Contemptible Tate Brothers Come Stateside
The popular influencers are being probed for human trafficking, and their visit to Florida caused a stir.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your … sex traffickers yearning to exploit women for money.”
Wait, what?
I had planned this morning to write about a sex trafficker named Jeffrey Epstein, expecting that we’d get a tranche of information about the powerful and wealthy people who participated with him in exploiting many young women over many years. (Epstein supposedly hung himself in a jail cell in 2019.) The big news about all that ended up being little more than a clown show yesterday, however, involving the Justice Department giving redundant and yawn-worthy information via a small band of prolific MAGA social media influencers. We learned nothing new or noteworthy.
The Epstein Files won’t release themselves.
Anyway, during our editors’ call this morning, I drew the short straw and will instead relay the story of two different (alleged!) sex traffickers — Andrew and Tristan Tate — and their arrival in Florida from Romania.
The Tate brothers hold dual American and British citizenship, and until yesterday, they have not been allowed to leave Romania since authorities opened an investigation of them in 2022. The two social media influencers are accused by numerous women of exploiting them to build their lucrative adult entertainment enterprise, and authorities are investigating allegations of money laundering and human trafficking. In the UK, the brothers are wanted on allegations of tax evasion, rape, and human trafficking, which seems odd given the British tendency to look the other way when Muslim men rape young women.
(Side note: Andrew claims to be a Muslim, though Tristan claims to be Christian.)
They both vigorously deny the charges, though both are, well, on video bragging about doing the things they’re accused of doing. When asked, their chief refrain is that they have not been convicted of any crimes. Andrew calls himself a misogynist pimp, and Tristan is the ever-present yes-man echoing his older brother. They blame the “matrix” for a conspiracy to silence them because they preach against the “woke mind virus.” I would readily concede that neither Romania nor the UK are paragons of justice, especially regarding free speech, but that hardly proves anything.
“This is a democratic society,” Andrew pontificated outside Fort Lauderdale airport yesterday. “It is meant to be innocent until proven guilty.”
Yes, that’s true, but I have a higher standard of morality than “Well, I wasn’t convicted.”
You might be asking, who cares about these guys? Why is it news?
Unfortunately, millions of people follow them — primarily disaffected young men who desperately want a masculine role model in a society that tells them they are the problem. They support Donald Trump, and they oppose feminism, DEI, and anything woke. They have enjoyed promotion from influencers like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Benny Johnson and even received praise from Trump attorney Alina Habba. It’s all what our Samantha Koch recently called “The Delusional Embrace of Andrew Tate.”
Because I have three teenage sons, I listened to one of their podcasts a few months back. I’ll summarize the 90-minute show this way: “We’re awesome. Unbelievably awesome, in fact. And all of you out there are total and pathetic losers who will never be awesome like us. Unless you give us some money and take our online courses, and then maybe you might achieve a shadow of our greatness.”
Truly, that was the thread for an hour and a half.
Their social media posts are even more tedious. Andrew proclaims the “virtues” of having “multiple beautiful baby mothers producing you children,” and he declares, “The Nuclear family has nuked masculinity to zero.” There’s plenty more, but their appalling commodification of women is often too vulgar for a family publication.
Yet when two buff and athletic guys (both international kickboxing champions) smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and generally exude machismo while boasting about the beautiful girls they’ve bedded, the exotic cars they drive, and all the money flooding into their bank accounts, it becomes almost irresistible for young men who also want those things.
Of course, the Tate brothers put the “toxic” in “toxic masculinity,” effectively making the argument against men better than any raving feminist ever could.
There is speculation that the Trump administration either pressured Romania for the Tates’ release or at least facilitated their entry back into the United States. When asked, President Donald Trump said, “I know nothing about that.”
Regardless, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis isn’t happy. “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” said DeSantis. “We were not notified. I found out through the media that this was something that was happening.”
The brothers may end up having an uneventful trip to the U.S. before heading back to Romania in March for further proceedings. They may never be convicted of anything in a court of law. Still, two narcissists who run around bragging about exploiting women who aren’t worthy of anything more than that are not worth listening to, much less extolling. Just because they “make a great point” about the Left every now and then does not make them or their hollow vision of life worthy of respect.
