Former professional kickboxer, self-proclaimed ‘Top G’ and a staunch advocate of ‘escaping the matrix’, Andrew Tate, landed himself in hot water a couple days before New Year’s Eve. Following a verbal duel with environmentalist Greta Thunberg which involved big cars with huge emissions and an email address with ‘small d*** energy’ , Tate released a video response to the young activist. The video helped the Romanian police track Tate’s location which subsequently led to his arrest on account of “organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing, and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost.” Not only did Tate get brutally ratioed by Greta on Twitter, he was also arrested — which led to the collective meltdown of Tate’s fanboys. Many eagle-eyed viewers took to Twitter to point out the similarities between Tate and Duke (played by Dave Bautista), an American men’s rights streamer in the Netflix film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Glass Onion was anyway being lauded for its Simpsons-level foreshadowing given how accurately it predicted the shitstorm following Musk’s Twitter takeover. With Andrew Tate’s arrest, the Daniel Craig-starrer seems to have attained the Nostradamus status for foreshadowing his downfall down to the last detail.
Tate And Duke: The Toxic Brotherhood
Exhibit A: Duke, in Glass Onion, is a men’s rights streamer with over a million followers on Twitch. He has a podcast where he talks about pressing <air quote>men’s issues — one of them being the ‘boobification’ of America. He sells Rhino pills (unregulated and potentially dangerous performance enhancement drugs which promise firmer, longer-lasting erections) to his impressionable audience of 17-year-old boys and when arrested, he asks Miles to bail him out. He also carries a gun with him and shoots it in the air casually after taking a swim in the pool. Anyone remotely familiar with Andrew Tate knows that much like Duke, Tate has built a career out of podcasts teaching young men how to be the ‘alpha male’ — which essentially means being hyper-masculine, shedding any feminine traits (yes, that includes being “a little b****’”) and getting filthy rich while treating women like crap. All of these assertions have been made by Tate which can be verified in the countless YouTube shorts and hours of Podcast content uploaded on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube. Instead of urging men to talk about their struggles and challenges with other men, creating a safe space for them to share their demons, Tate instead asks them to not be a “a little b****”, essentially asking them to “man up”.
Compare that to Duke who tells his followers “Western workplace is dominated by men because that is what nature made us to do”, thereby perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes (FYI, there are plenty of men who take up writing, teaching and other jobs that do not require physical strength). Both Duke and Tate mislead their young followers who feel disillusioned and invalidated given the rise of the feminist movement where everyone — from the government to media-at-large is focused on empowering women. Men’s right’s streamers like Duke and Tate bait their young male followers by addressing some genuine concerns that men face today — loneliness, poor mental health, lack of safe spaces to talk about their experiences and body shaming but instead of discussing the root cause of these issues, they blame women and the left-wing politicians for it. Yes, young men are lonely, many of them are depressed, but blaming women and left-wing for lack of awareness around men’s mental health isn’t exactly appropriate. Asking young boys to ‘man up’ and place their self-worth around money and capital (which Tate is guilty of) will only make them feel worse about themselves thereby jeopardizing men’s mental health. Glass Onion does a fantastic job at exposing men like Tate who claim to fight for men’s rights but are only perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes by asking men to confine themselves to traditional masculine roles or as Duke calls it, ‘the natural order of things’.
It’s All About The Money!
Glass Onion also exposes the endgame of the men’s rights streamers and podcasters like Tate and Duke — that is, making money off the insecurities of impressionable young men. Just like the fictional Duke who scams his 17-year-old male audience by selling them dangerous performance enhancement drugs, Tate also scams young men by offering them membership of ‘The War Room’, a global network which he claims is more exclusive than the Illuminati ‘but only cooler’. Tate, on his website https://cobratate.com/, claims that ‘War Room’ will provide members access to millionaires around the world, help them network and become a millionaire. All one has to do is pay $5,000 (approximately Rs 4.13 lakh INR). Those who join the War Room have to sign a strict NDA (non-disclosure agreement) failure to abide by which can lead to a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Risking themselves of being sued, several users on YouTube joined Tate’s War Room only to find out that it is essentially a complicated Telegram channel which offers no value. Most of them advised their followers to not join Tate’s ‘network of millionaires’. To put it simply — Tate (and even Duke) claim to fight for men’s rights but are only poisoning the minds of young men with half-baked truths and brainwashing them into being an ‘alpha male’ instead of addressing their mental health problems. And while they are at it, they are also capitalizing on their insecurities and making thousands of dollars off it.
Ironically, both Duke and Tate who are self-proclaimed ‘alpha males’ are easiest to break and more often than not, they are their own enemy. Remember how Duke died in Glass Onion because of pineapple allergy? Notice how Tate gave his location away by ordering Jerry’s Pizza and unknowingly doxxed himself? More often than not, men like Tate who claim to have ‘escaped the Matrix’ end up jeopardizing themselves.
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