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Andrew Tate. The Cult-Leader-Type Influencer Radicalizing Teens

NOTE: There is no transcription for the soundbites played of Andrew Tate during this episode. If you need them transcribed, however, I'd be glad to do so. Please contact me at acoleman@neurogility.com Sorry for the inconvenience.

Soundbite from Andrew Tate

I don’t often find myself without words – but I’m telling you, this guy leaves me searching for the right way to properly convey how truly dangerous he is. I didn’t know anything about him until both my son and Godson brought up the way he was arrested and conspired against back at the end of December. I did a bit of research then and thankfully managed to change their minds.

And I’ve spent hours and hours over the past few days digging a lot deeper - pouring over videos of Andrew Tate’s misogynistic idiocy…and it’s just stunning.

But what’s worse, is he mixes in just the right amount of masculine self-improvement bullshit so teen and tween boys, young men and some very grown ass men have bought into it. And if I were to just play those sound bites, but for the arrogance and obvious narcissism, it doesn’t sound that terrible.

And what’s so clear to me now, and I think will be to you, is that he’s clearly very - intentionally - orchestrated this whole conspiracy-based philosophy with the ulterior motive to cover his own sick tracks - to convince his deeply devoted followers that  nothing is his fault – that everything is totally and utterly society/or the government’s fault for anything that makes him look bad.

Now, if you don’t know who this guy is, you need to because your kids certainly do.

Your sons know him as “top G” – your daughters know him as the rich guy all the boys in her class worship

You need to know him as a dangerously charismatic cult-leader-type social media influencer who teaches you boys and men to treat women as property – his influence over them has been described by many as radicalization – that’s how bad it is. This is not hyperbole – this guy has brainwashed people without ever being in the same room with them.

I’m Ann Coleman, and this week on Speaking of Teens, Andrew Tate, what you need to know about him so you can clearly state the facts to your kids…and hopefully deprogram them.

Soundbite from Andrew Tate

The clips you heard are from an interview with Tate several years ago on YouTube – sometime after 2017 when he’d moved from London to Bucharest Romania, in an attempt, many believe, to escape the heat of potential rape prosecution in London. We’ll talk about that shortly.

You heard him describe how he made his first millions, how he started out in the web cam business by luring his girlfriends into it and how he supposedly retired from webcams and then moved into the casino business. His side hustle at that time was teaching men how to find women and put them on webcams – he called it the PHD program (pimping hos degree) – yeah.

To say this guy is arrogant, vile and detestable would be the biggest understatement ever as you’ll see.

Luckily, Mr. Tate, who’s been called the “King of Toxic Masculinity” and his equally horrible little brother Tristan (who seems to be just along for the ride) are currently locked up in a Romanian prison awaiting a trial on charges of sex trafficking, rape, and the formation of an organized criminal group. We’ll come back to that later.

And this as good a place as any to also throw in that yes, there are horrible messages out there in the music kids listen to, the video games they play and on social media and other videos they watch. But the thing that makes this guy so much more influential is the way he’s able to talk directly to them – music is more passive, games are interactive but he speaks directly to them – appealing to them in a way that these other mediums cannot. That’s what, I believe, makes he so much more influential and dangerous than other influences or influencers.

First, let me back up and tell you who this guy is and see if I can possibly do justice in describing his immense influence and popularity among the male population worldwide.

In a nutshell, here are the basics - Andrew Tate is a 36-year-old former kickboxer, the son of chess champion, born in the states and moved back to the UK with his mother after his parents divorced when he was in elementary school.

He and his younger brother Tristan were then raised by his single mother in the projects (they call them estates) in one of the poorest areas in England called Luten. He and his brother both became kickboxers as young men and by many accounts he was pretty good at it.

Behind the Bastards reported on their podcast that in 08 he was the 7th highest ranked heavyweight kickboxer in Britain – a year later he won his first championship and became the number 1 ranked kickboxer in Europe for his division. By all accounts he was a good kickboxer, although some of the claims he makes (like being the best in the World, are more of a semantic argument – his championship league that gave him some World title only actually competed within Europe – so whatever Andrew.)

After he retired from kickboxing due to tons of injuries, he managed to land a spot of Britain’s Big Brother reality TV show. But only after 5 days he was kicked off the show because the producers learned of a video circulating of him slapping and hitting a woman with a belt. Later the woman came out with a video declaring it was all sexual role-play and not real.

He and his brother wanted to make big money fast. And as he’s repeated in videos and podcasts a million times, he started the webcam business with his girlfriends – literally because he didn’t have the money to open a strip club and make them do that for him.

And then, as he’s said in interviews, after Trump was elected in 2017 it seems that he seized on a unique opportunity – and I’ll give him this – he’s no dummy. He jumps online on all these social media sites and starts squakin’ and making as much noise as possible as an Alpha male, extreme right-wing conservative, religious faux-motivational speaker for men who want to (as he says “escape the Matrix”).

A lot of what he says literally hinges on this idea of the movie, The Matrix – he uses it as a big metaphor for his whole hype. In his videos and interviews he describes men who subscribe to society’s norms – of going to college, getting a job, working towards a career as losers, slaves and he preaches not to “follow the system” – he says no one should work a 9 to 5 job – that you can’t “get rich” that way. He says repeatedly that most people who “follow the path”, work, consume, and die.

And the thing about him – as with many cultish leaders – there’s some of what he says that makes a bit of sense and you can relate, he talks about self-improvement, fitness, eating healthy, getting rich, getting the girls – and he’s the real deal – he has a yacht, a compound, all the cars - and you get it and maybe it motivates you a lot –

so when he hits you with the over-the-top ridiculous Alpha male bullshit, but by this point, you’ve bought into him as a person and a motivator and oh, yeah, that make sense too!

Now, going back to social media – and this is something else he throws out there all the time – he claims he’s the “most Googled man on the planet” – which, while not completely accurate, at one time at least in 2022, if you typed in “Who is” in Google, he popped up first in the drop-down choices. He beat out Trump, Kim Kardashian, Biden… (but when I tried it yesterday it was George Santos in the #1 spot, and I’m so sure that would piss Tate off!). He was also the #1 influencer of the year in 2022 according to a survey conducted by Piper Sandler of almost 15,000 teenagers (beating out Mr. Beast – the biggest Youtuber on earth)

He has over 5 million Twitter followers today (1 million of those came in within 24 hours of the account being reinstated) – but back in the spring or summer of 2022, he was banned on that platform along with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Discord…even Uber and Air B&B closed his account. A that point, he’d had over 14 billion views on TikTok alone. He says he had to buy a bank and a merchant portal to conduct business. His big cancellation came because so many people were upset that he was influencing so many young people with his vile and disgusting rhetoric. But you know what? He made over 11 million dollars in the month following his cancellation.

And although his accounts were banned, he is still all over the internet. First of all, he’s been allowed back on Twitter and there are interviews and appearances all over YouTube. He also has an account on the alternative YouTube channel, Rumble and all of his archived videos are on his various websites. He’s bragged in interviews I’ve seen that his fans, followers, and customers (as I’ll explain in a minute) work for him on the internet to help manipulate the algorithms.

As a matter of fact, I can’t remember who it was I read or heard say this – but just as a test, they opened fake accounts on one of the social media platforms pretending to be a 13-year-old boy - and the first posts and videos that popped up in their feed were about or by Andrew Tate.

His YouTube channel, by the way was called “Tate Speech” – so clever. And as I said, now that he’s been banned from YouTube he just uploaded all of his archived videos to his business websites. Let me tell you about those websites and businesses.

He claims to have retired from the webcam business when he opened the casino – but we now know that’s not true. But sometime along in there he gave up the PHD (pimping hos degree) program and moved on to what he called Hustler’s University, supposedly teaching guys how to get rich on the internet. He then shut that site down and just renamed it as The Real World because he said when the Matrix attacked him and banned him all over the internet (he literally said it was a conspiracy and a combined attack) but he says the Matrix also somehow attacked Hustler’s University. So, anyway, the ravings of a madman.

The Real World is just Hustler’s University revamped. It’s purported to be “a global community of like-minded individuals amassing an abundance of wealth.” This is the rest if his message: “Every member receives advanced training and ongoing mentoring from a team of multimillionaire industry specialists. The Real World successfully transformed thousands of lives through our money-focused, unique education system. The Choice Is Yours. The Matrix wants you poor, weak and alone. We have opened up a mass portal to give you the tools to escape modern day slavery. We've spent years developing our fully independent and modern-day educational platform and we continue to innovate and improve every day. We want you to become wealthy, strong and well-connected in this world. We will not fail you.”

What it is, he claims is a chance to be taught how to make money online through things like crypto (which I’ve heard him make fun of in interviews), stocks, online selling, drop shipping, things like that. He claims that you have access to all these millionaires that teach the courses (all of whom look to me to be under 30 years old).

This University is subscription based at $49 per month and the actual way the subscribers (some as young as 13-years-old) are making money, is not by selling online but by earning affiliate fees of 48% from marketing The Real World to other guys through…you guessed it, online videos.

So, on the Real World website, the top thing you see is the compilation of videos with all these very young men hyping how much money they’ve made by joining the University – but it’s all because of the affiliate marketing fees they make every time someone signs up under their name. So, in other words, he’s getting rich on basically what amounts to a multi-level marketing scheme – a pyramid scheme almost except that he’s smart enough to have these real people doing a little teaching in there – so he’s selling a real “product”.

He says in an online interview that he’s been successful in garnering so much attention and so many followers by being “talented enough and skillful enough to garner attention”. Which is exactly what he’s done by being so vocally misogynistic

and pro-male, so “anti-establishment”. He says, “It doesn’t matter what you do, if you can get attention, you can make money from it.”

So, his advice to these young men in his affiliate program has been that it doesn’t matter how you get attention online – just get it. He says you want a good mix of haters in with the people who like you – attention is attention. And he uses these guys and other followers by encouraging them to post his videos and use certain hashtags, etc. in a very methodical way – it’s pretty freakin’ genius really. In one YouTube video I saw – he said he had 175,000 “students” paying this $49 per month – I see on the website it’s up to 200,000 students.

Another part of his business that feels very cult-like to me is what he calls The War Room. It’s an exclusive club for only the manliest of men. And if you’ll watch the Vice channel documentary on him (you can watch it on YouTube – I’ll link to it) you can see this ultra-macho, misogynistic weirdness for yourself.

Tate fancies himself a self-help guru for men really and he refers to himself and I assume has the men refer to him in this case, as the Commander. I know – it makes me physically ill. He even has grown men as what he calls chaperones there calling themselves things like “Alpha Wolf” – who knew men could be so damn gullible.

So, he’s teaching these guys (who pay $5,000 to join) how to be a man – how to be a rich man (or as he says, a “high-value man”), how to be a high value man that dumb hos and bitches (as he calls them) will fall all over. And believe it or not, men fall for it.

He actually says he started the University so these guys could eventually make enough money to join The War Room.

In the background on the website for the War Room is a video of Tate shooting guns, standing in front of his enormously expensive fancy car collection, driving Bugattis and Ferraris, disembarking his private jet, partying on his yacht, riding a jet ski, all while wearing sunglasses, smoking a cigar, and looking very buff and macho.

Here’s what he says about The War Room on the website:

I'm Andrew Tate - World Champion Kickboxer & Multi-Millionaire.

The War Room is a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.

I teach the deserving the secrets to modern wealth creation. Society is influencing you for society's wellbeing (that’s the Matrix he’s talking about).

They don't want you to be free, they want slaves who work, consume, and die (those are buzzwords for him – I’ve heard him say that several times). I'll teach you the truth about life.

“The War Room is the most powerful network of its kind, represented in over 80 countries. From the mastery of mind and body to money and wealth, the War Room is an unprecedented incubator for success. Your membership grants you access to a global network with capabilities across every realm of human endeavor. The War Room is the only place of its kind where powerful men from all walks of life join together in a brotherhood committed to becoming better men. Join us.”

A picture is posted beside this paragraph with all the faces blurred out – because it’s a big secret.

I heard him say on a video that this group of men has afforded him to have a place to stay anywhere he wants in the entire world, if he needs a plane to come get him somewhere he just snaps his fingers, need a yacht, snap my fingers, that kind of thing.

If you watch the Vice documentary, you’ll see the type of self-help Tate hypes. He literally bullies and guilts them into a cage fight with a professional fighter (he makes fun of and the men who wisely refuse – calls them losers for not getting in the ring. In the documentary one guy was knocked completely out and had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital. So, that’s what you get for your $5,000 – the shit beaten out of you.

These are grown men joining a big-boy fraternity…or, quit frankly, based on what I’ve seen now, maybe something closer to the mob. And I swear if you were to see he and his brother walking down the street, you’d move to the other side - in their head to toe black and leather and expensive sneakers – they look like gangster characters in a movie. Like what you’d picture as Eastern Block mafioso. Sunglasses, no smile, ripped with muscles, head to toe black and leather, bits of flash from the bedazzled watches and jewelry – the swagger is palpable – they are dripping in machismo, arrogance, and vanity.

So, here’s the best part of this whole The War Room thing – Andrew Tate’s 41 Tenets to live by – the 41 Tenets of Tateism he calls them! There’s a video of him sitting in a brown leather executive’s chair in a dark paneled room – like you’d imagine in an old English mansion. And he seriously reads off his 41 tenets. I’m certainly not going to play it all but here’s a soundbite from his introduction.

Soundbite from Andrew Tate

That’s just a bit of his ultra-sanctimonious introduction to Tateism (and he says it all with a straight face) and I think his narcissism reveals itself a bit there

But take a listen to this handful of tenets he espouses

Soundbite from Andrew Tate

I will say, if you don’t know who this guy is, most of these tenets make sense in a very Alpha male, far-right sort of way. But when you know what he’s said elsewhere, what he’s been accused of doing, and you’ve actually seen him in these videos, those tenets seem not only hypocritical but downright laughable. And honestly, I’m not so sure they weren’t written and recorded in an effort to boost his defense against some of the allegations against him. Because he knew they were coming. Look at me – I’ve specifically said I would never break the law, I’d never be mean, I’d never do what I’m accused of.

But let me play you a short mash-up of a few clips of Mr. Tate (just so you can understand a bit more about him and what young men are hearing him tell them (and these clips are MILD compared to other clips I could have played but I’ll warn you, there’s a bit of vulgar language):

Soundbite from Andrew Tate

So, while this guy tries to dress up his philosophy on life as merely conservative views, this is way outside the realm of reasonable, and not what I’d want my son exposed to. If he had his way, society would return to ancient times when men dueled and made women wear chastity belts.

In one of his now infamous videos, he says, of a woman, “Bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck (as he shows his hands around an imaginary woman’s neck) Shut up bitch!”.

On Twitter (referring to Weinstein and the #metoo movement) he said “If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bear some responsibility,” (that’s the one that allegedly got him banned from Twitter). He’s also said, that women “belong to the man” but denied he meant that they are a man’s property. And he says there’s no such thing as clinical depression and men should be able to suck it up and snap out of it.

In one video he tells about being bullied when he was little, and his dad told him to use what he had to make these bigger boys leave him alone so he proudly tells of hitting one kid in the head with his lunch box as hard as he could and how his dad just took him to Walmart to get a new one because it was banged up and bloody.

Women have actually complained that “Tate and his cult” have radicalized their boyfriends. In a Vice News documentary, one girl says this of her boyfriend and says he even released revenge porn because she refused to take back what she said about Tate (that he was sexist and misogynistic). She said, “It’s like a virus, these things that he’s spreading. The scariest thing is, I have no idea if the next guy I meet could be an Andrew Tate fan.”

A 14-year-old girl in the same documentary said “The boys at school my age think it’s okay to say horrible things like women are a man’s property and they get to do what they want with them. Makes me really disappointed in my generation.”

Boys as young as 11 can quote Tate verbatim – they call him Top G or their God – they’re his primary target audience – although he’s denied he targets kids – but these young boys are at an age where this type of garbage can really impact the way they view and treat women and the rest of the world.

In a Business Insider article, one teacher is quotes "They talk about alphas in sixth grade now." Another says she’s now seeing "blatant misogyny" from the boys in her high school biology class – she’s heard them say things like girls should stay in the kitchen and only exist for reproduction. This teacher pointed out that what makes these views more dangerous than just what a kid heard dad say, is that "this is what this major influencer has to say, who a lot of people are rallying behind, making it more normalized and more OK to be so vile."

A human trafficking survivor and educator was quoted as saying that these young men “idolize” Tate and she’s even heard them say they wish it was like it was in the 50s when “women made zero decisions. She said she heard one boy say, "We're gonna just smash them down to the ground, destroy all of their confidence. We're the men, so you're gonna cook and you're gonna clean and you're gonna do this.”

These boys are now treating their teachers differently because of Tate. They’ve of course always had to deal with misogyny but many are now saying it’s 10 times worse than it has been in the past. They hear them literally worshipping him, yelling out his name like a battle cry – calling him “God’s gift to men.” This is no joke. His influence is more than toxic.

A few months before he and his brother were arrested in Romania, in December 2022 Vice News’ Matt Shea was allowed into his private compound in Romania for an interview and to kind of shadow Tate and see his world. The resulting documentary is called The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate and you can see it in its entirety on YouTube (I’ll of course share the link).

As they walk into the compound which is this large, converted warehouse with big walls around it and armed guards out front, Tate makes a big show of his cars, his armed guards and how there are “secret places” he can’t let Matt see…of course he mentions his 4-time world champion kickboxing thing and they walk inside and he of course has a handful of girls inside wiping counters and fetching coffee.

Then Matt asks him about a couple of swords just sitting on an end table  - Tate picks up the largest one and as he looks at it admiringly, reminds Matt that it was the subject of one of his Tate Speeches on his YouTube channel. He says, “And I talked about how the number one problem with the world is that not enough men walk around their houses with swords. Because if more men walked around their houses with swords, so many of the world’s issues could be fixed.”

“You have to extrapolate it.” (Did I forget to mention he’s a Mensa member so he throws out a big word now and then) “For example, if a woman panics, she sees something on TV and the man comes home and she’s like oh my God we got to start wearing a mask da da da. If the man walked around with a sword and she’s like put a mask on and he’d be like, I’m brave I don’t need a mask, I’m the commander, Fuck you.” (looking at the sword again he says, “It’s just a symbol of empowerment”.

At this point in the documentary, they break in and show the actual Tate Speech from YouTube where he says “You got your sword, your wife starts talking and your like, shut up I decide what I do. Be quiet! Cook!” I mean maybe that would be funny as a skit on Saturday Night Live? Maybe – maybe back in 1979??

So, let me tell you now about what Tate’s been accused of in London and Romania and what’s up with his and brother Tristan’s arrest.

When he was still living in London in 2016 he was accused of and arrested for rape but and an assault but it never went to trial.

Tate says he’s never abused a woman, but Vice News actually found women from his past and interviewed them (but kept them in disguise and used assumed names because they’re so afraid of Tate’s rabid fans)

These girls say Tate’s persona is not just an act – it’s not a character he plays – it’s the real deal.

One girl who dated him back in 2013 and said she’d heard bad things about him but thought they must be lies because he seemed so nice. She said they went on 3 or 4 dates and then she went back to his house one night and they started making out on his bed. She says that all of a sudden, he stopped and laid back on the bed and said, “I’m just contemplating whether I should rape you or not.”

She says he then instantly changed, jump on top of her and grabbed her throat and started strangling her. She’s saying, “please don’t” and he’s saying, “shut the fuck up”. The more she resisted, the more aggressive he got. She says he was really hurting her and was yelling “who do you belong to? Who do you belong to?”

And of course, she couldn’t talk because he was literally choking her – she couldn’t get away. And so, he raped her. As she’s telling the story she can’t even bring herself to say the word rape and she’s crying – it definitely happened – the girl is certainly not making it up.

She said when he was finished with her, he went to the bathroom and acted like nothing had happened. She said she was so confused – she thought, did I make him think I wanted that somehow.

She then played for a WhatsApp Voice Message she got from Tate afterwards, in which we hear him say, “Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it” “I fucking loved how much you hated it. It turned me on.”

And another one where he says, “Are you seriously offended that I strangled you a little bit? You didn’t fucking pass out. In all the women I’ve ever slept with not a single one has ever bitched or complained like you are bitching and complaining now.”

And then every few months he’d send her another voice message to remind her to keep her mouth shut – in one you can hear him say, “I thought I’d remind you of the caliber of man I am. I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet.” He is a scary, scary man. But she finally got up the courage to go to the police in 2014 or 2015 and made a report but apparently without any evidence they couldn’t do anything at that point.

But she got a call sometime in 2016 from the police who told her two other girls had now filed reports saying basically the same thing had happened to them. So now, with 3 complainants, they had enough to move forward.

Vice also interviewed one of those other girls, who he had lured into the web cam business – she had been 20 at the time and to get her primed the first night to do this sort of work he literally bought her 5 bottles of wine and got her drunk – she doesn’t remember him drinking at all. She says she’s sitting there beside him and he just hauled off and punched her in the arm so she got up to go to the bathroom and cry (as she does in the interview).

She says when she came out he was acting all nice. She says they ended up having sex and she was still really, really drunk. She says from then on, every night she worked he would come in and have sex with her – and he would strangle her while he did it.

She says she and another girl who apparently started working with her in the same webcam room would end up sleeping with him together. But then this other girl started seeing someone and was not the least interested in sleeping with Andrew.

So he’s in there with them one night and the girl Vice is interviewing says she went to take a shower leaving the other girl alone with Andrew. She says when she opened the bathroom door she saw him raping this other girl in the bed. He threatened to beat her up and said, “I don’t give a fuck if you call the police, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

She says that’s when she really knew she couldn’t do this anymore, she quit working for him and went to the police. After that, the girl he raped in the room also went to the police – they were the other 2 girls the police had told the first one about.

This is when they finally arrested him and took him into custody.

The investigation was actually going on while he was on Big Brother and the producers were told about it, but they said they kicked him off for the slapping the girlfriend incident.

So, after he’s arrested and released he goes on a podcast and calls this second girl who accused him of rape, a dumb ho – to be exact, he says, describing when the police showed up to arrest him, “you’re under arrest for suspicion of assault of this dumb ho” and busts out laughing - and both of the male podcast interviewers are laughing their asses off about it and his fans’ sympathetic comments are popping up on the screen on YouTube.

So, that all happens back in 2016 while he was still living in London but in 2017 he and his brother move to Romania. He’s hinted all over the place that it’s because of their relaxed sexual assault laws. In one video that has now been deleted, he said, “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free,” And he’s also said it was because he wanted a compound with armed security guards that wouldn’t be allowed in the UK. And oh yeah, he also said it was because “Western Society is so degraded.” Oh my God – the arrogance is just off the charts with this guy.

So now he has the armed body guards, the secret rooms, the swords, and although he claims not to be, we know he’s still running a webcam business at this point. He also has The Real World, The War Room and who knows what else going on behind the walls of this compound.

According to the Associated Press, in April of 2022 the Romanian authorities launched an investigation and raided the compound based on allegations that he and his brother were holding 2 women captive there, after being tipped off by the American Embassy because one was an American Citizen. Apparently, they didn’t find anything at that point.

In August of 2022, Tate was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and said this incident was actually a case of swatting. And if you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone calls in an emergency call a sick prank.

And this is perhaps unnecessary information, but I think it’s hilarious really. On December 27th Tate for some reason decides to Twitter taunt the young climate activist, Greta Thunberg, saying something amount the “enormous emissions” from his 33 special cars and asked for an email address where he could send her a list of his car collection.

Twitter feuds are just so grown up – don’t you think? The following day, on Dec. 28th, in a Twitter reply that went viral, Thunberg said he could absolutely “enlighten” her at a fake email address — smalldickenergy@getalife.com to which he later replied by posting a video showing him (of course!) smoking a cigar sitting next to two pizza boxes — which he vowed not to recycle — a jab at her climate activism.

And guess what happened the very next day?! December 29th he and his baby brother were arrested by Romanian authorities on human trafficking charges with six victims identified — one of the Tate’s was also charged with rape, though local laws prevent authorities from saying which one.

The agency in charge of investigating such crimes in Romania said they had identified six victims in the human trafficking case who were subjected to "acts of physical violence and mental coercion" and were sexually exploited by the members of the alleged crime group.

And on December 30th a judge approved the prosecutor’s request to hold the brothers for 30 days pending an appeal by the Tate brothers. And Greta Thunberg tweeted, “That’s what you get when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes.” God love her.

In early January the authorities seized 11 of the boys’ prized gas guzzling sports cars and are investigating whether they were purchased will the ill-gotten gains of human trafficking. If they are, that money will go to pay restitution and court costs.

The boys lost their appeal to get out of jail in January and they along with 2 Romanian women who are now also being detained, will stay in Jail until the end of February at least because the judge approved another 30 days of detention.

And apparently, they can stay in jail for many months as long as the judge approves the prosecutors monthly requests for another 30 days. This judge, when he approved the second 30 days, cited “the particular dangerousness of the defendants” and denied their appeal. Wow, huh?

Now, this whole time, Tate is giving messages to someone to Tweet on his account. A recent one said "I'm in detention as they 'look' for evidence. Evidence they will never find because we are not guilty. They have and will continue to ignore and throw away any and all testimony or hard evidence (that) we are innocent."

The agency that investigates human trafficking in Romania says the Tates lured in their victims using the loverboy method. This is the very method Tate brags about in dozens of interviews in podcasts and all over YouTube – one of which you heard at the top of he episode.

For example, in another interview he says, ““I’ve been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade. I’ve had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriends at the time and, of all my girlfriends, NONE were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me.”

He's also said, “I learned the most time-efficient way to meet girls, get them through the dating process, get them to bed, test if they’re a good girl or not, and begin the process of them falling deeper and deeper into love. THAT IS MY SKILL. To extremely efficiently get women in love with me.”

Interestingly, on the website Uncaged, which is an organization that works to eradicate human trafficking internationally, wrote an open letter on it’s website back in 2020 about how bad the trafficking problem was in Eastern Europe and that loverboy method is the “the single-most common method for enslaving Romanian women.”

This is what they say, “This pernicious scheme starts when a trafficker targets a young, low-income woman. He showers her with attention and affection. He asks her out. For a small while, he spares no expense to treat her like a queen. It’s all part of a plot to win her trust.

Once the trafficker and the victim are romantically involved, he will invite her on a getaway trip. Sometimes he will ask her to move away with him for “a better life.” Since the woman is usually in love at this point, she often goes with him happily.

When they’re out of the country, the trafficker strikes. Often, he will confiscate her passport and documents before taking her phone. He then passes this precious woman off to another trafficker. At this point, the woman has been enslaved until partners like ours across Europe can rescue her and bring her to a place like the first Sanctuary.

It’s terrifying to think of the scale of this deception. Every year, 250,000 people are trafficked into Europe alone. At least 77% of the survivors we encounter in Europe are from Romania. When we hear their stories, we hear about traffickers using the Loverboy Method over and over again.”

I guess we know why the Tate brothers moved to Romania.

This is going to really hard for his defense attorneys to fight after he’s admitted this very thing all over the internet. And disgustingly enough he and his brother both have also even described their webcam business in video and in print as “a scam”. They have these women turn around and use this same method on the men that pay to talk to them and see them on the webcam. The women convince the me that they’re in love with them - that they want to move to wherever these guys are and marry them and Tate has described in detail how they lie to them to get them to send more and more money.

The Tate brothers knew this arrest was coming. As a matter of fact, he had the whole internet believing he’d predicted the Matrix was coming to get him – he even said it when he was being handcuffed and carried away. He has his legions of devoted worshipers out there right now cooking up the conspiracies and crawling under every rock to try and come up with evidence or something to free their Top-G. I don’t even have time to rattle off some of the comments online – it’s pathetic and sad really that they just don’t see it.

As a matter of fact, just a few days ago an alleged transcript of a WhatsApp “wiretap” surfaced on the internet and all over Twitter and YouTube his fans (and opponents) are dissecting it and trying to prove it means one thing or the exact opposite. The way I see it, it means nothing other than a couple of these girls were really scared and wanted to maintain the front to Tate that they had no clue anyone had tipped off the authorities. The prosecutors supposedly leaked it. Who knows.

I’m a big believer in innocent until proven guilty. And they’ll get their day in court – at least in Romania. But hopefully, some of this will convince at least a few people that he’s certainly not worth worshipping. But I don’t hold out much hope there because this all just feeds into his rhetoric – the conspiracy theory mindset he’s promoted.

I have no doubt that Mr. Tate is spending his time in prison doing nothing but spinning and weaving his narrative and figuring out a way to use this to escalate his influence and intensify his message. He’ll somehow make himself look like a victim of the Matrix no matter the outcome. I’m sure he’ll be back – his followers will see to it.

Maybe he needs some clarity about which world is the Matrix and which is actually real. Maybe he needs to swallow the red pill.

Speaking of Teens is the official podcast of neurogility.com.

Go to neurogility.com/herewego for all our free parenting guides and e-books to help you learn more about parenting your teen.

You can go to neurogility.com/40 for this episode’s show notes and transcript.

Thank you listening – I’d really appreciate you sharing with any group of moms you belong to.

I’ll be back next Tuesday! Until then – be wary of the Matrix. I’m totally kidding! Forget the Matrix!