One of the great commenters on this channel asked me this yesterday. I must say that I really don’t know much about Andrew Tate at all. He seems to be some kind of cult figure on the right, and there were a number of videos put up on YouTube by right-wingers shocked at his conversion to Islam, wondering if it was genuine. I gather also that he’s anti-feminist, but the only other thing I really know about him is that the Romanian police arrested him on charges of enslavement and people trafficking after he got into some kind of spat on Twitter with Greta Thunberg. The right-wing American activist and YouTuber Matt Walsh coincidentally put up a video about this question, ‘Why do young men support Andrew Tate’ on YouTube yesterday. I haven’t watched it, so really don’t know why some men do. My guess is that, to them, he represents traditional masculinity and conservative values against the woke left.
In the case of Tommy Robinson, I think the short answer is that the people that support him are thugs. Robinson used to be a BNP stormtrooper before founding the English Defence League and Pegida UK. He’s got convictions for assault, and his house is actually in his wife’s name because of another conviction for mortgage fraud. There’s a video up on YouTube showing what he’s really like. It’s of him punching and beating someone at a sports match. His method of dealing with critics is to dox them, telling his supporters not to bother that person, and then later taking the video down, so that it doesn’t look like he’s encouraging people to go round and harass them He’s also done this personally to his critics and their families. He turned up at the house of the parents of one of his critics in Cumbria with his horrible mate Avi Yemeni, demanding a word in the early hours of the morning. He also went round banging on the windows and doors of Australian anti-racist and teacher Mike Stuchbery, as well as slandering him as a paedophile. It ended with Stuchbery leaving his job to go to Germany. He also got hit with a heavy legal case after he libelled a Syrian immigrant kid who’d suffered racist bullying at school. Robinson claimed the lad was the bully while interviewing one of the boys responsible for the attack. Robinson got sued for libel, lost, and was ordered to pay substantial damages.
A fair number of his supporters seem to be football hooligans. A few years ago when he was running the English Defence League, their supporters included football casuals, so called because they wore casual clothing looted from the stores they trashed. When he turned up in Bristol, he was supported by the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, who might be genuine football fans, but I suspect otherwise. As for respectable Conservative support, I’m not so sure. The Lotus Eaters support him, but talk about him in coded language as ‘the bad man’ in case they get a YouTube ban for doing so. I don’t know if other right-wing web sites support him. I haven’t seen him interviewed by the New Culture Forum, even though they have interviewed History Debunked’s Simon Webb. Possibly this lack of obvious support is because of his violence and criminality, just as many Tories in the 1970s stopped supporting the NF because of it.
Unfortunately, the long official coverup of the grooming gangs has given him ammunition. He’s made a number of videos about them and spoken to their victims, in contrast to some of the police and local authorities that have tried to silence them. He’s thus able to present himself as a lone voice standing against official complicity in these terrible crimes.
I’ve covered Robinson and his wretched followers in a number of blog posts, and the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation, Hope Not Hate, have published a book exposing him and his crimes. My guess is that some men support him for the same reason they support Tate, and that Robinson also represents to them traditional Britain against the Muslim threat. But how much support he has beyond his own milieu I really don’t know.
Tags: Andrew Tate, Anti-Feminism, Avi Yemeni, Conservatives, Court Cases, Cumbria, Democratic Football Lads' Alliance, English Defence League, Football Hooligans, Fraud, Greta Thunberg, History Debunked, Hope Not Hate, Immigrants, Intimidation, Libel, Looting, Mike Stuchberry, Muslims, New Culture Forum, People Trafficking, Police, Simon Webb, The Lotus Eaters, Tommy Robinson, Violence
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
January 6, 2023 at 1:04 pm |
Well, if you don’t know much about Tate, here’s a good start
https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/andrew-tate-platformed-by-government-favoured-service-provider/
January 6, 2023 at 2:13 pm |
Thanks, Gill. 🙂 very interesting article. In other words, Tate is a violent, racist misogynist with a history of violence against women. In his own words, nearly half of the reason he fled to Romania was to escape rape charges, and once there it is alleged he was kidnapping women and forcing them to perform pornographic acts. Unsurprisingly, he’s in with the worst people – Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Tommy Ten Names, Donald Trump Jnr and, of course, Nige. He prattles about conspiracy theories, violence towards women and, of course, he’s got a bee in his bonnet about the World Economic Forum. Haven’t they all? What I found most interesting is that his backer, Thiel, is another American private healthcare head, who wants a piece of our NHS, who was a supporter of young Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father and his wretched Libertarianism.
This clears a lot of stuff up. There’s been shouting from the American right that Tate has somehow been framed and it’s all false charges due to some connection between the Romanian police and Thunberg. But from the sound of it, it looks very much that his arrest is due to allegations of genuine, and extremely heinous, criminal activity.