Right-Wing Influencers Are Defending the Indefensible: Andrew Tate

AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru

Alt-right influencer Andrew Tate is a self-professed pimp and pornographer who boasts on camera about hitting women. But some so-called Christian conservatives in the MAGA media space are now trying to rehabilitate Tate — and revealing their rank hypocrisy in the process.

It all started when MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson, who has 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, hosted Tate for an “interview” last week. This more than 40-minute conversation also featured Trump lawyer Alina Habba, the incoming White House counselor, who gushed at Tate and called herself a “big fan.” Yet this wasn’t a journalistic interview, like when Piers Morgan hosted Tate and grilled him on his… controversial… views. Johnson’s segment was a live-streamed tongue bath, the softest of softballs.

This didn’t go the way Johnson hoped. He received tremendous pushback online from conservative media stars like Ben Shapiro and Liz Wheeler. Amid the backlash, the MAGA podcaster resorted to tweeting, with no context, “Christ is king” and “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”

It’s been a while since I was in Sunday school, but I’m pretty sure that promoting pimps who exploit and abuse women isn’t very… Christ-like. And, when Jesus told his followers not to cast stones in John 8:7, he was talking about not condemning repentant sinners — Tate has never repented or apologized for his wrongdoing, which he still either denies or boasts about, depending on the specific charge.

So, this apologia was largely not well-received online. But some influencers from the new Right did leap to the defense of Johnson and Tate.

Enter Candace Owens.

The right-wing new media empress has made opposition to pornography a certain part of her political platform, with viral posts calling it a “tool of enslavement” and saying we should “BAN IT & stigmatize every person who defends or profits from it*.” She forgot to include a footnote, which I helpfully added: *except Andrew Tate.

Not only has Owens hosted Tate for multiple friendly, softball interviews of her own, but she interjected herself into this latest conversation as a rare voice in defense of Johnson and Tate.

“The people who have made their careers purporting to care about the free market of ideas and speech, are now all telling Benny Johnson that he shouldn’t speak to Andrew Tate,” Owens tweeted. “Take note, conservatives.”

Way to miss the point.

Very few of the critics upset with Johnson for orally fellating Tate are upset that he “spoke to him.” Essentially none of these people were upset with Piers Morgan, for example, for speaking to Tate, who is certainly a newsworthy figure, because he actually did an adversarial interview, not PR.

The critique of the embrace of Tate is that people who say they support family values shouldn’t uncritically uplift and celebrate pimps who abuse women. (Just take Tate in his own words: He brags on camera about hitting women as part of “pimping 101,” sent a woman texts about how much he loved “raping” her, and sent voicemails describing how much he enjoyed their lack of consent and admitted to choking them.)

And almost none of the current chorus of right-leaning critics are calling for Tate to be censored by the government or even by X. This is not remotely a question of “free speech”; it’s about discernment, gatekeeping, and basic integrity.

Candace Owens wasn’t the only online figure to make this kind of category error. Actor-turned-political commentator Russell Brand made a similar defense of Tate, arguing in a viral segment on his YouTube channel that, while Tate does “say some stuff that’s pretty out there” he is “maligned… to place an impassable threshold around systems of influence and power.”

Yeah… no.

First, the criticism of Tate isn’t about hot takes, old tweets, or otherwise “saying stuff that’s out there.” They’re about his actions: exploiting, harming, and allegedly beating and sexually violating women.

And Tate is not being “maligned” because he poses some kind of threat to “systems of influence and power.” He poses no threat, because he stands a snowball’s chance in hell of ever attaining any sort of political power. He also doesn’t have the kind of mass following or influence anymore that Brand suggests. If you look at Tate’s Google trends, he did have a moment several years ago but has since fallen off the face of the planet in terms of online clout.

Tate is being “maligned” because he’s spent years bragging about harming women and facing allegations of doing just that. It is actually that simple.

Both Candace Owens and Russell Brand seem to suffer from a similar sort of tribalistic mind virus. They’ve cut their teeth in new media as anti-establishment warriors; and, to be fair, the political establishment gets all sorts of things horrifically wrong. (Just ask the people of Iraq.)

But the establishment isn’t always wrong. The tribal reflex that Owens and Brand have succumbed to forces them to take any anti-establishment position and support any anti-establishment figure, no matter how baseless and contrary to their stated values, simply to be on the other side of mainstream opinion.

That kind of cheap contrarianism isn’t brave. It’s boring, and morally bankrupt.

Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.