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The Tate Brothers' Should Be The Trumps' Second Epstein Scandal
The truth is much worse than most people realize, and they knew a lot of it.
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I’ve had Heidi Blake’s lengthy New Yorker exposé about Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan open in a browser tab for over a month.
I finally read it yesterday, straight through.
If you’ve already done the same, you’ll know why I felt compelled to write this. If you’ve been on to true depths of the Tate brothers’ predations for months or years, I imagine you’ve found yourself incredibly frustrated that more people weren’t aware, or didn’t really seem to care. I get it now!
If you haven’t read the feature—if it was on your to-do list, or this is the first you’ve heard about it—and your time today is limited, I’d encourage you to save this piece for later and devote your time to the profile instead. It’s long. It might take you an hour to read beginning to end. It’s also one of the most disturbing pieces of journalism I’ve ever read. But it is important.
Why yesterday: There’s another piece I’ve had in mind to write about the politics of masculinity in America, and I thought I might be able to use the Tate brothers’ recent arrest and pending extradition to the United Kingdom as a peg.
Hopefully I’ll get around to that one at some point.
But I couldn’t write it credibly without reading the New Yorker story first. I hadn’t done it already because I assumed (naively it turns out) that I already knew the key facts about the Tates. A few peers who read the article when it came out posted their astonishment at its revelations—they used terms like “evil”—but I assumed they were just catching up with what most of us already knew: The Tates were accused sex traffickers and rapists, and avatars of a large global movement of “masculinists.” That’s all true, of course. But the tenor is way off. The way they’re depicted in our discourse, even by critics who find them repugnant, turns out to be unhelpfully euphemistic. To a casual observer, they come across like so many other right-wing influencers with big online followings—except that they may have committed some ugly crimes in a parallel realm of their lives. Misogynistic. The worst of the manosphere. Icky.
No, no.
If you’ve decided to file the Tate profile away for later, let me just distill for you why I think it’s unusually important.
First is the scale of the depravity. It’ll drain the color from your face. It’s weird to say that the terms “sex trafficking” and “rape” are insufficient to convey the depth of evil Blake uncovered. But there’s really no other way to put it. There was nothing incidental or concealed or limited about their crimes. They quite openly ran something like a global multilevel-marketing scheme, but for sexual exploitation, arguably even sex slavery.
Second is the reach of complicity. Because of how we talk about right-wing influencers, and how rightists ple