Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate

theguardian.com:

Andrew Tate says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.

He also thinks rape victims must “bear responsibility” for their attacks and dates women aged 18–19 because he can “make an imprint” on them, according to videos posted online.

In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.

“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,” he says in one video, acting out how he’d attack a woman if she accused him of cheating. In another, he describes throwing a woman’s things out of the window. In a third, he calls an ex-girlfriend who accused him of hitting her – an allegation he denies – a “dumb hoe”.

Tate’s views have been described as extreme misogyny by domestic abuse charities, capable of radicalising men and boys to commit harm offline.

But the 35-year-old is not a fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. Instead, he is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times.

Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.

His rapid surge to fame was not by chance. Evidence obtained by the Observer shows that followers of Tate are being told to flood social media with videos of him, choosing the most controversial clips in order to achieve maximum