Update: Read to the end to see our thoughts after listening to the entire interview.
Well, ‘Tucker on Twitter’ has a new episode tonight (after taking last week off) and here it is:
Ep. 9 The Andrew Tate interview pic.twitter.com/0KKMzSVmMO
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 11, 2023
Yep, it is a long one and frankly, we haven’t had a chance to listen to all of it—it’s over two hours long, after all. But basically, the thesis this week appears to be that Andrew Tate is a martyr for traditional masculinity.
That sound you are hearing is us rolling our eyes.
Honestly, we never even heard of Tate until he pulled off the trick of making us sympathize with Greta Thunberg. And subsequent reports have made him out to be a definite creep. We have listened to this interview long enough to hear him portray himself as a family man, but multiple reports state that he literally wrote this on his now-deleted website:
My job was to get women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was my job. My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.
There are multiple sources for this claim, but here is one of them:
Andrew Tate said he broke a woman’s jaw and that his business was a ‘scam’ ahead of Romanian charges https://t.co/xgLPCNOZ1C
— A🌺M💙 (@m_azita) January 20, 2023
He has also said this:
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 girlfriend at the time and, of all my girlfriends, NONE were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me.
Source:
Tate‘s alleged conversion to Islam was a pathetic attempt to borrow credibility from a worldview that he hopes will help him cosplay as an ancient warlord rather than a promiscuous porn peddler. https://t.co/dKbpyR9gYV
— First Things (@firstthingsmag) January 23, 2023
Like we said, we have not listened to the entire interview, but we have gotten far enough to see that, according to him, what he has admitted to is a great deal of what the Romanian authorities have accused him of doing.
And we are not experts on Romanian law—as in, we don’t know anything about it. For instance, does the government have to prove he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? We literally have no idea. But we would be very troubled if the entire legal theory is that that he manipulated them with feelings of love or something like that.
But even if we are unsure of the legal theory, we are pretty sure of one thing: He is a creep, and if we were blessed with any daughters, we would keep them far away from him. This really doesn’t sound very different from classic ‘pimp’ behavior. And we are disappointed to see Carlson seemingly pretend that he is anything but scum. We say ‘seemingly’ because we have not actually watched the whole thing as we stated earlier. Maybe at some point Carlson will lay into him. Maybe he will end by making the exact same points we did. That doesn’t seem very likely but we will reserve judgment, we will watch it, and we will update you, appropriately. So, keep an eye out.
In any case, we remain interested in more than just the actual subjects of each video. For instance, can Carlson challenge the mainstream media with this ‘Tucker on Twitter’ enterprise? The view counts tell that story:
Episode 1: 120 million views.
Episode 2: 60.8 million views.
Episode 3: 104 million views.
Episode 4: 32.6 million views.
Episode 5: 17.5 million views.
Episode 6: 32.3 million views.
Episode 7: 15.9 million views.
Episode 8: 9.3 million views.
And as of this writing, this latest episode has over 4.4 million views. So, if we trust these numbers, each episode is getting less popular, but that is generally expected. The novelty is wearing off.
We are also specifically concerned about the feud with Fox News. As we previously reported, according to very credible reports, Carlson was never fired. Instead, he was kept under contract but told he is no longer supposed to go on the air. Therefore, they would be paying him to do nothing, basically, but that would have the benefit of keeping him from going to any of their competitors … at least in theory.
Except he arguably is building a competitor in real time. So, it all depends on what is covered by a contract that we have never seen. We noted previously that there was a chance that simply telling the public what he thinks is not a violation of the contract, because he seemed to do that outside of work on many occasions before his show was shut down. It would depend on what the contract says. But all he has done on ‘Tucker on Twitter’ before today was simply share his views. There was no original reporting, on this Twitter show.
But him conducting a one-on-one interview with a newsmaker sounds a lot more like the kinds of things he would do for his old show on Fox News. And, again without seeing his contract, that sounds like the kind of thing that would be forbidden under his contract. So… the next question is what if anything will Fox News do about this? There are too many variables for us to pretend to know what the answer to that question is, but we’ll keep any eye out.
In any case, he continues to get reactions:
I was willing to be ambivalent about Andrew Tate
— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) July 11, 2023
After watching this
I am rather impressed by him
The mainstream media will willingly promote the narrative that the Tates are human traffickers but freely disparage a movie about real human trafficking, Sound of Freedom
— George (@BehizyTweets) July 11, 2023
No one should trust these frauds
Thank you to Tucker for the interview
— TONY™️ (@TONYxTWO) July 11, 2023
Fair points.
Tate is a terrible influence for young men with his lifestyle. Money chasing, running Webcam girls, pure hubris. He represents the opposite of what the left wants in many cases bur the notion that he is righteous in absolutely any way is absurd. His fans will be here any minute…
— 9mmSMG (@9mm_smg) July 11, 2023
Tate is charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking, and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. Are you an Andrew Tate right winger or a Sound of Freedom right winger. You can’t really be both. https://t.co/SWbS9xxFAZ
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 11, 2023
Tucker devotes his first lengthy interview to a sex trafficking woman abusing fraud. https://t.co/e9imstNuy4
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) July 11, 2023
Two and a half hours? I don’t think so. https://t.co/ynttMMFT34
— David Marcus (@BlueBoxDave) July 11, 2023
Annnnnnnnnnnnnd I’m losing respect for Tucker….
— Rís Rosario (@reeseonable) July 11, 2023
This man traffic’s women, pays for sex, abused women, & preaches faux masculinity. Not a good look for a supposed Christian & conservative when Tate is the antithesis of that. https://t.co/cJC603Vi9D
Regardless of your opinion on @cobratate, the establishment banning him to make boys not listen to him created a #StreisandEffect of epic proportions. pic.twitter.com/GODV2dW7Ur
— Emergent Perspective (@_emergent_) July 11, 2023
Maybe so, but just because they are drawing your eyes toward a creep, doesn't mean you have to consider him some kind of hero.
Why? It’s like a clickbait interview of a useless person.
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) July 11, 2023
Why are you interviewing a horrible man that runs a webcam/ porn business in Romania? He sells women. NOPE https://t.co/cPZGeulzgB
— T🦅🇺🇸🐊 (@Floridagirl0850) July 11, 2023
moderator of the first GOP debate https://t.co/78NBFpupCf
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) July 11, 2023
Yeah, that will be an interesting experiment. We have hated the format of debates for a while. One of the things we hate the most is the questioner who makes the question into a paragraph, often full of debatable factual assertions, that then forces one side (inevitably the Republican side) to spend precious time correcting the false assertions in the question. Will Carlson be better on that count? Or will he just have a different kind of question as a paragraph?
We shall see.
In any case, we will provide some kind of update after we have listened to the whole thing, either in this post, or another. So keep an eye out, dear reader.
Update: Well, we listened to the entire interview and the most basic thing is that Carlson never pushed back against Tate’s ‘family man’ routine. Tate brags online about his ability to manipulate women, and, frankly, we don’t think it is limited to women. We think Carlson was getting manipulated here, too, only he used different tactics.
And the method of manipulation wasn’t complicated. Tate isn’t a moron. He is intelligent and articulate. And he made sure to say many things that appealed to Carlson. He suggests that the election in 2020 was stolen. He keeps joking that he is not even slightly suicidal—suggesting that he is afraid someone will kill him and make it look like suicide. He was vaccine skeptic, and a skeptic of COVID restrictions. He is feeding Carlson many things that either he would flat out agree with, or would at least Carlson would think is worthy of consideration. That doesn’t mean any particular thing he was saying is wrong, necessarily.
Ironically, he seemed to be telling on himself. He talked about how bad things wear a cloak of virtue, while proudly wearing a cloak of virtue. And, basically, this guy who claims to have a harem was talking about how a rich guy will end up having something like 30 beautiful girlfriends, leaving 29 lonely guys who don’t get those girls. Indeed, every time he talked about the value of women, he talked about it solely in terms of attractiveness. This is not a man who will grow old with a woman, finding value in her as they reach their twilight years. This is a guy who will always chase around the 20-year-old girls and will eventually die alone.
There are a few other things worth noting. First, Carlson somehow has never seen The Matrix? Dear reader we are old enough to remember when Carlson’s predecessor on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, argued that you needed to see certain movies just to be culturally literate, and we would argue that The Matrix is one of those movies. Second, at one point Carlson says the F word. Outside of some outtakes, we don’t think we have ever seen him say any curse word. Finally, Carlson says more explicitly than ever that he thinks the 2020 election was stolen. However, his comment is so vague we are not sure anyone could successfully sue him for defamation. For instance, he isn’t clear who he thinks stole it, only that it is presumably someone who wanted Biden to win, nor is he clear how it was stolen. We suppose Biden might be able to sue on the theory that it defames him by suggesting he is not a legitimate president, but that seems unlikely.
In any case, it was a disappointing interview because we think Carlson basically was bamboozled into playing this guy’s PR department, but we should remember who he is, in his own words. This is not to say that everything Tate said was wrong, just understand that we don’t think his goal is to educate or enlighten us: It is to bamboozle us into thinking he’s anything other than a scumbag who is essentially a pimp for the Internet era. We are not convinced at this point that he committed an act that can rightfully be a crime—in American law there are many bad things you can do that are not illegal—we have no doubt his conduct was immoral, based on his own words.
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