Why Do Western Men Keep Glorifying Rapists and Pedophiles?

The manosphere is gangster rap for white boys.

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Just a Rapist

Andrew Tate, 39, was arrested in Miami on July 19, 2026, alongside his brother Tristan. The Crown Prosecution Service announced seven counts of rape against Andrew, three counts of sex trafficking, three of assault, and 19 charges related to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. Court filings provided by the Department of Justice allege that two women were strangled unconscious by Andrew Tate and penetrated without their consent. One accuser recalled being unsure whether he “was just a rapist or if he would kill her.”

Antonio Gramsci understood that the ruling class does not maintain its grip on power through force alone. It manufactures consent. It builds, as he wrote in the Prison Notebooks, a cultural hegemony so pervasive that the subjugated classes internalize the values of their rulers as their own. The peasant does not merely obey the landlord. He aspires to become the landlord. He adopts the landlord's cruelties as virtues. He teaches his sons that the landlord's world is the only world worth wanting. The chains become ornaments. He even builds the reverence into his language — "My Lord," "Your Grace," "Your Majesty" — so that every act of address is an act of genuflection, so that deference is woven into the tongue itself before the mind can question it. The ruthlessness becomes divine.

Gramsci called it common sense: the way ruling-class ideology seeps into everyday life until it becomes invisible, until it feels like nature rather than architecture. What we are witnessing now, in the elevation of serial predators to the status of cultural heroes, is one of the most grotesque expressions of this principle that the West has yet produced. The mask has come off, the face beneath is deeply depraved, and millions cheer because they have been taught that depravity is beautiful.

“It channels the genuine economic despair of young men that late capitalism inflicts on those it does not need, and converts that despair into worship of the very class that produced it”

Owning Women

Andrew Tate has amassed more than 10 million followers, most of them boys and young men. He runs an online academy where he claims to teach young men how to get rich and attract women. The curriculum, stripped of its marketing language, is domination. Women as property. Consent as irrelevant. Wealth as proof of biological superiority. He built his fortune, in part, while running a webcam pornography business for about a decade. The pipeline from consuming women on camera to the charges now leveled against him is not a contradiction. It is a continuum.

Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. The transaction could not be more transparent. You deliver the votes of angry young —mostly Western, mostly white— men, you provide cultural cover for a politics of domination, and the state shields you. Don Jr. publicly spoke out against Andrew Tate’s detention in Romania, calling it “absolute insanity.” The Tates have repeatedly praised Trump and urged followers to vote for him in 2024.

The “manosphere”. Credit: OCCRP

The pattern repeats. In November 2024, an Irish civil jury found Conor McGregor liable for sexual assault. Nikita Hand alleged that McGregor isolated her in a bedroom at Dublin’s Beacon Hotel in 2018, choked her, and raped her, leaving her with visible injuries documented by a sexual assault treatment unit. Ireland’s Court of Appeal dismissed his attempt to challenge the verdict, with the three-judge panel rejecting all grounds. None of it mattered. McGregor, has pivoted to political commentary, including anti-immigration rhetoric and a St. Patrick’s Day visit to Donald Trump’s White House. He is received at the seat of American power not despite the verdict but because the verdict is itself proof that he is part of the club. He is one of them, just as the visitors to Epstein’s island all knew of each other that they loved the same thing.

A jury found that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and later defamed her after she went public. Carroll has been paid more than $5.6 million as part of the verdict. He owes her, in total, including interest, over $100 million. The sitting President of the United States. A man found liable by a unanimous jury of sexually abusing a woman in a department store dressing room. Not a fringe figure, not a disgraced outcast, but the head of state of the most powerful country in human history.

Read it here.

Normalizing the Abnormal Inside the Normal Brain

Marx described ideology as the camera obscura, the inverted image of the world that makes the unnatural appear natural. The young men who follow Tate, who worship McGregor, who wear Trump’s name on red hats, have been fed through a camera obscura of algorithmic precision: the lie that Trump, Tate, and McGregor represent natural manhood, the pinnacles of masculinity.

How did the powerful manage to naturalize abuse, exploitation, and rape as aspirational? Consider the machinery: the bondage and choke pornography that saturates their minds before they have had a first kiss teaches them that women exist to be used. The combat sports spectacles where racial taunts and misogynist provocations — known as the tradition of “trash talking” — are selling points rather than disqualifications teach them that cruelty is entertainment. The cigar-smoking, shiny-shoe wearing, Lamborghini-leaning aesthetic of the manosphere teaches them that the degradation of women is a lifestyle brand, something to aspire to, something that signals arrival.

Federal prosecutors noted that Andrew Tate posted a video tour of a $50 million superyacht, “Obsidian Blade,” reportedly being built for him in Turkey. The violence and the consumption are presented as inseparable, continuously placed side by side, and as a psychologist I know how the brain turns correlation into causal connection. They become two expressions of the same will to power. Millions of boys absorb this lesson before they are old enough to vote.

None of this belongs to one political party or one faction. The rot is structural. Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit and appeared to be a regular on Epstein’s Lolita Express. Multiple women accused him of sexual assault. Joe Biden faced an accusation from Tara Reade. The Epstein client list crosses every partisan boundary. The class that rules does not divide along the lines it draws for the rest of us. Its members share something deeper than ideology: the impunity that wealth purchases, the silence that power commands, and — most importantly — the knowledge that they all share the same appetites of moral depravity, and that they are therefore part of a club that protects its own.

Tate’s Just Unlucky He Isn’t Part of the Epstein Class

And here is what must be said plainly: the only reason Andrew Tate sits in a cell is that he is not powerful enough. He is an aspirant, not a member. He built his brand on the aesthetics of the ruling class — the yachts, the women, the contempt for ordinary life — but he did not possess the institutional armor and mega-wealth that genuine membership requires. He did not have the battalions of lawyers, the intelligence contacts, the decades of accumulated leverage that allowed Jeffrey Epstein to operate for years in plain sight. The Epstein circle, whose names remain largely unspoken, whose crimes remain largely unprosecuted, operates in a different stratum altogether.

News of the White House intervention on behalf of the Tates came as Trump was already under fire over his ties to Epstein. The system protects its own, and the Tates were never quite its own. They were useful. They were part of the coalition of hyper-masculine social media voices who helped deliver young male voters to Trump and who helped minimize Trump’s Epstein escapades among their followers. And now that the legal walls are closing in, the administration discards what it can no longer use. The fact that the Tates are being extradited to the UK shows that the Epstein class has no more use for them — except one final act of distraction, in which they become the face of assault and abuse so that the Epstein class does not.

But the culture the machine built persists. The millions of boys who learned at Tate’s digital feet that women are property, that consent is a fiction, that the law is for the weak — they will not unlearn those lessons because their teacher is in handcuffs. They will find the next prophet. The pipeline is self-sustaining, powered by algorithms designed to maximize engagement, which in practice means maximizing outrage, resentment, and the pornographic thrill of watching someone exercise power without consequence.

The Perpetual Depravity of Western Capitalism

The Western system of exploitation is so successful because its mechanisms of control operate not through a visible dictator but through the confusion and managed bewilderment of the population. The manosphere is one of its most effective instruments. It channels the genuine economic despair of young men — the precarity, the loneliness, the sense of disposability that late capitalism inflicts on those it does not need — and converts that despair into worship of the very class that produced it. The young man who cannot afford rent is taught to admire the man who owns the building. The young man who has never been touched with tenderness is taught that tenderness is weakness. The young man who senses, correctly, that the system is rigged against him is taught to rig it further, in his fantasies, against those even more powerless than he is.

This is not a new technology. The ruling class ran the trial phase decades ago, on the populations it considered disposable. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the music industry (owned by the same Epstein class that now owns the platforms) invested enormously in the promotion of gangster rap. The formula was identical: take communities crushed by deliberate economic abandonment, by the crack epidemic, by mass incarceration, and offer their young men a single aspirational image: the dealer, the pimp, the killer, draped in gold, surrounded by women reduced to body parts, glorifying the very predation that was destroying their neighborhoods. The invisible kids no one in power cared about copied it. They killed each other. They degraded their sisters. They filled the prisons that enriched the investor class. And no one in power called it a crisis of masculinity. No one launched a moral panic. Because it was working exactly as designed. And as a bonus, the young men were now blamed for their own miserable existence and their own destruction.

The manosphere is gangster rap for white boys. The aesthetic differs — cigars instead of blunts, Lamborghinis instead of Escalades, crypto instead of crack — but the architecture is identical. Manufacture despair. Offer a predator as the only model of escape. Let the desperate destroy each other and those weaker than them. Harvest the profits. The only difference is that the trial phase targeted communities the system had already written off. The rollout targets the sons of the middle class, which is why, for the first time, commentators are treating it as a crisis.

Fairy tales once performed the function of manufacturing aspiration toward the depraved ruling class — but with more elegance. The king was wise and moral. The queen was beautiful and pure. The castle was where goodness lived. The divine right of monarchs was woven into bedtime stories for a thousand years, naturalizing hierarchy so deeply that even revolutions could not fully dislodge it.

But beneath the elegance lay something deeply perverse: these were stories conditioning poor girls to long for the day they would be chosen by kings and princes, narratives designed to teach daughters that it was an honor to be selected for their youth and beauty by a depraved class of child-molesters and rapists, because that is what royalty has always been. Every kingdom in every story was a grooming operation.

The capitalist class learned the lesson and adapted the form. The castle became the penthouse. The king became the CEO. The divine right became the “grind.”

But the pretense of benevolence has been abandoned. The modern fairy tale no longer requires a happy ending or a virtuous hero. The hero strangles women unconscious. The hero faces dozens of charges. The hero is accused of child molestation. The hero sits in the White House. And the audience (raised on a steady diet of degradation packaged as empowerment) watches and applauds and wants to be just like him.

We will be told, in the coming weeks, that the system worked. That the Tates were arrested. That justice was served. But the arrest of two men does not indict the civilization that crowned them. It does not touch the economic structures that reward predation. It does not dismantle the media ecosystems that amplify it or the political systems that protect it. It does not reach the men who are truly untouchable — the ones whose names were in Epstein’s book.

The sacrifice of the Tates, if that is what this becomes, will function as all such sacrifices function in a system designed to preserve itself: as a pressure valve, a spectacle of accountability that obscures the architecture of impunity. As applying the law only to the common people while the Epstein class sends nine-year-old Eastern European models around the world as birthday presents for eighty-year-old men.

Read it here.

The prophets of all religions understood something that our commentators refuse to acknowledge: the corruption of the rulers and the corruption of the people are the same corruption. I have called it “Trickle-Down Psychopathy.” You cannot produce a predator class without producing a population that venerates predation. You cannot build an economy on exploitation without building a culture that sanctifies the exploiter. The sickness is one sickness. And it will not be healed by handcuffs, or by elections, or by the performative outrage of a media class that platforms the next monster before the cell door closes on the last.

- Karim.

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