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Not a good day for Mr. Tate Andrew Tate, Brother Tristan arrested amid human trafficking probe
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.
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.
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.
Or, you're being fooled by a more sophisticated lie.
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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.
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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!"
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
No one cares about any ideological justification you can come up with for failing*. That's for feminists. Just try not to fail
Lift weights
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.
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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'
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'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'
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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.
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?
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.
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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)
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They're still young!
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