The truth is much worse than most people realize, and they knew a lot of it.
Brian Beutler at Off Message (07.31.2026):
I’ve had Heidi Blake’s lengthy New Yorker exposé about Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan open in a browser tab for over a month.
I finally read it yesterday, straight through.
If you’ve already done the same, you’ll know why I felt compelled to write this. If you’ve been on to the true depths of the Tate brothers’ predations for months or years, I imagine you’ve found yourself incredibly frustrated that more people weren’t aware, or didn’t really seem to care. I get it now!
[...]
But I couldn’t write it credibly without reading the New Yorker story first. I hadn’t done it already because I assumed (naively it turns out) that I already knew the key facts about the Tates. A few peers who read the article when it came out posted their astonishment at its revelations—they used terms like “evil”—but I assumed they were just catching up with what most of us already knew: The Tates were accused sex traffickers and rapists, and avatars of a large global movement of “masculinists.” That’s all true, of course. But the tenor is way off. The way they’re depicted in our discourse, even by critics who find them repugnant, turns out to be unhelpfully euphemistic. To a casual observer, they come across like so many other right-wing influencers with big online followings—except that they may have committed some ugly crimes in a parallel realm of their lives. Misogynistic. The worst of the manosphere. Icky.
No, no.
If you’ve decided to file the Tate profile away for later, let me just distill for you why I think it’s unusually important.
First is the scale of the depravity. It’ll drain the color from your face. It’s weird to say that the terms “sex trafficking” and “rape” are insufficient to convey the depth of evil Blake uncovered. But there’s really no other way to put it. There was nothing incidental or concealed or limited about their crimes. They quite openly ran something like a global multilevel-marketing scheme, but for sexual exploitation, arguably even sex slavery.
Second is the reach of complicity. Because of how we talk about right-wing influencers, and how rightists plead innocence and naïveté whenever they get caught, I think there’s a widespread assumption within the political establishment that Trump world was attracted to the Tates for politically transactional reasons. They had a big audience of impressionable potential voters; the Trumps could grant them access to the corridors of power; everybody wins.
Not that this would be exculpatory, but it’s an alibi of a sort. Occam’s razor pointed to another case of malign indifference or neglect. Just another couple scumbags in or adjacent to Trump world. The Tates were useful, so Trump world arranged to spring them from Romanian captivity without asking too many questions. Then, when Trump cut them loose this month, declining to intervene against their extradition to the U.K., a further inference was straightforward: Before, Trump and his advisers didn’t know; now they know, and the truth is too hot even for them.
This appears to be false.
People well ensconced in Trump world, including members of his administration and even his family were participants in, or at least aware of, what went down in the Tates’ online and in-person network, which they called the War Room. The War Room was a paid-access forum for instruction on, and sharing stories about, violently or psychologically coercing women and girls into nonconsensual sex and pornography.
Last week, I noticed Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, had asked Republicans to open an investigation into these ties, and, as part of it, to subpoena Barron Trump. Her letter cites different reporting, but when you read the Blake article, it’ll dispel any reflexive notion you might have that Ansari is pulling a stunt, or trying to dirty up Trump’s college-age youngest son. She is completely correct. If Barron Trump is truly put off by physical abuse of women, he’ll be happy to share what he knows.
Great column by Brian Beutler on why the Trump Regime’s enabling of the monstrous sex trafficking duo Andrew and Tristan Tate should be on par with his Epstein List scandal.
This woodblock print, designed in the mid-20th century, is a celebrated landscape masterpiece by the legendary Shin-hanga and Sōsaku-hanga virtuoso Shiro Kasamatsu (1898–1991).
Titled "Toriire" (The Harvest), this brilliant work stands as a spectacular monument to mid-century rural lyricism, moving away from solitary minimalism to document the collective, rhythmic vitality of an autumn rice harvest. The artwork orchestrates a masterfully vibrant, warm palette of golden straw-yellows, rich ochres, striking indigo-blues, and a cool, multi-tiered sky to capture a timeless scene of agrarian life in harmony with Japan's monumental topography.
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
romaincrisis
amandla
gamechangershow
