Guys Win: Andrew Tate, Rape Politics, and the Authoritarian Right

TBYR formally welcomes @Cobratate & @TateTheTalisman to Florida. As free speech absolutists, the Tate's haven't been formally convicted of any crimes and are welcome to speak to our group. We're old enough to remember when a *"Convicted Felon."* won the Presidency. #Freestate

The Tampa Bay Young Republicans posted this to X on February 27, in anticipation of the arrival in the United States of Andrew and Tristan Tate, the popular lifestyle influencers who were, until recently, being held by Romanian authorities on charges of rape and human trafficking. Their return to the U.S. comes thanks to lobbying by the Trump administration, and it is one of the few actions of Trump’s first 100 days that has been met with substantial criticism from even other Republicans. 

Not so for the Tampa Bay Young Republicans, who revelled in the anger and disgust their invitation generated. It is good that even leading Republicans like Ron DeSantis have said that the Tates are not welcome in Florida. The TBYR are not, it seems, representative of the majority view. 

But their statement is important because it’s a glaring reminder that the Tate appeal is strongest with young men, a reality that poses a serious and longer-term challenge for American politics and culture. This comes at the same time as many young men on the right are also openly flirting with the darkest elements of authoritarianism and nativism that Trump and MAGA have to offer. It’s a generational problem compounded by the way the same misogyny and sexual violence Tate endorses rest at the heart of far right politics more generally. 

I want, therefore, to offer the Tate episode as both a warning sign for the future of Republican Party politics in America and a window into the way authoritarianism is a political paradigm within which rape as both a practice and philosophy is deeply embedded. 

The dark misogynistic future of the GOP

You might say that the party has already succumbed to a culture of misogyny and sexual predation. And in many ways, this is true. Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist, is the leader of the party. His cabinet is lined with officials accused of the same or similar conduct. 

But it’s important to stress the potential for a much darker generational shift in how the party approaches women’s issues. This requires focusing on the young men already in the party and those who will age into politics over the next decade, looking at their views and the media ecosystems in which they operate. 

Andrew Tate has become an icon for young men around the world, particularly in countries like the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Young boys are becoming radicalized, engaging in extremist discourse online that bleeds into real-world behavior. Tate self-describes as a sexist and misogynist, and his rhetoric is often deeply violent–including encouraging men to choke, hit, and spew profanity at women. In one video, Tate advises men whose partners accuse them of cheating to respond with aggression, which will of course lead to sex: “That’s how it goes, you go slap, slap, grab, choke, ‘shut up bitch,’ sex.’”

On the other side of all this, he promises his young male audience the keys to wealth, power, and respect. In an interview with Vice News in 2022, he declared “I don’t have loser friends.” And young men have responded. Millions follow Tate across his social media and other internet presences. Fan accounts spread videos of him dispensing violent and deeply misogynistic advice. Data and research company Savanta found that roughly one-in-three young men (aged 16-25) in the U.K. see Tate’s vision of masculinity as positive.

In the United States, the current administration is a mirror of Tate’s attitude toward women. And it came to power partly on the back of young men, with men aged 18 to 29 favoring Trump by 14 points in November. This came a year and a half after Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll by a jury in New York. Trump defended himself in part by saying Carroll “is not my type.” 

Since his re-election, Donald Trump has staffed his administration with multiple men who have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assaulting her in 2017. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s former nanny, Eliza Cooney alleged he subjected her to unwanted touching and groping when she was in his employ. At the time, Cooney was 23 and Kennedy was 45. Kennedy’s defense has included that he, in his own words, is “not a church boy.”

Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly expressed regressive attitudes on women and the family and engaged with far-right commentators who proudly espouse violent, misogynistic views. In 2022, Vance went on podcaster Jack Murphy’s show and recorded a 90-minute conversation on all manner of political and cultural topics. As Mother Jones noted at the time, Murphy had written a 2015 blog post in which he claimed “Feminists need rape… It is our duty as men to save feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.” Vance has never addressed Murphy’s comments directly or in relation to his appearance on the show. Another figure in Vance’s orbit, the Bronze Age Pervert (actual name: Costin Alamariu ), has argued that feminism has cursed society with a “terminal disease” and has unfavorably compared American women to those from other countries—referring to them in one post as a “kind of dog woman.”

It matters, then, that Trump is still popular now with young men. YouGov’s polling has continued to show him with net-positive favorables. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, noting that the left-right gender gap is most pronounced among young voters, has suggested that “On some level, the very things that disturb fussy establishment pundits like me—Trump’s strongman tendencies; his propensity to arbitrarily fire people and break stuff without regard to consequences—might appeal most to young male populists frustrated by a system they believe has abandoned them.” 

The popularity of Trump with Gen Z men and the success of influencers like Tate suggest a dark and ugly future for the American right. I have argued before that the increasing popularity of Trump and MAGA with young men is indicative of a shift in our politics. It’s one that moves Trumpism from an outlier to the normalized mainstream. It’s an idea that runs counter to the liberal common sense about what should work in a modern, plural society. But it is integral to the nature of authoritarian, anti-liberal politics and the reaction against contemporary progressivism. 

There is no law of gravity that dictates a generation must be more open-minded and civilized than those that came before it. Young voters have been enthralled with extremism before. Many young Germans, for example, saw the Nazis as a forward-looking and exciting party. As Rampell notes, there’s real cause for concern that figures like Trump and Tate can harness the anomie and sense of dislocation among young men to press them with ways of building community around noxious but potent ideas of masculine virtue. 

Rape and the authoritarian right 

The misogyny of figures like Tate and Trump is a preeminent feature of authoritarian politics. Throughout modern history, strongmen have glorified retrograde views on gender, legitimized violence against women, and left a wake of sexual victims in their private lives. 

In her book Strongmen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat stresses the importance of traditional masculinity and virility as essential parts of the leader’s image. She argues that “The strongman would be nothing without bodies to control…Far from being a private affair, the sex life of the strongman reveals how corruption, propaganda, violence, and virility work together, and how personalist rulers use state resources to fulfill their desires.”

Of Mussolini, Ben-Ghiat observes he tended toward “brief and violent encounters.” Mussolini committed his first rape at 17, well before he was the all-powerful fascist dictator of Italy. Once he was Il Duce, Ben-Ghiat notes that he “took his pleasure with the women brought to his private quarters and then dismissed them immediately…His compulsive conquests acted out his beliefs about the submissive roles women should have under fascism.”

Looking elsewhere, Francoist Spain was deeply regressive in its policies toward women and the family. The Spanish strongman ruled the country in one-party state, inflected by extremely conservative Catholic social values, until 1975. Under this regime, women were relegated to domestic roles and their freedoms highly restricted. The rhetoric toward women was paternalistic and protective, but the reality was much more vicious. 

The Sección Feminina (Women’s Section) of the Falange advised women to submit to men. In the household, wives were expected to acquiesce to their husband’s sexual needs and wants, with no concern for their own. It was a system that we would now look at as institutionalized marital rape. A culture of sexism restrained and subordinated women, and the law punished wives for adultery as well as fleeing abusive households. 

The legacy of these years can still be felt in a Spain that has in many ways embraced a forward-looking and feminist future. To illustrate this, we can look to the La Manada (or “Wolf Pack”) rape case that erupted in mid-2010s Spain, which offers a view into the interrelation between sexual violence and far right politics.

In July of 2016, a group of five men took advantage of the tumult of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona to gang rape an 18-year-old woman. And they filmed it. The subsequent case became a rallying point for Spanish women, not least because the men’s WhatsApp conversations, in which they discussed date rape drugs and joked about women in dehumanizing terms, showed they had intended to engage in sexual assault on their trip. The majority of the Spanish public was outraged when the three-judge panel ultimately ruled that Spanish law prevented them from ruling the crime a rape but instead had to be classified as a sexual assault because the victim had assumed the fetal position instead of fighting back. 

But, as Meaghan Beatley reported for the Guardian in 2019, the new far right party Vox was also energized by the trial. Vox, which current leader Santiago Abascal has described as “the party that defends what Spaniards say on WhatsApp,” jumped at the chance to defend masculine virtues against the supposed degradations of feminism. Another Vox official, Francisco Serrano, is a former judge who has forged his political career on anti-feminism, even writing a book entitled A Practical Guide for Abused Fathers: Advice to Survive the Gender Dictatorship. Serrano and others on the far-right oppose Spain’s 2004 gender violence law, which introduced these categories of crimes between domestic partners, and in 2018 Vox made its repeal part of its party platform alongside other anti-feminist proposals. 

Vox went on to achieve its best-ever results in the 2019 election, finishing third in overall support and securing 52 seats in the Congress of Deputies.

This saga exemplifies the reactionary and reactive nature of modern far-right misogyny. It’s a dangerous paradigm precisely because it is activated by attempts to dismantle it. Resistance is the very thing that fuels it because, like rape itself, it is a politics of dominance and control. 

When young men today turn toward influencers like Tate and political leaders like Trump, they’re indulging a time-tested fusion of authoritarian politics with a certain gendered and domestic malice. This found its most direct expression in the wake of Trump’s election victory, when Groyper and white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes declared “Hey, bitch, we control your bodies! Guess what? Guys win again.” 

It’s critical to keep these elements of reaction and dominance up front. The Trump administration is a test of every value we have come to say we hold dear as Americans. But it is also a frontal assault, an embodiment of violent machismo and rape as politics that is about subordinating both liberal women and a supposedly feminized country. 

Featured image is Spanish Commander Francisco Franco giving a lecture on his visit to Spanish deputies, by Mondiale Photo-Presse