Andrew Tate has become the subject of mockery after taking more than 10 hours to come up with a limp response to Greta Thunberg on Twitter.
The “social media influencer” posted a video in a tweet, showing himself dressed in a dressing gown and smoking a cigar as he explained his comeback, which was branded by Twitter users as “pure cringe”.
It comes after Thunberg responded to a tweet by Tate, in which he boasted about his car collection and “their respective enormous emissions”, by inviting him to “enlighten” her by emailing “smalldickenergy@getalife.com”.
The climate activist’s tweet quickly went viral, with people praising her for making “the greatest tweet of all time”.
Tate’s initial response to Thunberg’s clapback was to say: “How dare you?!”
He later posted another tweet and wrote: “Thank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis @GretaThunberg. The world was curious. And I do agree you should get a life.”
In his accompanying video, Tate – who was previously banned from Twitter for posting misogynistic content – went on a bizarre rant claiming that Thunberg was referring to herself in her comeback.
He also accused the “global matrix” of deploying a “bot farm” to make the 19-year-old’s tweet go viral.
“Greta’s email address is ‘I have small d*** energy’. Why would that be her own email? Strange,” he said. “I don’t want to assume her gender, it’s 50/50, but it is what it is.”
Tate added: “I’m not actually mad at Greta.”
He then appears to address someone off-camera, telling them to “bring me pizza” and to make sure “these boxes are not recycled”, before continuing with his explanation.
“So I’m not actually mad at Greta, because she doesn’t realise she’s been programmed, she’s a slave of the matrix, she thinks she’s doing good. Someone has sat her down and convinced her to try and convince you to beg your government to tax you into poverty to stop the sun from being hot,” he said.
“And then, because I called her out on it, the global matrix got this bot farm to like and retweet and all this bot commenting try and pretend that her telling me that she has a small d*** in her own email address somehow teaches me a lesson.
“Now I know at least that Greta [is] hate-filled, bitter, sitting somewhere without the heating on, shivering, views my tweets, which is going to make my Twitter account far more fun into eternity.”
But Twitter users were unimpressed by Tate’s two-minute video, with many finding his efforts to one-up Thunberg even funnier.
“You waited a whole 10 hours, and this is the tweet you came up with?” one person asked incredulously, while another said: “I can’t lie, I’m f***ing dying laughing.”
Presenter Matthew Stadlen added: “Greta has rattled [Andrew] so hard that he’s got dressed in a dressing gown and staged himself receiving pizza. Not a fan of the word ‘owned’. But I’ll make an exception for [Andrew], who has been emphatically owned.”
Another person wrote: “Just when the entire world didn’t think you could possibly embarrass yourself further. Congrats, champ.”
Tate returned to Twitter in November after the ban was rescinded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who purchased the social media platform for US$44 billion.
The kickboxer was first banned from Twitter in 2017 when he posted that women should “bear some responsibility” for sexual assaults. This year, he was also banned from other platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, which he remains unable to post on.
