The two wolves of Andrew Tate
The problem with Andrew “Cobra” Tate is that nobody will criticise him for the right reasons. He will be criticised for misogyny, for anti-feminism, for the creation of an unsafe environment for women—and his defenders will claim that he speaks the unacceptable truth. The reality is that Andrew Tate is a gangster who promotes gangsterism.
Armies are not gangs—a gang inverts what an army is. An army is based on honour and tradition—defence of the homeland. A gang is a group of men who come together to pursue their selfish interests against the law—and that can include against their own homeland; it is to gangs that foreign intelligence services turn to carry out tasks to undermine other countries, since gangs know how to circumvent home laws. So gangsters are traitors who are just out for themselves and their buddies—to whom they must swear loyalty on pain of death, mutilation, or death of their families (a mechanism that not only protects the gangs but suppresses truth in the general sense).
“We’re evolved to feel invincible amongst the battle cry of our peers”. Perhaps evolutionary psychology has established that as a fact, perhaps a swarm of monkeys demonstrably attacks with greater ferocity as a troop and their blood shows elevated testosterone or cortisol or whatever hormone is meant to actuate aggression in mammals. Whatever Tate means by that—whether he means “evolved” in a generic or Darwinian sense—he reveals his true character. A coward who cannot stand alone against a mob.
“We” feel invincible means “Andrew Tate” feels invincible—when protected by a mob and, I presume, when the mob has one lone individual up against the wall (the mob, the Mafia—do you see it yet?). If you’re looking for one man who will stand up and speak the truth when everyone says otherwise, don’t look for Andrew Tate—he only feels “invincible” in a mob; if you have to stand alone, he’ll be in his canary yellow lambo flat out down the motorway at 113 mph in the opposite direction and very hopeful he’ll never get caught up in “that business”.
People who talk about being ready to “FIGHT” and “DIE” have never thought seriously about what their own death entails—let alone, as is implied, what it would be like to kill other people; and, I presume, they do not really expect to face that question because they will be hidden in “the mob”, quite invincible when the time comes—invincible and irresponsible. Tate’s attitude is basically feminine, gangsterism is feminine—cartoonish violence notwithstanding, actually women like cartoonish violence. It’s the idea that a “real man” is in a mob—mobbed up—and he defends the gang’s taboos to the death with utter fanaticism. This is called being a hysterical woman, as with those mobs of women who claw at Justin Bieber or South Korean teen idols; it’s violent and sexual—as with women, mobs are very into “taboos”, often unspoken, that cannot be violated and keep “our thing” together.
So Andrew Tate is feminised—so he knows, like Sylvia Plath, that “every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face”; or, perhaps, she could have said “every woman adores a pimp”—someone who works her over when she misbehaves. You know, it’s silk suits, sports cars, cheap scent smuggled across the Channel in yer uncle’s yacht, an illegal fire arm in the glove compartment, county lines with the da lads from Albania, and drop yer bird orf at a tannin salon in Leamington Spa on the way (peck on the cheek, luv)—perhaps even a switchblade to cut up “a cow” who defies you (“British cows for British men,” scrawled the East End pimps in the 1930s when the Jewish gangsters moved in—very Peeky Blinders, if that’s what your cup of tea is). Andrew Tate is feminised because he was raised by a single mother—and what do the sons of single mothers typically do? Join gangs or form gangs. And that is exactly what Andrew Tate has done.
This point is not unconnected to the final statement in the tweet: “Brutal tenacity took me from social housing to hundreds of millions.” Well, “brutal tenacity” basically means “no scruples”—so how he won his kick-boxing championships, I don’t know; probably best not to look into it too deeply or, per Chinatown, someone will come along and put a flick blade up your nostril. “Hey, this is Tiramisu, Romania—don’t talkaboutit, capisce? You wanna play Boy Scout, you go back to…etc”. We know how Tate made his money—he’s a whoremonger, he runs a digital brothel; not even a physical brothel—since that would be too real.
“Social housing” is significant. The usual phrase, the phrase used by normal people, is “council housing” and people who come from it speak about “the estate” or they say “Cherry Park”. “I’m off Cherry Park like.” “That’s a bit rough.” “Yeah. It’s rough—me mam never let me play outside after school.” So why does Tate say “social housing”? It’s what social workers, The Guardian, and higher technical-specialists call “council housing”—it’s a euphemism, a euphemism to escape the stigma “council housing”. You see it written on those plastic roller-placards, like the standards of Roman legions, that always appear at conference centres: “SocialXpo 2023: a social housing forum | Resilience - Diversity - Sustainability”. You pick up a mini pain au chocolat and balance it on your coffee cup before you head out to the break-out session, a Masterclass on “elder abuse and peripheral social housing development strategies”.
So why does Tate do it? At one level, it’s his colossal narcissism. It looks like he’s really important—he talks like a person with an MA in Social Work and Welfare Studies. However, there’s more to it—I suspect Tate never really came from “the estate” at all; that is just the hard luck story he sells people because he is a feminised man—a gangster, a liar. He wants to control you by binding you into this self-pitying narrative.
Yet people who actually come from nothing are ashamed about it—hence another populist rightist figure, Paul Joseph Watson, who does say he comes from council housing, doesn’t wave it about. Sure, sometimes he plays “ordinary lad up against the elites”—not a hoity-toity Prince Andrew and his paedo pals, but just a lad who likes footie and a pint. Yet he doesn’t do it very often and he doesn’t have this self-pity narrative that’s present in Tate—he doesn’t want to sell you on a victim narrative; and that is because Tate is on the left.
The reason people use jargon like “social housing” is to make their story authentic. It makes the outsider think, “Wow, he must really have grown up in poverty because he said ‘social housing’—that’s a special authoritative word for ‘council housing’.” Except people who really come from that world don’t want to draw attention to it—dignity, self-respect—and if they talk about it they don’t try to convince you that it was real with high-flown language. Why would you want to convince someone with specialist jargon when you’re just telling them about where you came from? Just the basic facts—that’s all you need. If you were a liar though…
What probably happened was that Tate spent some time in council housing—perhaps six months, or lived in a house that was partly sponsored by the council and partly a private landlord. What he didn’t come from was “total poverty” or “the manor” or “the estate”. The problem with Tate, the environmental cause of his narcissism that led to this self-pity narrative, is that he has two wolves inside him.
Wolf number 1 is his mum—a school dinner lady from Luton. It is difficult to express how unglamorous it is to be a school dinner lady from Luton unless you are actually British—but let’s say it is the least glamorous, least sexy, least powerful, least intellectual, least important role you could hold in British society. The term “bog standard” sums it up. Nothing to be proud about—nothing at all. That is Wolf 1-–and it is why Tate feels very sorry for himself; he feels great self-pity about it still, despite all his superficial “success”.
However, there is also Wolf number 2 in Tate; and Wolf 2 is his dad—a black American USAF technician and minor chess champion. Tate’s dad was special. Tate’s dad was an American, an American in the Air Force (just like Top Gun), a black American—an intelligent black American. You can see little Andrew Tate in his primary school playground in Luton; he’s mixed-race, his dad is American, his dad is in the American military—he’s a chess champion, actually. He sends me these American comics. No, you can’t get them here. He sends me these American sweets. No, you can’t get them here. Little Andrew Tate is special. He’s not like the other boys in Luton—sure, his mum is a school dinner lady; but his dad—his dad is legendary. Not only is his dad black, he’s an intelligent black man—a chess champion, a technician; not a pilot—but not an army private either.
Now, this is all taboo but at a certain level Tate gets it—everyone else gets it—and you know it when you watch American conservatives genuflect to Thomas Sowell: the intelligent black American man is like a Phoenix that everyone seeks in America (in the West) that if found will save everyone. “He speaks Latin, he does calculus problems in his spare time,” says a conservative intellectual, as he practically cums in his underpants—we found him, not a sports star or a rapper, but a black chess champion. Orgasm.
So now we understand the Tate personality, the perfect storm for narcissism: on one side, we have the mother—who is nothing, probably did bring him up in straitened circumstances, albeit not absolute poverty, and who provided his primary role model. On the other side, we have the legendary father, practically a holy object in America and the wider West—who is distant and awesome, just like God; now, given his intelligence, he must have done alright in America and he must have sent some support—and that’s why “social housing” is a ruse (Tate is a bit special).
Of course, his mother probably ran him down. “No, we’re not going to Mablethorpe this year for a holiday because your father <<accusatory tone, by extension little Andrew>> didn’t send the money again.” The message soaks in: I’m bad, I’m useless—like my father; yet my father is also a demi-god, per the media. This sets up the narcissistic flip: filled with self-hatred and valueless and yet god-like and overconfident.
If you wanted to break Tate in an interview you could just say, “Andrew, tell me about what it was like to be abandoned by your father.” You would get a crack in the mask, quite a large one, and a lot of “cope”—and make sure to say “Andrew”, not “Mr. Tate” or “Cobra Tate”; you need to break down that grandiose mask he hides behind and uses to manipulate people with—so let’s keep it first-name and conversational, just like we met on the street on the way to the post office. “They call me Mister Tate!” Well, if you met him every day and wanted to puncture the narcissistic act you could say, “So Andy, how’s the pimping going?” Andy—what a come down. Actually, it’s an Executive Men’s Online Recreational Retreat and Business Strategy Centre. “Yeah but Andy how much do your girls charge me to show me their tw*t?”
So Tate is a narcissist who has this big gangster act that conceals the frightened and rejected little boy inside—and yet the frightened little boy still activates from time to time, Tate wants you to pity him; he likes to talk about how men can’t talk about how they suffer—no one cares. Well, that’s talking about your suffering without talking about, Andy—having your cake and eating it.
He’s a gangster. It’s good to be a gangster: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Grand Theft Auto, gangsta rap—gangsters are good. That’s just entertainment. Well, it’s an aspiration—the Twitter Trust and Safety Council, now defunct, was a gangster operation too; sure, they never slit anyone’s nose—they were gay gangsters, really—but it was the same principle. The cozy little club, the narcissism and self-pity, the code of silence, the unwritten rules—“our thing”. Gangsterism—a gang of girls or girly men who never stand alone and never seek the truth, but rather just have a “hustle” to protect that they staff with reliable stooges (even if they’re radically incompetent—he stays because he’s in “our thing”).
Andrew Tate is an unfortunate man because inside he is a lost frightened little boy who has never achieved anything real in his life—just set up a perverted gangster organisation to cultivate little Tatelings, the lost boys club. The problem is that the people who criticise him don’t say that—they complain he is insufficiently feminised, not feminist enough; even as he primps and preens before the mirror.
In the olden days, men like him were run out of town by outraged fathers—as stands he’s just rewarded. I mean, whatever, everyone’s a gangster now—even the American president looks pretty gangster when it comes down to it. Yet Tate is not a great actor: his performances are hollow and the pain underneath—“the wound”, as the poet Robert Bly used to say—remains all too obvious and tender. It’s never had time to heal, since it has never been exposed to the light—just suppurated until it blossomed into gangsterism. We are surrounded by people like Tate at various levels—if only they would give up the act, and get real.