Misogyny, Misandry and (Online Cult) Leader: The Daily Emails of Andrew Tate

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is now a national emergency. A new report by the UK National Police Chiefs’ Council this week noted VAWG-related crimes increased by 37% between 2018 and 2023, with male perpetrators ever younger. Much is technology-related, and police chiefs noted young men are being ‘radicalised’ into misogyny online by influencers like Andrew Tate.  

It’s not just the police warning of Tate’s influence. Women teachers across the anglosphere have noted antagonism from young male Tate fans. The UK counter-radicalisation strategy Prevent has also seen a ‘rapid rise’ in referrals of young Tate followers. Tate himself is currently facing trafficking accusations in Romania, as well as rape allegations in the UK – all of which he denies. While for many, Tate is a self-evidently violent misogynist, he has more than 9 million followers on social media platform ‘X’,  and many see him as an authentic truth-teller in the face of persecution.

Despite narratives of ‘radicalisation’ extremism scholars have been unclear what Tate represents. Is he an extremist? Or a malign influencer? Or something else? To help better understand this, I analysed two months’ worth of Tate’s daily emails, available to anyone who subscribes, and considered how they fit with current (gendered) understandings of extremism.

Tate First, Tate Foremost

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the most common topic of Tate’s emails is himself, specifically his success. Tate projects a vision of himself as a supreme leader, with mastery – or hegemony – over other men, and over himself. Tate’s projected alpha masculinity is one of discipline. Evidence of this discipline is both physical, his body, his battle for new PBs, and competition with the men around him; and mental, for instance the subordination of his own impulses and emotion to the rigours success demands.

In Trump-esque language, Tate uses series of superlatives to communicate to the reader that – among male supremacists, he is supreme. He will “always be at the top”, for instance, he is “the happiest man” with “the strongest network of individuals on the planet”, and operates “at the highest echelons of masculine performance” as “the most famous person on the planet” etc.

Tate projects himself as many things – warrior, businessman, expert, see Figure. 1 – but the most frequent self-allusions explicitly treat his male followers as a market for his online businesses. His daily emails represent him primarily in the role of teacher/mentor providing opportunities that will transform readers’ bank balances.

Abuse of women – and men

A significant aspect of Tate’s supremacy/hegemony is not over women – who are referenced in only two of the daily emails over two months, and a minority of the wider data – but over the young, male reader desiring transformation.

Tate leverages this: he berates the reader for being “average” for being lazy, for failing to make the gym, for being so hopeless that they make Tate literally “furious”. Who is to blame if you don’t put the work in? Only, Tate argues, yourself. The emails are often abusive. They frame Tate’s readers as subordinate, self-hating losers. Where he is constantly working to stay rich, successful, with many high-value sexual partners etc, they are lazy and unambitious, lacking action or agency.

The best way for men to express the agency and self-mastery that Tate allegedly demonstrates? Paradoxically, to do what he says.

One of the most frequent codes I used for themes in Tate’s emails is ‘Instruction’. Instructions varied: to sign up for his pay-for courses the Real World or his ‘Hustlers University’, or to the élite War Room network (cost – $7,979), or to buy his merch, the limited-edition comic books, or mugs – all of which he repeatedly instructs us to do. Instructions often end his emails: to “IMPROVE” in caps, not to fail, to message him when they have done what he tells them. Doing what Tate says – being controlled by him – is framed as a choice: to join an exclusive brotherhood of élite businessmen who meet in exotic transnational locations, who will then help and mentor you to success.

Tate the Extremist?

Tate’s brand of masculinity resembles extremist masculinities in some ways, but not others. Extremist masculinity is anyway not monolithic – contemporary extreme groups even just in the UK model various masculine subcultures, as I outline in Extreme Britain. However, we can say that contemporary extremism tends towards clear differentiation between men and women’s roles – whether God-given, or naturally defined – with men dominant.

Tate certainly buys into a misogynist ideal of innate gendered difference, with women subordinate to men. What is different is that Tate’s email content does not suggest a  clear extreme ideology beyond this.

JM Berger defines extremism as the domination by an in-group of an out-group through hostile acts, and for this to be the measure of in-group success. However, Tate’s daily emails – admittedly carefully curated content, some of which he also tweets verbatim – have no clear out-group. He names enemies – the Matrix, the media, women accusers – but aside from the ideology of sexism, his email ‘ideology’ appears pragmatic. When Tate borrows from the most popular mobilisation tropes of contemporary extremist and conspiracy movements, it looks like a bid to maximise his customer base using tactics already proven popular online.

For instance, Tate has retweeted cartoons linked to the Great Replacement Theory to appeal to fearful white men; however, in both emails and online he also frequently references his black American father, and his own conversion to Islam. Tate uses his newfound faith to communicate a prophetic quality, focused on his ‘expertise’ of business, crypto and the financial markets. Tate predicts calamity if readers do not act quickly to benefit from his market advice – how? By buying his products. This does have something in common with emails aimed at funding activity from the far right or Islamists. However, Tate disparages and subordinates potential male customers in often abusive terms – this is not a tactic I saw in my own research with extremists.

Online Cult Leader

Tate’s emails focus on “learning”. With a salesman’s instincts, like Trump and Jordan Peterson, Tate has seen a (gender) gap in the market for selling his self-claimed expertise to young men from lower socio-economic demographics, who are unlikely to go on to Higher Education.

What emerges in analysis of Tate’s daily emails is less a picture of the gender binary familiar from extremism – men in dominant roles, women at home – but a gendered regime enabling Tate to gain Power, Money, and Sex. Power is consolidated through control over other men, his fan-base; money is gained from their purchase of his products; and sex is a commodity to attain through this wealth and ‘success’.  These are less the hallmarks of an extremist, but as Steven Hassan notes, of a cult leader.

Tate’s male supremacy is well-known, and has important real-world effects, give VAWG is rooted in misogyny. His contempt for the men who revere him is less documented. Tate’s knack is for seemingly persuading young men lacking power that he is like them, that he shares their values and has their interests at heart. In reality, Tate’s hegemony as ‘Top G’ is reliant on subordinating his male followers – as losers who will never match him. To tackle VAWG, one challenge is, as the NPCC suggests, for tech companies and government to act on the links between increasing violence and online misogyny. Another is for young men to recognise for themselves how they are also being exploited and dominated by Andrew Tate.