The bathos, at odd moments, is extraordinary. “If more men walked around the house with swords, most of the world’s problems would be fixed,” says the 35-year-old influencer and ex-kickboxing champion Andrew Tate, explaining to his interviewer, Matt Shea, why he has so many swords lying around. For example, if you get home and your wife has seen something on the news about Covid and is wittering on about it, you can grab your sword and tell her: “I’m brave, I don’t need a mask! I am a commander!” Tate lives with his brother, Tristan – “I don’t have loser friends!” One of his right-hand men is called Alpha Wolf and another is the self-proclaimed “greatest hypnotist in the world”.
If you weren’t already crying, you would laugh. But the problem is that one person’s bathos is another person’s inspiration. Tate’s faith in the home-sword is only one element in the abundance of deeply violent and misogynistic attitudes that he spreads, so far unstoppably, online. His hate-filled videos have been viewed more than 11bn times and he is one of the most Googled people in the world, which has made him very rich and, within certain demographics, very famous. The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate is a Vice special report that investigates his rise and possible – in the wake of his arrest at the end of December last year – fall.
