Our Samantha Koch recently took on the toxic masculinity of social media influencer Andrew Tate. Liam Siegler took to the pages of National Review to make much the same argument. He begins by noting that both Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens interviewed Tate in recent days, elevating his profile among conservatives.

It is easy to understand why so many are fascinated by Tate. He has grown wildly popular over the past two years for talking about issues plaguing young men, issues many people on the left either scoff at or ignore. He rightly recognizes the current crisis of masculinity. Far too many men lack purpose, a reality that shows up in statistics about drug overdose, pornography consumption, suicide, and education. He is filling a void.

But voids should not be filled with just anything. While Tate does promote some good things, such as personal responsibility, individual initiative, and physical health, his flaws are so monstrously critical that anyone with an ounce of moral fiber should reject him. And while he does motivate some people to get out of bed, whatever virtuous qualities he possesses are easily outmatched by his wholehearted embrace of sexual promiscuity, vapid materialism, and his power-centric vision of masculinity. …

To learn the truth about Andrew Tate, one need look no further than his own words. He built his wealth by starting what he called a “little attempt at a webcam empire.” When kickboxing was not making enough money, he evaluated his “assets” of five or so girlfriends and asked, “How can I use these women to make me money?” Tate convinced two of these women to start a webcam business with him and his brother Tristan in their two-bedroom flat. While the brothers would create their schedules, provide housing, and recruit new models, the girls performed for and interacted with men online. Their business grew until at one point Tate claimed to have had 75 women working for him in four locations, generating $600,000 a month. It was a hard business to run, he said, because “women have to want to obey you.” But because of his “supreme competence” and the money his business paid, girls allegedly were clamoring to get in. Tate has claimed he made his first million via the webcam industry.

Siegler goes on a length to use Tate’s own words to illustrate what kind of man he really is. “You’ve got to lie to him,” he told his “girls.” “We were taking their money … all of it,” Tate said of his girls. “We were milking them dry.”

And he felt no remorse. Asked once if he did, Tate promptly replied, “F*** no,” and gloried in his entrepreneurial skills. He succeeded not just because of the “beautiful girls” but because he “put together an apparatus of genius behind the avatar of beauty.” As Tate himself admits, the webcam enterprise was about his ego. It is not a coincidence that some of his camgirls were branded with tattoos that said “Owned by Tate.” Not only was “the game” about money, it was about amassing power. …

For Tate, the entire point of female companionship is the recognition it gives a “high-value” man, as “sexual access is an easy indicator of status.”

That has a lot to do with why the accusations and charges against Tate are believable. Is he really the sort of man who wouldn’t do it?

One of Tate’s personal selling points is that he is unafraid to advocate for traditional values in a world hostile to such views. Yet he is anything but traditional. Take his views on marriage, for example. As previously noted, Tate believes monogamy is essentially a conspiracy to repress the male spirit. He also believes that, in the Western world, marriage is “suicide and doesn’t make any sense at all.” It is “designed to destroy the man the second it doesn’t work out well.” With the rise of feminism, marriage “basically destroys all men in the event of [the wife] leaving.”

Naturally, Tate detests traditional sexual ethics. While he condemns pornography, he does so only because it emasculates men and deprives them of real sexual experiences. And so it is not a surprise that he openly brags about having sex daily. Nor is it a surprise when he promotes male promiscuity while condemning women for the same behavior. “A man having sex with multiple women is not nearly as disgusting or degrading as a woman having sex with multiple men,” he once claimed. For him, the difference between a man and a woman is: “I can love my woman with all my heart. I can die to protect her. And I can still f*** another b****.” But women who cheat are “just running through life being a hoe.” In Tate’s ideology, men are accountable to no sexual ethics at all.

Of course, Tate dismisses the charges against him, though Siegler details them and they don’t look good. He concludes:

In a society that couldn’t care less about cultivating the virtues men need to lead healthy lives, and that increasingly lacks genuine male role models, it is inevitable that people such as Tate would seek to exploit the vulnerable. People like him will prey on men’s worst insecurities about themselves and profit off their emptiness and despair. But men need more than expensive cars, six-packs, and cheap sex. They need purpose. And Tate offers nothing but a hollow, misogynistic, corrupt, and power-obsessed vision of what it means to be a man. He has profited off the commodification of women’s bodies and taught young men to do the same. He is no role model. Young men deserve better. And it is incumbent upon all of us, and especially conservatives, to give it to them.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.