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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Not a good day for Mr. Tate Andrew Tate, Brother Tristan arrested amid human trafficking probe

Andrew Tate and his brother have been arrested and led away in cuffs after their luxury Romanian mansion was raided by police.

The divisive influencer, referred to by his fans as ‘Top G’, and his brother Tristan are being quizzed over human trafficking allegations, according to local reports.

The pair have reportedly been under investigation for the alleged kidnapping of two young women in their villa in the town of Voluntari.

Their home was raided by the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism in Bucharest earlier today, reports Libertatea.

The brothers were issued warrants in relation to forming an organized criminal group, international human trafficking, and rape.

I am skeptical. This does not make sense from a risk vs. reward perspective. Presumably their hustler university program and other businesses provide plenty of legal revenue; why engage in such unnecessary risk? Romania's criminal justice system probably does not have the same requirement of burden of proof as in the US.

Because he’s a pimp who makes his money off selling a ‘you can be a teenaged boy forever, but getting all the shit you thought you wanted’ fantasy, and acts like it.

I mean he probably has a basic level of smarts to manage his illusion, but this does not necessarily mean he has good decision making skills. They’re correlated but one doesn’t necessarily imply the other.

I enjoy the irony of him getting busted in a country so corrupt their diplomatic mission to integrate the criminal justice system with the rest of Europe’s got caught using a stolen car on the same day, at the urging of an international NGO with the acronym GRETA, after he bragged about paying off local officials. But, uh, all that points to someone who has poor decision making skills, even if he isn’t necessarily stupid.

I am skeptical. This does not make sense from a risk vs. reward perspective. Presumably their hustler university program and other businesses provide plenty of legal revenue; why engage in such unnecessary risk?

I mean..part of the "scam" of Hustler's University is that Tate has a great life and makes a lot of money and will teach you how to do the same.

Even if the Bugatti and houses are leased and rented, you still need starting capital to sell that scam. How did Tate make said money? He didn't have a lucrative MMA career... I think he didn't expect to blow up this big and now his past is catching up with him.

TBH I feel the same way about his misogyny: Tate could have been vastly more popular and could have skirted the ban (as other "manosphere"' guys are doing now) but he said and did things early on that allowed him to be tarred as an actual misogynist. But, at the time he was saying it, he probably didn't expect to ever get as big as he did. But he was locked in.

So another SBF...a fake or fraudulent rich person whose lies caught up to him

He might have actually have been independently wealthy (though I'm suspicious of this - he speaks like a rapper in some ways) but it would have been through illicit activities like pimping or pseudo-illicit ones (since it just collapses into pimping) like running a webcamming business.

Tate could have been vastly more popular and could have skirted the ban (as other "manosphere"' guys are doing now) but he said and did things early on that allowed him to be tarred as an actual misogynist.

Why not just say "said and did things that were actually misogynistic"? Hard to get more misogynistic in the actual meaning of the word than treating women as chattel, no?

In some ways doing things allowed him to be tarred is worse for his career, it wouldn't matter how sexist he was if no one ever found out.

I think that was the clear implication of "actual misogynist" (especially in the context of the rest of the post) but your framing is better.

Andrew Tate is a pimp - why are you surprised he gets arrested for being one? Nothing he says is different from other pimps who have bothered to write down their thoughts (like Iceberg Slim).

It is surprising because he already has bigger sources of income, and a big media following. It makes no sense to risk it all, when he already made it to the top.

One thing that proponents of noble lies like the falsehood of HBD or Healthy at an size seem to never account for is that by publicly denouncing the truth and harshly punishing any deviation they are feeding credibility directly into the kind of people who shouldn't have any. If you're a young man today and all you see from the mainstream is easily debunkable nonsense and thinly veiled contempt for you and what you see on the fringe is people comprehensively calling out those plain lies, coupled with their own nonsense but at the same time clearly not holding you in contempt then... I mean it's not convincing to those of us who contrarian enough to assume everyone involved in probably wrong but we're a rare breed. To many others even if they don't internalize it this is just as simple as siding with the liars who pander to you over the liars who demonize you. The solution is to stop. fucking. lying. so. god. damned. much. But this isn't going to change for many depressing reasons.

I just want to second this. I'm a little bit unique on the motte in not having a college degree and working in skilled labor instead, and my secular peer group reflects mostly young(as in not close to retirement, not as in "under thirty/forty"), working class males(skilled labor jobs are gender segregated, deal with it).

And the thing is, they know they're being lied to constantly. Just all the time, by every source they're being taught to regard as trustworthy. They know that being fat isn't healthy, and those black women in the sports illustrated swimsuit edition need to hit the gym and should stick the the watermelon over the fried chicken for the sake of their health. And they know that the people claiming it's healthy and beautiful are influential people they're supposed to regard as more trustworthy than their lying eyes. They don't know why- it's pretty difficult to imagine that someone actually cares that much about fat women qua fat women to try to lie about health at any size or whatever, and anyway it doesn't seem like the actually kind thing to do to tell them to go ahead and get seconds because stupid bullshit about exercise being white supremacy- so they believe people who tell them why and don't have obvious motives to want them to believe mistruths. This source is usually Alex Jones or someone similar, not Andrew Tate, but it isn't hard for me to imagine Andrew Tate being extremely popular among a different set of young males. Not in skilled labor- he mostly comes off as pretty toxic to people who emphasize the "working" part of "working class", but it seems immediately apparent to me that he has a lot of appeal among young males who want to get rich and laid and don't want to work for it. And most of them have some sense that "the government and media and major corporations are constantly lying to us all the time, for no apparent reason", and also some sense that it wasn't always like this. That latter part is obviously BS; the government has been lying to the public for longer than any of us has been alive, and the media is about as bad. But the sense that a different way, where society's establishment is honest(I don't believe this has ever, in the history of the human race, happened since the garden of Eden) makes it even harder to convince them not to pay attention to Alex Jones or his black equivalent telling them the government and media are spouting BS deliberately to make them sick/weak/poor/sterile/whatever. And that tends to make Alex Jones a much more credible source of information, because, well, the government doing sandy hook doesn't seem totally implausible in the same way that "that man is actually a woman, and fat is healthy" does. Even when Alex Jones is pushing whatever bullshit about things that have nothing to do with the government lying.

I mean obviously you have a similar process going on with other groups, where- as I've written before- climate change skeptics and young earth creationists have a better, not worse, understanding of those theories than average. Why? Because they know enough to follow creationist or climate change skeptical arguments, but not enough to directly compare them with their opposites, and, well, creation scientists and climate change skeptics are a lot less likely to serve some agenda that's obvious, blatant lies to their in group. Creation scientists and climate change skeptical scientists simply tell fewer blatant lies than the scientific establishment tends to, and the actual way to distinguish the truth of the debate would be to get an advanced degree in those subjects and compare them at the nitty gritty technical details. Ain't nobody got time for that. We all have to pick which set of elites we want to listen to, and the ones that constantly and obviously lie to serve an agenda they have no apparent reason(of course the actual reason is the cathedral, even if it doesn't work the way Mr Moldbug describes the shoe still fits) for supporting seem like a bad bet. Even if we know the other guy is misrepresenting things to serve his agenda too, as long as that agenda makes sense for him to hold, it's epistemologically safer to believe the expert telling you that fossil fuel emissions are good for the environment because he's getting paid by Exxon, at least about other things, than it is the expert telling you that exercise is actually bad for you in a way fried chicken isn't.

In conclusion, if you want people to believe you, stop lying about so many obvious things.

Because they know enough to follow creationist or climate change skeptical arguments, but not enough to directly compare them with their opposites, and, well, creation scientists and climate change skeptics are a lot less likely to serve some agenda that's obvious, blatant lies to their in group. Creation scientists and climate change skeptical scientists simply tell fewer blatant lies than the scientific establishment tends to

I'd say creation scientists and climate skeptics are pretty obviously wrong in a way that pretty obviously serves their interests, even if I'd believe they aren't consciously lying. And yeah the scientific establishment would probably be better served if they held to the pure truth even more strictly than they have, but over all I think they've done pretty well on those issues, as shown by how evolution/climate change are both pretty well regarded as "True." these days by most people. Now all that's debated about climate change is its exact severity/the best policies to mitigate it, as it should be.

I think it's not a good idea to model this as narrowly as scientists vs laymen. The actually place the rubber meets the road is media vs layman. And in a lot of ways this explains much of the problem. The media took a shortcut on at least the climate science area and tried to brow beat people into accepting it rather than genuinely convince and engage with pushback. I mean "an inconvenient truth" made actual real predictions that mostly been wrong and it's widely agree Gore exaggerated to shock people into action. In other words he lied. Those of us who can engage with the science despite the media know that Global warming continues as an important to address phenomenon because we can grok the actual mechanisms and see the measures. Those who only engage with the media version see that they were lied to and have reacted by hardening against further lies in that direction. Even Evolution probably suffered by being weaponized by people more interested in taking down religion than spreading knowledge in good faith.

That well read people mostly accept these things as true is the faintest possible praise for theories that are this legible.

Those of us who can engage with the science despite the media know that Global warming continues as an important to address phenomenon because we can grok the actual mechanisms and see the measures.

Or, you're being fooled by a more sophisticated lie.

That's fair. But I think there isn't an easy solution to this, because I think the media has multiple motivations for publishing alarmism. a) They think ends justify the means and that exaggerating for a noble goal is worth it. b) Alarmism just gets more clicks, getting more money in their own pocket justify the means. And c), signaling, showing off how good of an environmentalist they personally are justify the means.

Punishing people more for dishonesty and rewarding honesty more is a good general approach. But that's pretty hard to do, since while it's very easy to say "You're full of BS" to someone who says "Climate change will end human life in the next 30 years", most cases are blurrier. What do you do to a journalist who publishes an opinion piece that says "In my personal opinion, I expect climate change to do two trillion in damage to this region over a ten year period" when the most accurate estimation is that it would only do 1 trillion in damage? At that point it's just opinions and estimation, you can get a bit angry at the exaggerating journalist, but demanding they get fired or something probably wouldn't be viable.

I don't mean that I'm surprised that many men would want the fairy tale they're peddling: the money, the cars, the bitches, the (possibly surgically enhanced, definitely HGH enhanced) eight pack and the spray-on tan. It's low class and shameful (or would be if we still had any standards) but I can understand the appeal.

Heck, do it in a somewhat more high-class (not "high-class" as such, but moreso than Tate, at least), and you're Jeffrey Epstein. I wonder how well Jeff would have done if he had decided to start a hustle on the theme of "here's how you can have sex with all the "girls on the younger side" you want and have private airplanes and politicians and scientists and businessmen and royals at your beck and call, like me!"

This. There is little to no overlap between the types of people that sell advice on how to make money in the stock market or real estate and the people who actually make money in the stock market or real estate.

But I find it literally incomprehensible how you can look at those people and not realize immediately that they're running a scam.

Especially since the tell is so obvious: when someone is apparently fabulously rich (despite the difficulty in pinning down his net worth when asked) but still needs to make that $49.99 teaching a Discord course to you...run.

All of these people - Tai Lopez & Dan Lok were doing it long before Tate - are the same. All you need is that one tell and you avoid them all.

But I kinda get it too: Tate is actually a vastly better demagogue than most of these other types.

He combines TRP talking points for sexually frustrated youth with this weird...it's not populism since Tate mocks poor people...let's say anti-elitism where he complains about the Matrix and the Fed money printer and the Canadian government being able to shut off your bank accounts (convenient way to shill crypto) in a way that's greater than the sum of its parts. It appeals not just to people's sexual anxieties but their economic ones while also making it seem like all the hate Tate is actually for being honest about the latter (making it seem like he has less to gain from pandering to you).

It's all bullshit, but it's a more interesting web of bullshit than people like Tai Lopez. Coffeezilla made the point too that he's managed to figure out a way to isolate his scam from his own persona, which most of them can't do (since the persona is the scam).

But I find it literally incomprehensible how you can look at those people and not realize immediately that they're running a scam. And it's not even like there's a "Well, yeah, they're terrible but think about the Supreme Court picks." argument to be made, they're just going to take your money and you'll still be a loser that wants to be like them and defends them when they say stupid shit...

This is a fully general criticism of parasocial relationships. I know a young man who I often overhear listening to these sorts of social media videos. The usual format seems to be a Red Pill Guru type dispensing cynical reductionism (that makes a lot of evo-psych style sense), usually with some clueless man or woman getting "schooled" in either a hostile or humble manner as a foil. The appeal is the impression of being in on non-obvious lore and understanding, and of flexing that superiority over others in a way that forces them to acknowledge it.

It's basically just The Daily Show with less obfuscated and more direct sales scams advertising revenue.

the thing that really amazes depresses the shit out of me about the Tates of this world is how many men look at their bullshit and uncritically buy in. Same thing with Liver King and other influencers.

Every more moderate alternative has been forcefully suppressed by a culture vehemently against men being masculine. Only those willing to break taboos and say the unsayable are left to provide such things.

When Jordan Peterson is a misogynist the term loses meaning.

Ugh. Not really an original insight, but the thing that really amazes depresses the shit out of me about the Tates of this world is how many men look at their bullshit and uncritically buy in. Same thing with Liver King and other influencers.

Low-skilled jobs tend to be boring and not pay well. Despite college being more common, still, not everyone can cut it in white collar work either. So this leave a lot of men looking for a shortcut.

Lack of good male role models/instructionals in the field of 'how to get bitches' leads to the Tates of the world getting pre-eminence since they're atleast offering something positive and actionable.

Like I'm not a huge fan of Jordan Peterson but a lot of the critics of his side of the manosphere just don't acknowledge how little the current left-dominated media really attempts to set men up to be successful or upwardly mobile. Tate might be a cartoon character but atleast he's something.

And that IMO is the biggest problem with the manosphere - it doesn't offer you solutions to your problems, but makes you feel good for having problems. And of course, it also doesn't take away from the fact that, as much as feminists hate them, confident and materially successful men do rank very high in the sexual market. That's why guys like Tate can say can go as far enough as they did and not face any consequences.

Like others have commented, I have to disagree that the manosphere provides no solutions to your problems. If you haven't experienced it at all I can see why it would appear that way because the majority of the content isn't specific or helpful enough to be valuable. There's plenty of graft, cruft, and "tough love" that's useless for people at the too-early stage of recognizing sexual market reality.

And that IMO is the biggest problem with the manosphere - it doesn't offer you solutions to your problems, but makes you feel good for having problems.

This is one of those statements that sounds accurate, but it's probably just due to outgroup homogeneity bias.

While what you're saying is true of say...incels. I would argue that TRP is vastly more helpful than say...Men's Lib or any feminist coded version. And it's really cause it captures a few banal insights:

  1. No one cares about any ideological justification you can come up with for failing*. That's for feminists. Just try not to fail

  2. Lift weights

  3. Approach - a lot of the "marginal" men really just need to be more outgoing. All of the TRP evopsych just gives them the confidence to do it.

That's all it takes to be better than a lot of the more "progressive" versions. Simply because it emphasizes an internal locus of control rather than commiseration.

* A very common thing on /r/MensLib and other such progressive spaces is to note problems, tut tut piously about how this or that problem all caused by patriarchy (even if women are the ones driving it) and will be solved...eventually when we dismantle it. In the meantime...they have nothing for you.

I would offer an and/or for (2): get competent at something useful / popular / impressive.

  • A very common thing on /r/MensLib and other such progressive spaces is to note problems, tut tut piously about how this or that problem all caused by patriarchy (even if women are the ones driving it) and will be solved...eventually when we dismantle it. In the meantime...they have nothing for you.

Or varieties of 'yes that is a problem but we need to solve the problems of marginalized oppressed people and prior generations that resembled you had it good so fuck you'

it doesn't offer you solutions to your problems

'Get jacked, get confident, get bitches' is more of a solution than anything being offered from the other side of the fence, though.

Is it One Size Fits All? No!

But atleast it's a suggestion compared to either 'Be Yourself' in a dating scene that is beyond warped or 'Long screed about how bad and evil men from before your time acted poorly etc etc etc'

The thing is, as with a lot of social problems these days, the solutions are all coup-complete.

You can't make the institutions that would allow boys to grow into men and negotiate high trust relationships with the opposite sex, those have all been destroyed on purpose by the powers that be, and as they dance on their graves they will pounce on any burgeoning attempt at creating such things again.

The political formula of the current ruling class requires any such things be crushed, so even if they didn't want men to be so aimless (and they do complain about it in those silly "where have all the good men gone" articles) they are duty bound to oppose any solutions.

Hence all you end up with is levels of cynicism reminiscent of Russian anarchism and its assorted bands of crooks, psychopaths and false prophets.

those have all been destroyed on purpose by the powers that be, and as they dance on their graves they will pounce on any burgeoning attempt at creating such things again.

Why do you say it's on purpose? Now I do agree the breakdown of families and fertility rates, high costs of education, housing crisis, etc., did demoralise many young men and true enough, the hard left seems to be gleeful about it. But is there any evidence that this is deliberately induced by the elite?

Why do you say it's on purpose?

Because those are declared aims of (some of) the Enlightenment and its litany of successors. From Rousseau to Engels to Dworkin to Haraway. The destruction of family, sex and the related social institutions isn't some accident, it's controlled demolition. In a similar fate to nation, religion and other such vestiges of premodern power.

Chernyshevsky didn't say "people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men" out of nothing. There is a clear opposition between human nature and the modern project and any attempt to roll back the decay of the institutions that shore up the former would go against the project that gives its very legitimacy to the modern ruling class: progress and the promise of ultimate equality between minds detached from physical constraints.

Men can't have their men's club because that would be reaction, fascism, patriarchy, or any of the other names given to people who attempted to stop the bulldozer or turn it back.

If you want names and faces you can get your fill from the usual suspects, but the Pritzker and Soros didn't start this. They're just the current face of a pebble that's been running down this hill for centuries now.

Well, they were caught because Andrew Tate was having beef with Greta Thunberg and his location was determined thanks to a pizza box from a local Romanian pizzeria. (EDIT: Though this also could be why)

And it's not even like there's a "Well, yeah, they're terrible but think about the Supreme Court picks." argument to be made

They're still young!

Thank God I wont have to hear about this clown for a minute or two, until he eventually bribes his way out at least. He does haves jokes though, I will give him that, his appearance on Tom Seguras podcast was a comedy show.

His popularity was a glitch in the matrix moment for me. So many normie young guys hearing red pill talking points for the first time, and thinking this guy is the Oracle at Delphi. Really the cringiest timeline.

Why would you expect them to have well-thought-out risk/reward tradeoffs? Other than what's in the other replies, most of what I know about Andrew Tate comes from youtube and instagram bits where he's bragging about how much money he has and insulting men who aren't rich, and how he has a surefire way for you to get rich. Sounds like walking survivorship bias to me, where someone made bad gambles that paid off for a time but have come around to bite him. Also, "plenty" of revenue is never enough for some people.

he's bragging about how much money he has and insulting men who aren't rich,

I never got the impression he was insulting people. It seems like his persona is mostly an act. Sorta like Alex Jones. Being insulted for being poor is hardly the worst thing . Better than being insulted for being short (cannot fix that).

"It didn't happen, and if it did, that's a good thing."

Anyway, Alex Jones isn't doing so hot lately either. Whether he believed his schlock or not, he gambled on no one calling him out, and made a lot of money...until he didn't. The obvious hypothesis is that Tate made a bunch of radical decisions, like running scams or moving to Romania, and finally hit one that had actual consequences.

He has been broadcasting ad-filled episodes and run ad-filled websites for 2 decades. he probably has loads of $ and more coming everyday, even with the lawsuit he will be fine. Just because you are not making as much money anymore does not mean you lose what you made.

I don't see how it being an act changes whether something is an insult or not. Jones may not seriously believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag, but it would still be pretty hurtful to hear someone say that you faked your own child being dead for a political fight (and it seems like some people did believe him). Like with most bullies and charlatans, the correct response is not to take them seriously, whether you agree or disagree, not to engage. But I also don't think it's entirely an act; he is actually living in Romania, after saying (as another poster quoted) that you can get away with rape there by bribing the cops.

And if it is an act, then Tate is still a greedy asshole, selling desperate men on get-rich-quick schemes, like 10,000 con men before him. Does that sound like a man with a great grasp of risk management to you?

I never got the impression he was insulting people. It seems like his persona is mostly an act.

And part of the act is insulting poor people. At least sometimes - I've definitely heard him say "brokies" and mock people who work hard for their money a lot.

this seems the same as when the left accuses comedians of punching down. his style of humor or commentary is not for everyone.

He was apparently "caught" because he started a Twitter feud with Greta Thunberg, during which he posted a video that had a shot of a pizza box that supposedly confirmed his presence in Romania, and the Romanian police arrested him within 30 minutes. That seems... implausible? Like, you needed the confirmation of the pizza box, but knew his exact location within the country well enough to nail him that quickly? OTOH, this all provides further evidence of my Dankest Timeline Hypothesis. Expect one more bit of absurdity before 2022 slips away.

Apparently it might get even better than that: there is apparently a European anti-human trafficking org that might be involved. Its initials? GRETA.

I'm actually a bit hesitant to do too much research on this cause it's too funny to not be true (and the very thing that creates the humor makes google searches harder)

"Actions of a young Swedish girl indirectly lead to the arrest of a black Muslim man for grooming and sex trafficking. Conservatives, naturally, defend the innocence of the black Muslim man and and bash the young Swedish girl."

This is the most savage thing I've ever seen you say and I am very proud.

I could get much more savage if I wanted to do so. One of my uses of this forum is a sort of a calmness-in-argumentation exercise, though I don't really succeed there as well as I could, either.

Reminds me of the criminal case that lead to the founding of the ADL: a murder of a 13 year old girl in 1910's Georgia, of which a white man (Leo Frank) and a Black man (Jim Conley) were suspected. Despite how racist this time and place is suspected of being, it is was the white man who was found guilty, kidnapped by vigilantes and then killed by them.

I mean, you’re pretty obviously eliding the whole Jewish angle and the fact that Leo Frank’s “whiteness” was very much a complicated question at that time. (And remains complicated now.) Like, this supposed irony resolves itself almost immediately once you drill down on that detail.

(For what it’s worth, I think that there were a number of reasons why Frank was targeted by locals that had nothing to do specifically with his Jewishness.)

I think it's worth noting that one of those reasons was surely how many of Mr. Frank's female employees testified that he was a creep and they expected him to rape and murder one of them.

It seems the pizza box claim goes back to this Twitter thread, which has a screenshot of this article. The article mentions the police used "social networks" to determine the brothers were together in Romania to arrest them but doesn't mention the pizza, or any particular social media post (Tate had made others about being in the country).

- But how did you know his exact location just from the pizza box, Holmes?

- Elementary, my dear Watson. In the video the pizza box happens to be located in a room, which was featured in several of his previous videos. That room happens to belong to a certain mansion, which is registered as Tate's address of residency at the local town hall!

- Amazing!

The actual cue that settled Tate's fate was that the pizza box belongs to a poor quality (cheap) shop thus showing the local cops that he would (no longer) be able to afford the aforementioned $500 customary bribe.

Oh and the local Romanian police is following his social media activity for the same reason everyone else is, where else would they get quality advice on masculinity and getting rich quick?

I admittedly know relatively little about Tate but it seems to me totally on-brand for him to be a sex-trafficking rapist. It'd be like if you told me Roosh V was a rapist. Like, no shit. It'd be more surprising if he wasn't. The guy who was banned from Twitter for saying it is partially a rape victims fault that they are raped and who said that 40% of the reason he moved to Romania is because police would be less likely to prosecute rape charges, is a rapist? What a shocker! Who could possibly have thought such a person would rape and traffic women! Here's an interview from 2019 where Tate gives his thoughts on the Romanian legal system:

The women understand they ain’t going to sit there and drink all your drinks and play with your d*ck, go to your house and suck your d*ck and then start having sex with you and say, you know what, “it’s rape.” It doesn’t even cross their minds. They’re very self-protective cause they know if a rich Romanian man did something wrong to a Romanian girl and she called the police, he’ll just give him $500 and it’ll go away. It’s as corrupt as f*ck. So there everyone’s far more personally responsible.

Definitely sounds like a guy very concerned with staying on the right side of the Romanian legal system!

Presumably their hustler university program and other businesses provide plenty of legal revenue; why engage in such unnecessary risk?

What I have heard from online rumors is that the women were trafficked as part of the Hustler University program. Basically "look at all these hot women who'll have sex with you if you follow our program!" Only the women are not there consensually. Maybe he thought he'd be able to give the police $500 to fuck off like he mentions in the interview and that turned out not to be the case.

Charitable interpretation: Tate was arguing against the emasculating effect of an overly credulous security apparatus. Western women are only making (false) rape accusations because extortion is a viable tactic. Take away the safety net and you take away that option, shifting the calculus in favor of "personal responsibility."

Seems pretty in line with his persona.

It obviously runs into all the same problems with folks who want to, say, LARP Wild West frontier justice. It simultaneously offends my effete Western sensibilities and reflects poorly on his intent to avoid such situations!

Rapist and sex trafficker really does not seem on-brand. Tate's a really good looking guy - top few percent. What's the point of raping women when he can just go to the local club and look cool?

who said that 40% of the reason he moved to Romania is because police would be less likely to prosecute rape charges,

Your quote from him indicates a concern about false allegations of rape, not a desire to actually rape anyone.

I'm not sure why one would need to use trafficked women, as opposed to just ordinary hookers, for Hustler U.

Rapist and sex trafficker really does not seem on-brand. Tate's a really good looking guy - top few percent. What's the point of raping women when he can just go to the local club and look cool?

Rapists are not generally desperate men who can't get laid otherwise.

As I'm sure you know, the feminist conception of rape is that it's about power, not sex. They would argue that someone like Tate might enjoy rape for the power it gives him.

While I do not really buy their argument (to be honest, I wonder if any man ever actually has), they aren't completely wrong that some men who are perfectly capable of finding a willing partner still enjoy the feeling of control over an unwilling one. And someone whose entire brand is money, power, and bitches might easily be the sort who considers "consent" an optional and/or silly concept.

some men who are perfectly capable of finding a willing partner still enjoy the feeling of control over an unwilling one. And someone whose entire brand is money, power, and bitches might easily be the sort who considers "consent" an optional and/or silly concept.

I think a plausible story of Tate raping people is a story much closer to Sam Brinton - a guy with a weird unstoppable compulsion.

But that compulsion doesn't sound at all like Tate's public persona from what little I've read. Tate's persona seems to be "[they] sit there and drink all your drinks and play with your d*ck, go to your house and suck your d*ck". That's not a story of forcing women at all, that's a story of being so cool and socially accepted that women want to have sex with you.

That latter motivation also fits a similar story of him having a harem of women doing onlyfans to enrich him.

I agree with you, it makes no sense and definitely very off-brand for somebody with Tate's level of rich and looks to go around rape people.

Especially with his huge media presence, way too much to lose than gain.

Well, he is definitely innocent for now. Until proven guilty.

I knew nothing at all about these people, and cannot say I am gratified by even this limited introduction. The modern world continues to impress with its ability to generate fresh horrors.

It's just the same pimping Iceberg Slim wrote about fifty years ago, dressed up for the social media age. Find vulnerable women, seduce and abuse them, force them to make you money by exploiting their bodies.

One presumes that Iceberg Slim persisted long enough to write a book largely because the vast majority of society was unaware of his existence and activities. We have no such excuse for these two.

I mean I'm not sure on anyone's age or career length offhand, but both wound up in handcuffs.

a fair point.

Iceberg Slim start writing precisely because he was arrested and had served jail time and decided to not be a pimp anymore.

Hustler university is not the way that the Tate brothers initially made their money. The way they became millionaires was basically to get a bunch of romanian girlfriends at the same time and slowly convince them to start doing onlyfans and camming stuff, managing them and taking a cut of the profits. Like, literally their initial business model depended on their ability to be so sexually attractive to young women that they'd be willing to give them a cut from their camming revenue. All the stuff like hustler university and their chains of local gambling houses in Romania came after they made their money from porn. In one interview I remember watching a few years ago Tristan Tate mentioned that at one point they had like 30 girls living at the same time in their mansion doing porn camshows... all of them apparently sexually exclusive with one of the Tate brothers. So the allegations wouldn't be completely outside of their wheelhouse, though this might also be caused by some ex-girlfriend bad blood, I can only imagine the levels of drama that would be going on in a house with 30 girls and 2 guys...

It does seem like a very strange story. But then again, edgelords are strange fellows. I've heard some plausible, and disturbing stories about the Barstool guys as well.