How Andrew Tate’s father formed his poisonous character

It’s difficult to overstate the ­influence that Andrew and Tristan Tate’s father had on them. Emory Andrew Tate II (Andrew’s full name is Emory Andrew Tate III) was an international master in chess and won the Indiana state ­championship six times.

He died in 2015 aged 56, after suffering a heart attack. Andrew once mentioned it on a podcast: ‘My father died during a chess tournament, which is the best possible death I could’ve wished for him. He died in a battle as he should. He was a warrior his entire life.’

He and his brother adored him. Tate fans also revere Emory as a John-the-Baptist figure. They repost his tweets with captions like, ‘Honour for us to have the privilege to learn and lean on your teachings’.

When we arrived at the Tate compound in Romania, Andrew handed us a piece of paper with a story written on it. He said it would be read out to all the War Room attendees (his followers). It began: ‘And so it happens that on this day, exactly 500 years ago, Master Po died. After morning exercises, he addressed the adepts regarding a mission to eradicate the Hyarushi Clan. They were masters in the art of poisons, a cowardly, yet highly effective skill. Po warned us that the mission was so dangerous as to be deemed impossible with no hope of return.’

The story goes on to tell how Master Po and his ‘apprentice’ fought their enemy, with the Master finally defeating the leader of the rival clan in hand-to-hand combat. At the heart of this parable is his father. He is revered by War Room members for his ­discipline, a theme that is integral to Tate’s conception of masculinity.

Tate’s followers refer to a mythical realm, Wudan, ruled over by ‘Master Po’, ie, Emory. They describe the ‘white path of Wudan’ as a journey of hardship undertaken to achieve power.

‘Did your dad influence you a lot?’ Matt asked Tate, fittingly as the two of them played a game of chess at his house in Romania (which Tate won easily).

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Tate replied. ‘A father’s job is to imprint on his son. That’s the whole point of progeny and bloodline, why kings had sons and their sons would succeed them. That’s the natural state of man.’

‘What kind of father was he?’

‘He was authoritarian, but that’s not a bad thing. A lot of negative spin is put on authoritarian, upright upbringings. But it’s a very good thing having a father who is very, very serious about discipline and respect.’

‘Did he enforce his views with physical violence?’

‘Did I get hit if I made a mistake? Yes, of course. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. For most of human history, children were hit when they made mistakes.’ Tate rubbished the modern liberal idea that children cannot grow into functioning adults if they are smacked.

‘I’m not saying “beat children”. Don’t hit a kid for no reason. But if a child makes a serious error, for there to be absolutely zero physical repercussion is wrong. Every single thing around us was built on the back of children getting hit when they made a mistake. We built the pyramids. We went to the moon. We built all of civilised society. The real world does the same thing. If you make too big a mistake, if you are too loud and too obnoxious, you’re too disrespectful, you’re going to get hit. So, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a child learning that lesson early – that there are authoritative figures in your life.

‘The bottom line of punishments always comes back to violence. It’s the standard on 99 per cent of the planet still today. It’s the standard even in the West, in most places: you f*** with your parents too much, you get a smack.

‘So, don’t pretend that’s the worst thing in the world. You say we’ve learned more about child psychology, blah, blah, blah, but your world view is untested. My world view is tested. It built modern society.’

Tate had nothing but praise for how he was brought up. ‘I was raised perfectly. I could not have hoped for a better father. He was an exceptional individual, so having an exceptional father made me an exceptional man. Exceptionalism was always a subject we discussed at the dinner table.

‘Expectations were always ridiculously high. I was moved up many grades in school. I aced every single test. I was not raised with, “I hope you’re happy”, I was raised with “I hope you’re a professional. I hope you conduct yourself in the right way. I hope you’re a fantastic man.”

‘And being a fantastic man isn’t about being happy. You can be a fantastic woman if you focus your life on being happy. But if you’re a man and you only focus on hedonism, you are not going to be a good man. Today, there are men out here doing drugs, being idiots, running around drinking all the time, and their only concern is being happy. They are not good men. The men who do good things for society, do things they don’t want to do because they feel a sense of duty and honour. So, being happy as a man really is not so important. I was never raised to be happy. I was raised to be fantastic at different things.’

According to this way of thinking, being happy was frivolous and feminine and therefore if you were a man, you should suffer and accomplish things.

‘The feeling of superiority is intrinsic to masculine contentment. You feel happy when you feel BETTER than others. We’ve evolved to compete,’ says one of his Instagram posts.

 Tate told us to beat ourselves up about our insecurities. We are lazy. We need to work harder. Otherwise, other men will outperform us and women won’t love us. He told his followers about losing a chess tournament aged seven, and his dad’s anger. ‘I said, “But I was tired, Dad.” He said, “You don’t make excuses.” For the next week and a half he kept me up to three, four in the morning playing grandmaster chess puzzles from a book. I’d sleep two hours, get up, go to school. My mum would go crazy: “Let him sleep, Emory!” And he’d say, “Quiet, woman. Chess, chess, chess, chess.” I’d be sitting there trying to keep my eyes open, trying to complete the chess puzzle. And after day five, I finally worked one out and he said, “See, you’re tired, but you did it.” You have to perform.’

When Tate told this story, he did so with a smile and a nostalgic glint in his eye. His followers gave a knowing chuckle. But to us, parts of it sounded abusive. Whether it was true or apocryphal is difficult to say. What’s certain is that it served a purpose. It was part of the myth-building whereby Tate achieved superhuman status through the suffering and hardship ‘Master Po’ put him through.

We were also left with the question: was Tate as productive as he claimed to be? Or was this all part of the carefully crafted illusion to make others feel insecure enough to pay for his courses?

Tate tells people he never had time for fun because he was always working. But, to us, he seemed more hedonistic than he let on, lounging around the pool with a cigar and chatting nonsense with his brother all day. One woman who knew him back in London in 2015 told us that while he and his brother claimed to be incredibly hard-working, in reality they would just sit in their underwear most days watching reruns of Come Dine With Me and the talk show Maury.

Keen to delve further into the Tate family, we managed to track down one of Andrew’s cousins. She told us that his number one desire was to be famous.

Of his father she said: ‘He was this high-IQ individual who had not mastered the day-to-day tools it takes to live a quality life. So, he would always be dressed like a bum and not shower. But my mother really enjoyed his company because he was so eccentric.’ That eccentricity went so far as to claim he was a spy. ‘He spoke Russian fluently. He spent a lot of time there. He told my mother a crazy tale of being electrocuted on an escalator in an attempt on his life. He showed her the mark on him.’

There was some confirmation of this from Tate, who claimed on a podcast once that his father worked in US air force intelligence, translating bugged conversations, and held ‘the record for the fastest assimilation of a foreign language for learning Russian fluently in 15 days, head to toe’. He explained that his father was discharged from the military after he was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

We questioned Tate’s cousin further about the alleged botched assassination attempt on Emory: did she ever get the sense that maybe he was making it all up, or did she think it was true?

She said she thought Emory and Andrew shared a desire to feed off the shock of others. ‘So, it could have been 60 per cent real, 40 per cent bulls***, you know?’

 One of the biggest questions about Tate is whether he is genuine or a performance. Perhaps to a generation that grew up with social media, this distinction is of diminishing relevance.

When their parents divorced, the Tate brothers left Chicago for England, with their mother, Eileen, who was English. It was there Tate got involved in kickboxing, winning 76 of 85 fights.

He and Tristan also had their first brushes with fame, on reality TV. In 2011 Tristan appeared on Channel 4’s Shipwrecked: The Island, and in 2010 Andrew was on the same channel’s Ultimate Traveller. Andrew’s contestant intro clip displayed of his cockiness: ‘I’m very mentally strong, and if I want to achieve something I achieve it. Because I’ve never been in a situation so far in my life where I’ve wanted something and didn’t get it.’ Then, in 2016, he was briefly on Big Brother, before being removed.

On reality TV, the pair found an arena where large personalities like theirs thrived. The final piece of the formula would be social media, where a person’s identity is gradually replaced with one custom-made for the audience. In this respect we, the audience, are partially to blame for Tate.

His rise to fame has been characterised by blending reality and myth. Like his father, Tate enthrals people with stories he tells about himself. But it would be wrong to dismiss him. His popularity does not just amplify misogyny, but undermines trust in democracy and the media, in some cases challenging belief in reality.

Traditional news organisations are failing to catch up with social media, where an increasing number of young people get their news and views from influencers, rather than from reputable sources.

Social media platforms claim that they, unlike traditional media, do not create content and therefore aren’t responsible for what viewers see. But they absolutely are responsible – they control what we as viewers see through algorithms they have designed to feed us the content they have decided we should see.

 They often claim this feed is merely based on users’ preferences and behaviour, but the radicalisation of a large part of a generation doesn’t just happen because young men like watching misogynist content. Andrew Tate, by essentially conning millions of young men into misogyny, has shown just how easily manipulated these algorithms are.

Tate’s message is potent because it taps into the young male appetite for rebellion, ­conquest, self-improvement and brotherhood which, whether ­biological or conditioned, seems to exist in spades.

Imagine if these concepts could be channelled differently: rebellion fighting systems of oppression instead of creating them; conquest that adds value to the world; self-improvement that doesn’t eschew intellectual pursuits; a brotherhood standing up for all people. Maybe then we would have something looking like positive masculinity rather than Tate’s warped version. 

 Adapted from Clown World by Jamie Tahsin & Matt Shea (Quercus, £20) published on September 26. © Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea 2024. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 12/10/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.