By Sam Hurtado, Guest Writer

This might be a bold assumption, but boys don’t usually grow up wanting to become  misogynists. 

Yet, the infamous Andrew Tate has chosen to walk down a path that has been littered with scandals and cancel-worthy opinions. This American-British personality has blown up to a toxic following. 

Who would have thought that the spewings of a former professional kickboxer could meet the extremely low bar of what it takes to be an influencer?

His climb up social media rankings began with the startup of Hustler’s University, a website that requires a monthly membership fee for Tate’s two cents on drop-shipping and cryptocurrency trading. 

Tate encouraged members of Hustler’s University to repost videos of him onto social media platforms and to choose his most controversial clips to reach maximum views and engagement. Bad publicity is still publicity, is it not?  

His clips became prominent in 2022, and people dug up some of his old tweets. Tate’s Twitter account was full of comments that degraded women and rape victims, had homophobic and racist messages and said that mental health was not real. 

These harmful, distasteful and frankly baseless comments have led to three of Tate’s Twitter accounts being suspended.

Tate is a poorly chosen, cult-like figure who gained a following from insecure and directionless men, whom he feeds his anti-feminist views. The man literally identifies himself as sexist and misogynist. Pitiful, how they really think that hate and condoning violence is what qualifies as “true masculinity.” 

Thankfully, he has been recently banned from Facebook and Instagram for violating their policies on hate speech. TikTok did further investigation on him before removing his primary account for also violating their policies. YouTube soon followed; Tate must have realized that this was a battle he wasn’t going to win and voluntarily deleted his Twitch.

It’s an unfortunate trend that social media keeps giving fame and power to the wrong people. Tate’s comments assault women, people of color, those who suffer from mental illness and members of the LGBT+ community, and it’s appalling that people are drawn to this kind of discrimination. 

He has been making comments like this since 2016. Why is he just now being held accountable? We can’t keep giving leeway to people like him without being considered bystanders to those targeted by his bigotry. 

Simply saying you support marginalized groups is different than actually standing up and fighting for them. Men like Tate contribute to the regression of a society that will provide equality for all. I applaud the social media platforms that took action to completely wipe out access for Tate to have a voice again.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this man is flooding screens everywhere, and it’s now becoming apparent that his poisonous ideas are infecting the younger generations that are exposed to it. 

With an unbiased algorithm running what shows up on our customized feeds, it’s hard to stop the spread of such detrimental and hateful messages.

The fact that he was able to reach this height of popularity says a lot on how people view controversial figures as purely entertainment and not someone who is threatening and disrespecting actual people. It isn’t humorous and cannot just be viewed as someone “trolling” or “doing it for the meme.”

In order to prevent the spread of this infection of insolence, we need to stop validating these antics. 

Misogynists crave being recognized and talked about; we can’t keep giving them the time of day. Instead, it would be much wiser and effective to simply block them from our viewing or report them so that their social media platforms are taken from them.