From Ben Shapiro’s take on Andrew Tate:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Right must stop cheering on bad people who don’t care about their principles.
Today’s case: Andrew Tate.
Now, let me say at the outset, I’m not upset at all with anyone interviewing Tate. Go for it. Have at it. There are lots of great questions to ask him. But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is that people are dishonestly conflating “interviewing” Tate with cheering on Tate — applauding him, talking about how brave and wonderful he is while he rips off thousands of people with his scam Hustlers University and preaches the virtue of treating women in a way you would never allow anyone to treat your wife or daughter.
No one is saying you can’t have Tate on your show. It’s a free country. What I’m saying is that if you claim you are a conservative and have someone truly disgusting on your show, and you proceed to tout them, praise them, and nod along to everything they say, you’re doing more than “platforming” — you are becoming a propagandist for that person. A person who purports to stand for Biblical values, American values, and traditional values has a moral obligation to ask Tate hard questions about his actions, beliefs, and past — not help him falsely rewrite his legal record or ignore all he has actually said while nodding enthusiastically.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
Tate isn’t a conservative politician trying to push conservative policies, with part of the job being to separate out his agenda from his personal behavior. He’s an online troll who revels in precisely the evils conservatives hate. It’s his entire, self-stated persona. If you don’t ask about that, you’re not doing your job.
Now, I get the appeal of Andrew Tate. For decades, the hatred of traditional masculinity has been so strong, so thoroughgoing throughout the media and politics, that people have run away from traditional masculinity altogether. Young men were basically told they were useless, if not outright toxic. That left a vacuum. And Tate filled that vacuum with masculinity, but its ugliest iteration — not a responsible masculinity that protects women, children, and civilization, but the sort of masculinity that tears everything down.
