25/4-2024
On April 24th, 2024, Andrew Tate tweeted:
This is a classic, post-ironic baity tweet. It follows the retoric that Donald Trump perfected, where you can basically say any outragous shit, and anyone calling it ridicoulous will be accused of not understanding the irony, while those in on the irony do believe it unironically. Because while Tate may not believe sexual pleasure from a woman is gay, he does care a lot about "genetic legacy" and he does write fan fiction about himself in a past life as a Wudan monk practicing the art of self-control:
She said she would stay with me forever, sickness and health, no matter what. That I am the sword and she is the sheath, and we need each other. I believed her. She believed her. So I rented a small room. Concrete floor and straw pillow. I forbid us to touch - only body heat can be shared. She asked how long we must do this for, and my answer was simple: “Until mastery is attained.”Now dear reader, you may be tempted to call this ridicoulous, that writing about you past monk life laying next to women sharing body heat without specifying wether or not this is fiction or real beliefs is absurd; that is because you don't understand irony. At the same time, you also don't understand the depths of how your lack of self-control around women will make you gay, inferior, submissive, enslaved. After all, Tolstoy wrote: "'Ah, you want us to be merely objects of sensuality -- all right, as objects of sensuality we will enslave you,' say the women." But you don't understand this, because you are stuck in the Matrix. You don't understand duality -- you don't understand the gay in the straight, the straight in the gay, the male in the female, the female in the male, the dominant in the submissive, the submissive in the dominant; the perseverance in suffering, the enslavement of pleasure, the immortality in legacy. You were probably not a monk in your past life anyway, but some type of animal, or sex demon, or maybe a gay, and you probably don't even worship Allah.
Anyway, I think Andrew Tate is inventing a new religion.
Andrew Tate, the only man with a stranger relationship to the word degeneracy than a white supremacist with an anime avatar, isn't the first one to use Islam as a sort of political independence movement: ... did the same thing in the ... when he created the new "branch" of "Islam" called The Nation of Islam -- "branch" and "Islam" in quotes because the actual theology manages to break so fundamentally with Islamic dogma that it's actually insane. But a more cleaned up version of the Nation of Islam, with less of a focus on UFO's and incarnations of God and more focus on politics, became the fundamentals of Malcolm X's ideology -- that with less focus on racial equality and co-existence, and more of a focus on Black power. An interesting similarity between the Nation of Islam and Andrew Tate is the way Christianity is viewed as a weak religion, basically unable for the political goals .. and a weaker form of the true religion.
Andrew Tate website reads: 2024 is the final year before the great enslavement. Your only chance is to learn from those who’ve escaped and build a strong network of brothers.
Aside from the Tales of Wudan, it also contains 41 tenets - yes tenets - of Andrew Tate-ism: I believe that men have the divine imperative to become as capable powerful and competent as possible in this life -- Tenet 1; One of my personal favourites: Tenet 3: I prefer loving rewarding consensual relationships with beautiful positive and virtuous women. Don't we all, Tate, and how dare the Romanian goverment alledge otherwise! Tenet 30: I reserve the right to administer difficult rites of passage to young men to allow them to earn the rank of manhood (reminds me of the anal stuff that alledgedly happened at my high school.)
Basically, instead of focusing on race, Tate uses Islam as a way to political independence, and I think it's interesting that it's specifically Islam. Just like with ELijah Muhammad, many people are sceptical of his choice, considering he's made his way to fame and success through OnlyFans pimping, and just like Elijah Muhammad, he does spice up his religion with his own ideas, with the same focus on "Do for self" that Elijah Muhammad preached.
When Andrew Tate is discussed in media, it's usually in relation to his conservative misogynist language about women, but I don't actually find Tate very threatening as a misogynist. Call me naïve, but a misogyny that completely alienates and turns off every woman ever, doesn't form a good basis for a male movement that's still in need of female validation, and red pill spaces are often obsessed with female validation. To quote Tate's website, "LIFE ISN’T WORTH LIVING AS A MAN UNLESS YOU’RE IN THE TOP 10%. LITERALLY IT’S ALL WOMEN WANT." Redpillerism isn't at all detached, at least not in practice, from the need of emotional and sexual validation from women, and it becomes a real weakness in it's male empowerment scheme, because it's not a male empowerment scheme, it's a female envy scheme. Fly out clip. It's a ridicoulous satire of the worst version of feminism. On a political level it's bad because they loose half the population, but red pillers are genuienly so emotionally obsessed with women, that even before politics they need some form of spiritual cleansing from the validation of women. They're not gonna go into political gayness, like the feminist movement does when it falls too deep into the envy problem, so maybe their best bet is to self-actualise Tate's fiction and become monks whom at most share body heat with women. That's the crux of the gay-straight man problem, right, that he desires women so much that it becomes a weakness, and as we all know being weak is of course gay. So celibacy could be a good solution, I mean, the Catholics managed to build a pretty stable Patriarchy on top of it, I guess because no Pope after Peter had to go home and hear what his wife had to say about apostolic succession.
So I actually think it's in religious discource that Tate becomes a more powerful, and threatening, influence, because he portrays western christians as weak, essentially for allowing basic liberal values of freedom of speech and freedom of expression (for example, he thinks Christianity is "weak", because in "supposedly christian countries", satanists can go around in the streets mocking Jesus.) And worse, no one seems to call out his radical rethoric in this regard -- american conservatives usually challenge Tate pretty strongly on his rethoric on women, but when it comes to defending the values of free speech that they're otherwise the self-imposed protectors of, they suddenly lay down flat. No talk about american freedom, no talk about the fascist squandering of free speech I've been hearing about, not even any christian theology of righteous suffering, of "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Just a yes Tate, you're right Tate, christianity is cucked Tate. Which is very revealing about these people's committment to liberal democratic society and their commitment to worshipping a guy that got excecuted for blasphemy, but also worrying as Tate pushes them to that place.
The reason the traditional conservative right pushes back on Tate's misogyny is because it's such a politically useless misogyny -- unless you want to take on women by force in some sort of Handmaid's Tale insurgeon (and even then that would be difficult and frustrating), you're going to need women's blessing to dominate them. And traditional conservatives work by coercing that consent from women by playing on their fears -- their fears of violence, of race, of queer people, of loneliness, of sexual exploitation, of the exisential dread of independence, of misogyny from the health care system, from misogynist culture outside of conservatism. Tate's outright misogyny threatens this view of conservatism as a safe haven for women actually, but it also funtions as a tool for trad-cons to look good in contrast; traditional conservatives want to be women's (and men's) only choice between being shared by five men in a pansexual woke gender-neutral harem or living in a romanian muslim harem while the man of the household awaits trial on sex-trade accusations. So conservatives like to challenge Tate on sexual politics, but they're pushed around on religious politics, and as religion hold a stronghold in american politics, I think he stand to be much more influential and much more destructive there. I think young men will try and subsequently abandon Tate's red pill, or take what's good and leave the rest, because most of it just doesn't work. It dies on it's own. You'll have to deal with women in your life, and I promise we'll be as bitchy about it as we can. But I think young men and young women will become traditional conservatives, which actually has the structure to keep them there, because they'll think it's the only way to have a meaningful, safe, loving, family-centered life, and they'll be unreachable by Tate's misogyny, knowing women to be the preachious submissive XX-heterosexual Holy Mary imitators that God intended, but they will be touched by Tate insulting their religion, it's strenght, and that will move them to a more religiously reactionary place. Christianity is fundamentally opposed to a survival of the fittest-mindset, but it hasn't failed to be dominated by that mindset in the past.
Tenet ...: I believe that men and women are different and each has their own unique and important strengths and abilities. An entirely uncontroversial statement in and of itself, since most people are not bisexual amphibiants (though we can always bump those numbers up: 👏more👏bisexual👏amphibiants👏); but in the context of 41 tenets of a new branch of theology and politics, the statement is probably better understood as men and women are fundamentally different in ways that are unabrigable and holy, something Julia Serano describes as oppositional sexism. This tenet of Tateism, I think, can actually be important in understanding the troll statement "having sex with women for enjoyment is gay", because having sex with women is gay, if you think men and women are so different that females risk giving you girl-germs. When asked what Tate would do if he head a gay son, he answered:
Maybe Tate would change his answer after converting to Islam, but I do think the statement is revealing about his world-view. Being gay in the red pill world is less about homosexual attraction and activity, and more about an unholy mixing of the feminine and masculine. It's the idea that the masculine is somehow degenerated, and not complimented, by the feminine. Another great example of this is my favorite clip, where the boys discuss why you shouldn't live with a woman: The more common understanding of masculine and feminine, is that they're in someway complemetary to each other, and that there's a bit of the feminine in the masculine and a bit of masculine in the feminine, like the depiction of yin and yang "EITHER OR. BLACK AND WHITE. YIN AND YANG. ACT.", which is not how yin and yang work.Another part of Tate's writing include his advice to young kings, also listed in paragraphs. Some of them seem to exist to fight incel-resentment-ideology, which I can appreciate -- I prefer the men fighting each other while I plot my female schemes:
A LOT OF MEN TALK ABOUT THE “EVIL” FEMALE. HOW SHE WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE, DIVORCE YOU, MAKE YOU CRY. I’VE DEALT WITH COUNTLESS BREAKUPS. I’VE NEGATED EVERY FEMALE TRICK. YET ONLY A MAN TRIED TO STAB ME IN MY NECK. I FEAR NO FEMALES. I HAVE REAL ENEMIES. THEY’RE MEN.
A lot of them are also more generic self-help advice, but some are pretty interesting, and also very common in red pill spaces:
2: FEMALES ARE OBJECTIVELY BEAUTIFUL. SEPARATE TO BEING A PERSON, THEY ARE GORGEOUS AS AN OBJECT. EVEN STRAIGHT WOMEN WANT TO KISS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN. AS A MAN YOU WILL NEVER HAVE INTRINSIC VALUE. YOU’VE EITHER MADE YOURSELF IMPORTANT OR YOU HAVEN’T.
There's two ways to read this I think: for one, I kind of recognize this as not something super different as to what sometimes motivates me myself, right? This is existentialism. Existence precedes essense; human beings have no inherent value and have to create their own values. When I do pathetic shit, I am that pathetic shit. There's no secret human essence that can save me from the reality of what I truly am -- the only one saved from that, is of course the girl reading this who does not have no worry about existentialism, bcs ur too beautiful<3.
On the other hand, it can be read as a projection of the insecurity that makes Tate want to have fifty-eleven children and tweet pictures of his cars to Greta Thunberg, joined with a pointless resentment towards women, as if women are yet to wake up to the existential dread of being a person because they're too pretty. If this was true, Andrew Tate's brother would also be saved from the anxiety of having no intrinsic value, because he's so beautiful it gives me goddamn goosebumps. But then again, he doesn't go around inventing religions, so maybe he does know he has inherent value and nothing to prove. He carries himself with a confidence and masculinity that Andre Tate and his alpha-bros just cannot muster.
Look at this picture of Christian: the rest are dark, gloomy, overly serious and immediately laughable; then Christian: bright, shirt a lil unbuttoned, swag shoes, glasses a little on the side, somehow having a party all on his own while the rest feel like they're discussing the downfall of the modern bisexual hot chip eating woman or something. I am not a woman of class, I am a woman of urges, and if Christian Tate played his little mind games on me, I would do what Wanda did in that Wandavision episode and just willingly and knowlingly step into his 1950's fantasy. He is the good brother, the christian brother, the innocent brother, and no one tell me otherwise, because hot people have never done anything wrong.
Anyway, I can't help but think that when Andrew Tate talk about the Intrinsic Unvaluableness of Man he's is mixing up two different anxieties -- on one hand, the fundamental human anxiety of self-awareness, that lies behind all the creation myths where human beings fuck up in some major way and then are forced to Live Like This, and a more personal anxiety of worthlessness that makes someone place so much focus on the bugattis and the bitches. The way Tate talks about success, is filled with the anxiety and otherness of someone who's "made it", who "started from the bottom and know we're here." He simultaneously hates the establishment, framing it as a complott working against other people also becoming finacially independent, and at the same time desperately wants to establish his right to be where he is: A PEASANT ACTS LIKE A PEASANT BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE. IN THE HEART AND MIND, IT IS WHAT THEY ARE. THE WORLD REFLECTS PEASANTRY UPON THOSE WHO ACT LIKE PEASANTS. I’VE BEEN ENJOYING THE WARM GLOW OF ROYALTY REFLECTED UPON ME SINCE MY MOST HUMBLE BEGINNINGS. there's something so funny about this statement, because it's so overcompensating that it becomes ridicoulous. Why is it in all caps. Why are you trying to break the Matrix by reinforcing serfdom. It reads like H.C. Andersens end to The Ugly Duckling another man who made it and lived with constant resentment, longing and otherness to the bourgeoisie he never really became a part of: "" There's a arbitrariness to class momvement that can make the whole system seem fake when you've passed through it, at the same time that the validity of it can become central to your sense of self-worth and security (LIFE ISN’T WORTH LIVING AS A MAN UNLESS YOU’RE IN THE TOP 10%. LITERALLY IT’S ALL WOMEN WANT. IT’S ALL THE WORLD RESPECTS. YOU MUST BE A WINNER, OR YOU WILL LIVE A LIFE OF PAIN.), and the result is this constant resentment at "the system", which branches over to conspiracy theories when it's legally and monetarily benefitial. I guess that what's interesting is that I don't think this resentment is uncommon for a european guy, but it does seems to be very appealing to americans as well, a country of people who I as a european thought loved the american dream, and thought class movement a part of the system and not a breaking of it -- but maybe america has changed in a way so that the american dream no longer feels like the point of the system, and more of a bug in it.
At the end the story Tate describes is a universal story; it's the marxist story ("In jail, they decided when I woke up, when I slept, when I ate, where I went. In your life, your boss decides when you wake up and when you eat and your bank decides where you go. You’re in jail. You are not free", from his Letter from Jail), it's the buddhist story of samsara, hell, it's so universal that the metaphor that Tate choose, The Matrix metaphor, originates from the Wachowski sisters' sense of escaping the gender matrix. Literally everything is the Matrix, because the Matrix is just collective structures that become oppressive when we forget that they're never the complete image. That's hinduism, right: the Atman forgets that it's Brahman. “The ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, ‘It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.‘”, The World as Will and Idea. In fact the only philosophy that doesn't incorporate these ideas, would be Islam and other abrahamic religions; they're usually the idea being deconstructed. I guess the closest thing is the islamic concept of dunya, which describes the material world and it's desires and illusions, a word that I've never heard Tate use.
Personally, I can't help but see this version of Islam as some sort of deformed version of the Übermensch, but eating the cake and having it too. Nietzsche thought Christianity was the slave religion, and Islam is akin to Christianity, but without the sacrifice of the Son of God. So people like Elijah Muhammad like the sense of lifting the slave oak of Christianity, affirming power for what it is, while also keeping the objective lense provided by abrahamic religion. So why doesn't it work? Well, I guess because there's just such a contrast between post-modern Tate and muslim Tate. They're two seemingly uncongigleble philosophies. For example, Tate's will to power and affirmation on humanity makes it impossible for him to denounce his webcam-business, even though it very much is a thing that's haram according to Islam, and the sort of thing a conversion would ask him to repent. Tate seems to believe that power prevails morality, but also that power is morality. Also, there's a twist and turn in the logic, just because of the fact that everything he says is just as empowering to a man as anyone else. Edith Södergren described Nietzsche as the only man she'd feel comfortable being herself around. There's this idea that Nietzsche is this white guy enlightenment philosopher, when the message of self-empowerment is just as effective for anyone. Whatch Nemo's The Code and tell me number one that it's not number one the same sense of breaking the matrix (literally "I broke the code") and secondly the same message of prevailing through self-empowerment. Maybe this is where the religious frame-work comes back: again, either power is king and western liberalism won and everyone else can go eat dick, or there's some grand actual morality being unfairly subjugated currently. Is it not here that the "divinity of men" comes in? ... but isn't it contradicted by the idea that power and success judges the true religion? Couldn't Jesus have been a righteous victim of the matrix like Tate is today? Isn't that the entire story of Christianity?
The human ability to be reamazed by these ideas, and then need someone to tell them it toghether with the message pull yourself toghether, never seems to fail. You could make a religion out of this! But at a certain point, the irony unvails and it all becomes a little too honest, a little too cringe. I don't think self-improvement is cringe, I don't think caring for others is cringe, but I do think this mixing of politics and theology is more fascinating than it is realistic, right? And refinding the same basic human truths over and over again, and then branding them in new clothes, new ways to make money, new oppressive systems, does seem a bit cringe, a bit like being stuck in samsara, stuck in the matrix. Berger quote
Is it obvious I relate to Tate? Maybe not, so I should just say it outright. We have the same overly-intellectual contrarian type of personality that's determined on believing something new and just end up believeing the most basic shit imaginable, we're both obsessed with religion and sex, we both seem gay (derogatory) (WE EVEN DO THE SAME FUCKIGN HAND THING) goddamnit we we're both sags, and pretty stereotypical sags to give the starfreaks some points; sagitarriouses according to chatGPT (it's the science machine) are independent, philosophical, impulsive, unpredictable. In my favorite eros-pilled comic book-philosopher Liv Strömqvist's book about astrology, she uses 17th century Queen Christina of Sweden as her example of a sag, who left the throne because of philosophy nerds that would come from southern Europe and discuss theology with her, and converted to Catholicism to have sex in the Vatican. Look, I'm not saying I belive in astrology, I'm just saying that's some relatable sagittarious shit. Nothing is more december-child than breaking the matrix. The problem is that breaking the matrix is so much fun that the question is if you can be satified with doing it just once. After a while the broken matrix mold toghether again. You stand in front of dogmas, allies, groups, ideas in need of defending, it's all just ... suffocating. This is not why you joined this. And Islam, well. I worry it could prove a difficult Matrix for mr. G to leave. Either way he was cooler as less of a religious culture warrior and more of a will to power type of guy.
Anyway. Every conservative is religious now. Candace Owens just converted to Catholicism; Jordan Peterson refers to himself as one of the four horsemen of meaning; Trump wants to make election day Jesus day to make up for Easter accidentally being trans. Andrew Tate is correct when he describes the new half of the 20's as a "post-truth" era, both because of deepfakes and half-facts, but also because were clearly moving away from the era of pseudo-rationality, "facts don't care about your feelings"-conservative posturing -- even Ben Shapiro has unpinned this defining statement from his X account sometime in 2023, after having it pinned I think consecutively since 2016. It's truly the end of an era. Now an open embracement of aesthetics and narrative world-views seem to be the thing. Well, you know what, I am ahead of all you bitches, I am post-religious. I find all your grasping for meaning in a meaningless world, this leap of faith beyond empirical knowledge into coherent larger than life world-views cringe, and just the other side of the same coin as basing all your beliefs on observable meassurable facts. The only religiosity I accept is the cry of "God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" of a truly religiously black-pilled man, a sufferer of the dark night; of one that doesn't so obviously just belive in order to sway existential qualms. I am my father's daughter, I look down on religion in the way only someone slightly wounded by it can. Yes, a catholic guys snubbed me, okay. Yes, I may suffer from a little bit of the lgbt's. But you know what, those among us who's world view is not built on personal resentments, insecurities, fears and sexual impulses arrising at the slight mention of God shall cast the first stone. At least I know that I am cringe. A lot of you don't even know that you're cringe. Andrew Tate only half knows that he's cringe. The other half lies awake at night wondering how he'll let himself have sex without succumbing to the gay experience of lack of self-control, of hedonistic pleasure, of death. And I think that side of Tate needs to think less and let himself be consumed by a woman, the way a drop is consumed by the ocean. Besides, who's to say what's gay anyway? Maybe being gay is dying on the cross for the sins of the world. Maybe the real gayness was the pleasure a heterosexual man felt while having sex with his wife. Words do not mean anything and they cannot control me. We are all in the Matrix right now, caught up in our of little mental cages, and you don't even know what sex you are outside of the simulation, so you might as well succumb to the inherent heterosexuality of being masc4masc.∎
44 THERE IS NO WORSE FATE FOR YOUR SON BUT FOR HIM TO HAVE DADDY’S MONEY AS A SAFETY NET. THIS GENERATIONAL WEALTH CRAP IS FOR SOFT MEN, WHO WANT TO REPLICATE SOFT MEN. I AM NOT ME BECAUSE I’M RICH. I’M ME BECAUSE I’M RICH AND EVERYTHING ELSE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?