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Dennis is an advocate for boys, and he believes that schools are a magnifying point for society’s culture of shame and that some kinds of shame fall disproportionately on them. He has been present when adults at school — parents, teachers, or administrators — talk about boys as “inherently dangerous,” reflexively wanting to “contain” or “control” them for the smallest hallway infraction so that a minor conflict doesn’t blow up into a big one. These adults talk about “safety” and “accountability” — ostensibly to protect other students, but really to protect themselves from legal or reputational consequences. Dennis believes that hardly any straight boy has the language to speak truthfully about how he envisions romance, dating, or sex because “they know if they say it aloud, someone will censure them or say they are encouraging rape culture.” So they confess their dreams to him in private in his office. And what they say is “I want to make a lot of money. I want the life I want. I want to be free.” Dennis adds, “It feels very Bret Easton Ellis. Empty at the center but all about the performative nature of being a male.” His fan base lived all over the English-speaking world, and it seemed to defy race, class, and religion. Tate appealed to the rural American pro-gun constituencies and to the anti-vaxx, anti-mask communities; he appealed to schoolboys in Sydney and working-class immigrants in the U.K., to young rideshare drivers and to jet-setting tech bros. Tate’s saturation was so complete that he reached into the blue villages of New York City, where many boys in their bedrooms found his rude and ruthless evisceration of every sacred liberal value hilarious. Feminism, environmentalism, gluten intolerance, literature, Harry Styles, Lil Nas X — Tate assaulted all of these with pejoratives the boys themselves knew not to use. Outside of school, they took pictures posing like him, their fingers laced together with their index fingers pointed like steeples; they made machete jokes in the group thread and listened to Tate in the gym; in private, they said, “He’s my guy. I love him. He’s so smart; he’s so relevant.” But when girls were around, the boys knew to keep quiet. Girls hate Tate. Pompliano did the interview before Tate became huge, and you can hear it in Tate’s voice; he’s looser and more transparent. He invited all five women to his home to persuade them to help him launch a webcam business, and two agreed. From there, Tate and Tristan built a business that, he said, eventually grew to 75 girls in four locations talking to men online for money. In 2016, Tate appeared on the U.K. version of the reality show Big Brother for five days before the producers removed him. The reported reason at the time was the emergence of a sex tape that shows Tate hitting a woman with a belt. In the tape, Tate, kneeling in bed fully clothed, demands that the woman say she loves him before he pounces on her and begins thrashing her. (The woman later made a video saying it had been “pure game” and they were still friends.) Seven years later, the real reason for Tate’s removal would come to light: At around the time of the Big Brother taping, one of the women he hired had charged him with rape and another with assault. Ultimately, the police couldn’t make the case, but the women’s accounts, reiterated in a Vice investigation published this year and including descriptions of choking, are harrowing. The same year as the Big Brother scandal, Tate and Tristan moved to Romania. The webcam business is big there, Tate told Pompliano.
Wait,” Pompliano interjected. “You can’t say that offhand comment and just keep going.” Tate clarified. He was probably sleeping with 65 percent of his employees. They wanted to have sex with him, he said. “It’s like the adage of the woman at the office liking her boss. You’re her boss. She’s naked in your house. You’ve made her millions and millions; you’ve got a Lambo out front. You’re the big G.” Boys entered Tate world through his most arresting clips — including those that suggest a violent hatred of women. In one TikTok that circulated untold millions of times, he describes what he would do as a pimp if a woman accused him of cheating: “Slap slap grab choke shut up bitch sex,” he said. The true stans lingered online for hours. One teenage viewer calculated he had watched between 48 and 56 hours of Tate; another laid up with an injury watched Tate nonstop all summer. “My friends would be scrolling for hours and hours and not saying a word,” says Spike, 17, a high-school senior in Brooklyn. On YouTube, fans found the original interviews, and podcasts that had been shredded into TikToks, as well as higher-concept video essays in which Tate puts forth his views on the struggles of young men, talking about the fear of competition, the allure of gaming, the rise of depression and suicidality. Tate upholds mental discipline and physical toughness as the ways to conquer the malaise, saying things like “If you cannot control your own mind, then you are just a feather in the wind.” Kids sniff out adult hypocrisies, and they withdraw. Dennis, a public-high-school teacher living in Brooklyn, calls the atmosphere in his mostly white classrooms “the New Victorianism.” Everyone wears baggy hoodies and sweats. It’s the fashion, as if no one wants to risk gender or body presentation. But it’s more than that. Dennis believes children live in two worlds, and the real world is “constantly hidden” on their phones. They are anxious and inhibited, fearing censure or punishment, about saying what they really want or think, and so they share their unmasked selves on finsta with a small, curated group. School, which used to be a noisy place, has become quiet. Timothy, a public-high-school teacher in a majority Hispanic and Asian community in Queens, echoes Dennis. He says that in school, boys complain to him, “I can’t be me.” Christian regards the Tate panic as a misunderstanding: “He makes a lot of jokes, and people take him out of context.” He sees Tate as “a little misogynist but not much much.” For Halloween, Christian dressed up as Tate, even shaving his head, “and I went to the most fun party of my life.” His mother, who hadn’t really dialed into Tate, helped him with the costume, but she wouldn’t let him have a cigar.Tate talks to media outside Romania’s anti-organized-crime and anti-terrorism directorate in Bucharest. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Above all, Tate talks incessantly about The Matrix , a dog whistle for incels and red-pill adherents, which in Tate’s version means the humdrum workaday world of wage slavery — of formerly proud men controlled by big business and governments, who never get ahead and whose feminist wives refuse them a blowjob at the end of the day. Freedom, Tate asserts, is attained by living his way: by getting strong and rich and becoming a G.
He claimed he was making the women rich. “Women have to want to work for you. Women have to want to obey you,” he explained. Tate compares himself to someone who “uses sex as a weapon” and a “reward.” He wouldn’t be sleeping with all the women, but “you’re obviously sleeping with some, whatever.” Provocative fancy dress costumes go on sale ahead of Halloween, including Jeffrey Dahmer and the Queen Dylan, who is 17, attends a different public high school in Brooklyn. He is good looking and popular, and his high-achieving girlfriend is too. But Dylan struggles to stay organized, and he is, as he puts it, “doing shit in school.” He feels desperate, sometimes, about his future. Dylan wants to be able to afford nice things — headphones and high-end fashion and jewelry — and he wants to be more than middle class, yet he can’t envision what adulthood will look like or how he’ll get there. He first saw Tate last summer on TikTok, he thinks because he was already watching self-help videos by Peterson, and he liked Tate instantly. Tate talks about heartbreak and trauma as the necessary struggles of manhood, and he seemed to understand Dylan’s problems because he’d lived through them too. As a poor kid in the council flats, Tate would see men driving Ferraris and become enraged that they seemed to be flaunting possessions he could not afford. Things would be different when he became “ rich rich.” From Emory, the chess master, Tate seemed to have learned to see human existence as a battlefield with winners and losers, men and bitches, kings and “brokies.”Even at well-resourced schools with robust curricula for talking about identity, the conversations aren’t striking a chord with some of the kids. Spike, who is 17, describes the eye-rolling among his peers when they’re forced to attend another seminar or symposium on systemic racism, microaggressions, misogyny, white saviorism, gentrification, toxic masculinity, or gender roles. Last year, for a social-justice day, the school created “affinity spaces for every single identifier,” he recalls. In the white-male affinity space, no one spoke. “Everyone sat around and played video games.” At the end of the video, Wynn calls for a new, positive model of manhood created by men in conversation with men. But out in the world, this kind of talking is nonexistent. Online, there’s yelling and dunking. And at school, where America’s boys and young men spend their days, the earnest public statements about open communication and mutual respect are countermanded by anxiety and exhaustion among administrators and teachers, as well as growing pressure to show results while avoiding claims of harassment and bullying. So when a student raises a thorny topic in class — Why can’t I use this slang? Why can’t I wrestle with my friends in the hall? — a stressed teacher’s impulse may be to change the subject and move on.
Tate also inhabits the very online world of men’s men, and he alludes to, insults, praises, and goes on the podcasts of those characters, too. The fans understand Tate in relation to them. Unlike Joe Rogan, Tate is a terrible listener. He is more of a heel than the pretty-boy boxer Logan Paul and less fratty than the Nelk crew. He spouts alt-right conspiracy theories about vaccines, masks, and women like his acquaintance Alex Jones, and he annexed the universe of gamer nerds by attaching himself to the Twitch streamer Adin Ross. He is a high-speed bellicose debater and interrupter like Ben Shapiro and, like the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, seemingly concerned about the psychic pain of young men. Yet the boys see him as more charismatic and aspirational, so he becomes exemplary to them in a way the others are not. Jacob has friends who consume Tate’s videos, and he’s noticed a change in them. Out of school and on the street, his friends relax, and “they can slip into something they might not have normally said, just casual remarks, jokes about women, the wage gap, how women should be in the kitchen.” It’s a kind of arrogance, or at least a misapprehension, to believe that you can take the good without the bad, two different boys told me. One put it this way: “They think they’re taking the valuable stuff and leaving the garbage. But I don’t think they’re successful. People are much more susceptible than they like to think they are.”I feel like, in general, in mass and mainstream media — this is definitely a very controversial thing to say — masculinity is being painted in a very bad light, then this guy comes along who’s very masculine and he’s inspiring the youth,” Dylan tells me. He wants to be more productive in his life so he can feel less lost, he says, “and then I turn on TikTok and there’s Andrew Tate saying, ‘You have to work as hard as you can, and if you just work on your goals, you’ll achieve them.’” Other influencers aren’t giving point-by-point constructive advice, Dylan told me. “Tate will say, ‘Why are you watching me? Go do something productive,’ and I’ll go do whatever I’ve been procrastinating, like my homework,” he says.
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