of one monster who over-reached himself, there are plenty more to take their place, and they will find plenty of followers in our age of rage-filled fakery.
https://www.getalife.com/hall-of-fame/andrew-tate
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