Andrew Tate (PBUH)

Tate decided to do this little prayer act because he thinks he is smart—but he is not as smart as he thinks he is. If he were really smart, he would understand that to be high status in the West is not to drive Bentleys or to boast about how much money you have—that is what gypsies do, and what Tate usually does. High-status people are concerned about climate change, about unconscious racial bias—about being “good people”, not about vulgar materialism. If you brag about your money, it shows you are insecure—people who are really secure about money never talk about it.

There is a scene in Fawlty Towers where a con man presents himself to the snobby hotel owner, Basil Fawlty, as an aristocrat. Fawlty’s wife says his bags are a bit tatty for an aristocrat. Fawlty replies, “Tat! Tat! It’s only the real upper classes that have tat like that.” Although Fawlty is wrong in this case, the actual sentiment is true—if you never had to worry about money and feel secure whatever happens because you have blue blood then you would feel equally secure to travel with “tat” as with the latest designer bags. Andrew Tate is a deeply insecure young man.

He is also a narcissist, so although he is bright—his father being a minor chess champion—he is detached from reality. In this case, he has decided to play at being religious to protect himself with religious status (another low-status move—religions are not esteemed in the West, except in a particular way). Why? He thinks he can “own” the left, since the left has been after him for a few months now; he thinks that the left loves Islam—partly because the right says this is so—and so in his mind this act will help show up the left because he will be able to say, “I’m a Muslim,” or, “I deeply esteem Islam—and so do you, so how dare you attack me.”

Tate is smart, just not quite smart enough—perhaps a little too autistic in his logic (knight to queen’s bishop). The left does hate Islam—it destroys Islam whenever it gets into power. The left is a bundle of rhetoric that holds all people are equal because it is so neurotic it cannot accept the reality that people are inherently unequal: hence when Westerners attack Muslim immigrants qua their Muslim nature, the left protests that Islam cannot be singled out for “special treatment” as, for example, being more violent than other religions—that would be inegalitarian. The right sometimes interprets this move by the left, as does Tate, as “the left likes Muslims”. This is not true.

When the left confronts Islam alone—or when Islam is not engaged in active attacks on the West—it disdains Islam because it asserts men are superior to women (and Allah superior to everyone). This is perfectly consistent if your default position is that all people are equal: it is just that Muslims are more vulnerable in the West, in this thought-mode, than women—being racial outsiders, less equal than women. Yet when Islam is “alone” in its native environment, it is a threat the left attacks. Hence Tate will make no headway with this approach because the left is not consistent in the way he thinks—he thinks they “just like Islam”, actually they dislike inequality (sometimes that’s about protecting Islam, sometimes about asserting the primacy of women over Islam). For the left, Tate will just be a “Muslim misogynist”—especially since he operates in a country, Romania, without a large Muslim minority to protect (plenty of gypsies though, hence he feels so at home).

I know this is what Tate thinks because I have seen him try the same strategy before: he tried to make out it was “racist” to associate Romania with weak laws to protect women against rape. That is not how it works: the left works in a fluid way, its concerns are situational and relational—in this case, Tate’s “woman troubles” trump the relatively “white” Romanians. He would have been on much stronger ground if he said, “As a black man I’m used to false rape allegations being levelled against me…there’s a long history of this kind of prejudice.” That would have shut the left right up.

Yet, of course, for Tate, who follows a lower-class status system, his blackness is what he wants to escape, not foreground. Hence he would never think to deploy it in this way—it is shameful for him; and he partly lives in Romania because Romanians are also “tan” and so, culturally, he is white there. It is only lily-white middle-class Australian students set to become medical doctors who say they are Aboriginal “blackfellas” to claim their scholarships (and social-status points)—for them it is high status to play down.

So Andrew Tate (PBUH) is engaged in another stunt—his whole life is a stunt, of course. It would be a better start if he abandoned his career as a whoremonger—a much better move than his prayer, of dubious sincerity, in a mosque or ashram or whatever religion he thinks will serve his purposes this week. I am sure the cosmic chess player would be much more pleased if he did.