Self-described misogynist Andrew Tate’s soaring popularity with young men comes as a reaction to the “feminization” of popular culture, according to 28-year-old political commentator and author Coleman Hughes.
“Insofar as Andrew Tate’s kind of masculine, male chauvinist politics are popular, part of the reason for that is a backlash to this feminization of culture,” Hughes said.
He points to the war on ‘toxic masculinity’ perpetuated by the left, particularly in education, which sometimes extends to shaming normal boyish behavior, like policing horsing around as part of the “anti-bullying” movement.
“As a reaction to the excesses of that, it creates a vacuum where someone like Andrew Tate can come in and just talk about fighting and denigrating women,” Hughes says on the latest episode of “We Never Had This Conversation,” a podcast hosted by The Post’s Rikki Schlott in Bill Maher’s Club Random network.
British-American Tate boasts over 10 million followers on X and runs a non-accredited “Hustler’s University” alongside his brother Tristan. Tate has previously said women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted and other inflammatory comments, leading him to be kicked off most other social media platforms. The brothers are currently awaiting trial in Romania on sex crime charges.
Hughes said fellow Gen Z men are becoming more conservative in response to various pointers from society such as headlines like “Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us” from left wing, female dominated mainstream publications like Vogue, precisely the kind of hyperbolic anti-male messages which push young men to the opposite extreme.
“Once we moved.. to third wave feminism… that is really about constantly pointing the finger at toxic masculinity, making boys and men feel guilty and wrong for acting in the ways that are more typically male, I think you get a backlash to that, and that backlash expresses itself politically as conservatism,” Hughes said in the episode, which dropped on Wednesday.
“I’m not the first person to observe that modern conservative politics has a more masculine character than liberal politics,” he added.
The 28-year-old writer and political commentator soared to national notoriety while a student at Columbia for his thoughtful critiques of identity politics and race essentialism — something he says more of his female peers seem to treat as a new “secular religion.”
“Throughout the last 100 years of American history, at any given point, women are more religious than men,” Hughes explained. “What happens now is you have a new religion that has come into the secular void of the American and Western left, which is intersectionality, and so in some sense, it’s perfectly unsurprising that young women who historically are more religious in general, would take to the new religion more swiftly.”
His 2024 book “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America” argues for a return to Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision that we would judge one another for the content of their character, not the way they look — a thesis which caused “The View” host Sunny Hostin to accuse Hughes of being a “charlatan” and a “pawn.”
“Critical race theory sounds like exactly the kind of academic, elitist bulls—t that the right is correct to hate,” Hughes said. “We’re rejecting the way Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement talked about race.”
Hughes, who is Black and Puerto Rican, says he first became interested in race politics while studying at Columbia, where he says “white supremacy” was an omni-present boogeyman.
“I became curious about… why some of the other black kids [at Columbia] think that there’s white supremacy here every day, when I’m walking around campus with my black skinned self experiencing no racism whatsoever,” he said.
“Why is there such a gap between what appears to be reality and what appears to be the dominant perspective?”
He was also especially horrified when the school held an orientation event in which they segregated students by race into “affinity groups,” where they were presumably more able to discuss their racial experiences with people who look like them.
While Hughes says some of his professors at Columbia were excellent, he was shocked to find how politically immature his peers were.
“Most of the students that were engaged with political issues I found to be absolute idiots, incurious, totally not open minded to any perspective they disagreed with. Poorly read teachers’ pets grabbing the coattails of the worst professors at Columbia and following them down the most intellectually bankrupt pathways the world of ideas has to offer,” he claimed.
As a supporter of Israel, Hughes was unsurprised to see his own campus devolve into chaos over the past year following the Hamas terror attack on Israel: “October 7th lit the match, because you had people essentially siding with Hamas before Israel had even retaliated,” he said.
While Hughes says colleges have made some positive changes to address encampments and boisterous protests — like adopting institutional neutrality and teaching students about free speech during orientations — he ultimately doesn’t believe any changes will be lasting.
“I have very little faith that the hypocrisy exposed by October 7th is going to lead to a kind of permanent or steady state of even-handedness,” Hughes said. “My fear is that the administrators in charge of those decisions are so unprincipled, so much like weather vanes in the wind.”