The Cult of Andrew Tate: Modernity’s ‘Men Without Chests’

On July 18, Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami as Britain sought their extradition on 59 criminal charges, including rape, sexual assault, trafficking for sexual exploitation, assault, and offenses involving indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.

The United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service added 38 charges involving four further alleged victims to the 21 charges already pending against the brothers. Andrew now faces additional allegations including seven counts of rape, trafficking, assault, and 19 offenses involving indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. Tristan faces six additional charges including rape, sexual assault, and trafficking. The British proceedings now concern seven alleged victims in total.

On July 27, a federal magistrate scheduled an Aug. 13 detention hearing to determine whether the brothers will remain jailed while contesting extradition, a process that could last for months. The Tates deny all wrongdoing.

Several of the brothers’ erstwhile allies — Donald Trump Jr. and Candace Owens included — have kept their silence after their July 18 arrests. Others were quick to take up their defense.

How did two men who have spent over a decade publicly describing their exploitation of women as a business model … become symbols of persecuted masculinity?

Tucker Carlson suggested, without evidence, that the brothers had been arrested because they criticized Israel. Rep. Abe Hamadeh of Arizona argued that Britain should not be permitted to extradite two American citizens when the charges were supposedly “unclear and political.” Nick Fuentes called extradition a “national humiliation” based upon “trumped up ‘Me Too’ charges.” Influencer Myron Gaines declared the case a “witch hunt,” demanded that the brothers be freed, and argued President Trump owed them assistance for helping mobilize young male voters in 2024. (RELATED: It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp (Especially If You’re Andrew Tate))

None of these defenses engage with the publicly reported evidence. They begin with Tate’s enemies: feminists, the media, foreign prosecutors, and the political establishment. Because those institutions are distrusted, Tate is obviously a persecuted figure. It is the enemy-of-my-enemy instinct elevated in place of moral judgment.

Whether British prosecutors can prove those charges will be determined in court, but the public record surrounding the brothers raises a separate question. How did two men who have spent over a decade publicly describing their exploitation of women as a business model — a “Pimping Hoes Degree,” as Andrew has gleefully put it — become symbols of persecuted masculinity?

As any conservative worth his salt knows, if there exists a question of moral stakes, C.S. Lewis likely had something to say about it. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis warned that modernity’s turn toward moral relativism — that moral judgments of right or wrong, virtue or vice are not absolute or universal — would produce “men without chests.” (RELATED: Getting Back to an ‘Honorable Manhood’)

Lewis, drawing upon Plato’s idea of the tripartite soul, employs a metaphor in which the head represents reason and the belly represents man’s base animal instincts and appetite. The chest, nestled between head and belly, contains the trained emotions such as honor, courage, and shame that equip reason to govern appetites. “The head rules the belly through the chest,” Lewis.

When moral judgments are reduced to nothing more than subjective feelings, it does not liberate man from arbitrary restraints. It destroys the part of him capable of recognizing which desires are honorable and which are degrading.

The resulting man may still be intelligent, disciplined, and ambitious, but intelligence and reason become servants of appetite. Man is reduced to a calculating head enslaved to an insatiable belly.

Or, a man without a chest.

Andrew Tate is an almost comically perfect man without a chest.

Tate uses his head. He is intelligent and possesses real energy and commercial cunning, but he employs them in service of his deviant appetites. Behind a façade of charisma and a sly tongue, he sold millions of followers on the idea that his appetites for wealth, domination, aggression, and sexual acquisition were what excellence, authority, courage, and masculinity really looked like. And if you wanted those things for yourself, why, just follow his example! All you needed to do was pay him $8,000 annually to enter his “War Room” and study for what he called a “Pimping Hoes Degree.”

According to a sweeping New Yorker investigation drawing from private messages, internal documents, interviews, and sealed prosecutorial files, the “War Room” taught members how to identify women susceptible to manipulation, bind them emotionally to men, and eventually move them into webcam pornography and OnlyFans work. Tate described the desired condition as “sexual slavery,” while his brother Tristan claimed that their enterprise, run from a heavily guarded compound in Romania north of Bucharest, employed 75 women and generated $600,000 monthly.

In the case of Iasmina Pencov, Tate reportedly persuaded her to move across Romania by telling her that he considered her his wife, then wore down her objections to performing online sex work. In explaining the business model, Tate was concise: “You have to f–k them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business.”

Even before launching his War Room or his “Hustlers University” platform — and before relocating to Romania after three British women accused him of rape and strangulation — Tate fed his appetite for cruelty and sexual domination to turn a profit. One of the earliest women in his enterprise was, more precisely, a teenage girl.

Tate met Bibiana Hruskova while traveling through Slovakia. They met in 2012, the year he turned 26, and she turned 15. In 2014, when Hruskova was 17, Tate summoned her to England. She had told him that she wanted marriage and children; he instead established a webcam profile portraying her as a Russian woman in her 20s and placed her at the center of his new pornography enterprise.

In one video leaked online in 2016, Tate whips Hruskova in bed with a belt while she lies in the fetal position, sobbing. “B–ch, look at the camera,” he told her while yanking her head back by the hair. “This is what happens when you don’t f–king listen.”

Tate claimed online that Hruskova was an ex-girlfriend, and that the video was filmed consensually in 2012 at the start of their relationship. By his own timeline, Tate filmed himself sexually degrading and whipping his child-girlfriend.

This is not reason governing appetite through honor, shame, or nobility. It is appetite enthroned.

It is all the more outrageous that ostensibly conservative figures looked upon this record — and the record has existed for years; it was never hidden — and divined a champion of Western masculinity being unfairly persecuted. Poor, poor Andrew, indeed.

The laundering of the Tates as unfairly persecuted “conservative” icons has been years in the making. In 2023, Tucker Carlson called Andrew’s Romanian detention “obviously a setup,” described his spirit as “not malicious,” and presented his central message as self-respect, achievement, and — somehow — putting down pornography. He even traveled to Romania for a sympathetic interview portraying Tate as a persecuted role model for young men.

Candace Owens did the same. She insisted there was “nothing” in the Romanian case and explained the brothers as a response to a “misandrous culture.” When later asked about Tate’s misogynistic record, Owens argued that “if there’s something that you don’t like about what Andrew Tate says … we’ve got to go backwards and take a look at the women who brought forth this modern feminist movement.”

What mattered was that Tate criticized feminism, counseled young men to exercise, and claimed that a “Matrix” of corrupt institutions wanted to silence him. Because Tate named some genuine wrongs, his defenders were willing to treat as secondary the rather important fact that he embodied many of them.

Tate is not some freedom fighter raging against modernity. He accepts that personal desire is sovereign, and that sex and human bodies can be commodified. He merely insists that men should, by virtue of being men, occupy the more profitable side of the transaction.

Andrew Tate is not an antidote to modernity. He is the quintessential man without a chest.