Posted on July 30,
2023
Tucker Loves Tate
Hardball interviewer plays the stooge
by
Daniel
Clark
Tucker Carlson's interview with web celebrity and professional
manly man Andrew Tate is being hailed as the most-watched interview of all
time. For those of us who have sat
through its entirety, it may be hard to believe that a large number of other
people have done the same, but that's okay.
If you happen to have "viewed" the video without watching all two and a
half hours of it, you have already seen enough, because the sycophantic slobberfest remained the same throughout.
To conduct the interview in person, Carlson had to
visit Tate at his home in Romania, where he remains on house arrest for reasons
never adequately explained during the 150-minute chat. Considering that this was primarily a
conversation about manliness, it was ironically fitting that it took place in
the homeland of Nadia Comenici, because Tate put on a
clinic in verbal gymnastics, while Carlson executed a flawless triple-supine.
The
former cable news personality opened by asking Tate what crimes he'd been
charged with, a question he should have been able to answer himself before
bothering to cross the ocean. "I'm
charged with being the head of an organized criminal group, which is in charge
of recruiting girls to make TikTok videos, to steal the money from the TikTok
views," Tate said. "The state thinks
that I, as a 35-year-old man, woke up -- I was already extremely financially
successful, I was already a father, I was already very well known; I have no
financial motivation, I have no criminal record, it's not my personality
profile -- but I woke up at the age of 35 and decided to make girls do TikTok to
enrich myself with the pennies that I would earn from TikTok views."
Carlson, a man who detects balderdash for a living,
and who had more than enough time to study his subject beforehand, nevertheless
allowed this rehearsed expression of incredulity to pass, implicitly trusting
Tate to provide the true story. What
Tate, his brother and two female accomplices are actually accused of doing is
holding women against their will and compelling them to appear in pornographic
videos.
Except for the coercive aspect of this alleged
activity, it sounds a lot like what Tate acknowledges already having done, though
legally, to earn as much as $600,000 a month.
In his webcamming business, he employed 75 women, many of whom he
described as his own girlfriends. For a
price, a woman appearing in front of a web camera in negligee would engage in
an online chat with a customer, sort of like what used to be known as phone
sex, but with video. So, it's not really
as if he had just woken up one day recently and decided to do such a thing, nor
would he perceive it as a penny-ante operation.
Had
Carlson been conducting a serious interview, instead of merely providing an
outlet for Tate to indulge in a series of unchallenged orations, he might have
pointed out that the accusations really do fit Tate's personality profile up to
a point, and asked him exactly how his activities in Romania differed from his
previous webcam business back in England.
Incredibly, Tate's webcam venture didn't even come up at the point in
the interview in which he discussed the destructive properties of
pornography. When he complained that
"men are replacing genuine sexual relationships with just the computer screen
and it's becoming a very, very big problem," Carlson let it pass without noting
that it is a problem to which Tate himself has contributed.
A closer inspection of Tate's personality profile
would have brought up the subject of his dismissal from the British version of
the reality show Big Brother, apparently over the discovery of what he
admits was a "kinky sex video" in which he beat a woman with a belt and shouted
threats at her. He argues that the act
was consensual, and that they were merely "acting out a role play." Admittedly, there's no reason to disbelieve that,
but what does it say about his personality, and whether it fits in with the
behavior of which he now stands accused?
Tate has faced multiple rape accusations, one of which
was the subject of a case that was dropped because the woman continued to have
a consensual relationship with him after the time of the alleged assault. The accuser in this case has since released a
series of WhatsApp voice notes from Tate that amount to a defiant admission of
his own abusiveness (e.g., "Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a
little bit?"). More role playing? Perhaps.
For all we know, all of his violent sexual encounters might have been
consensual. Even if that is true, it
would certainly be no reason to look to him as a sage, or suggest that he was a
fitting role model for impressionable boys.
This is far from the only area in which he needed to
be challenged. For all of Tate's
sensible-sounding concerns about the decline of masculinity in Western society,
he claims to have fathered at least ten children out of wedlock. Carlson might have asked him how many of
those children are boys, how big a part of their lives he can possibly be, and
whether leaving them to be raised without a man in the family undermines his
message about the importance of masculinity.
Near the end of the interview, Tate talked about the
importance of financial independence in maintaining personal freedom. This should have prompted an examination of
his own successful financial venture, an online community called Hustler's
University, which offers financial guidance that its critics claim is easily
available elsewhere online for free.
Enrollees are charged about $50 a month, but they can earn commissions
by recruiting other new subscribers.
Assuming that the promise of these commissions, and not the value of the
site's content, is the main driver of new membership, this would meet the
textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.
So what is Tate's advice to his followers about financial independence,
exactly? Be smarter than the people
you're scamming?
It would have been helpful if Carlson had confronted
him over this, but even if he had brought up the subject, he would only have
allowed Tate to get away with his all-purpose evasion: "The Matrix." This is
what Tate calls the global, omnipotent array of powers he imagines are aligned
against him, just because they feel threatened by his message of
manliness. Why is he under house
arrest? The Matrix willed it to be
so. Memo to Andrew: There's nothing
manly about blaming your misdeeds on an imaginary antagonist. Most boys stop doing that before
kindergarten, actually.
Mind you, this is the same Tucker Carlson who, only
days later, was lauded for his hardball interviews of Republican presidential
candidates at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa. In particular, his supporters are celebrating
his having "DESTROYED!" former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson over his
doublespeak on the subject of transgender surgeries for children. Good for him, but in the grand scheme of
things, so what? Not only does Asa
Hutchinson stand absolutely no chance of becoming president, but he's
struggling just to qualify for inclusion in a debate. In terms of societal relevance, he probably
ranks somewhere between Marianne Williamson and Carrot Top.
Andrew Tate, by comparison, is an influential internet
phenomenon who has achieved wild popularity among young British and American
men, while engaging in subhuman behavior and peddling a morally troubling
jumble of messages. He is the one who
really needed to be challenged, but the closest Carlson came to doing that was
to giggle, fluff his hair and say, "Oh, that is so true!" Was his kneejerk agreement with everything
Tate had to say meant to imply manliness by association? If so, then it was no more credible than
anything else in the entire production.
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