X for the win.

Just 10 days ago, a 23-year-old citizen journalist named Nick Shirley posted a video of empty state-funded “daycare centers” run by Somali immigrants across Minnesota.

Abuse of government programs by Somalis in Minnesota is not a new story. Yet the video became a national sensation. Shirley captured the brazenness of the apparent fraud, and the video has now been viewed 138 million times on X.

By this weekend, Minnesota governor Tim Walz was calling Shirley a “delusional conspiracy theorist” on X. News flash: if you are the governor of a state with almost 6 million people and you’re arguing with a 23-year-old online, you’ve already lost.

—

(Citizen journalism. With your help.)

Subscribe now

—

This morning Walz announced he was dropping his bid for a third term as Minnesota governor, a move that would have been unthinkable even a month ago.

In 2022, Walz won reelection by almost 8 percentage points; in 2024, he ran alongside Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for vice-president. No politician has seen his career blow up this fast since… well, since Joe Biden had to quit his own presidential campaign.

—

(Timmmmber!)

—

Walz was always an absurd figure, a wannabe war hero who dodged service in Iraq.

He was Harris’s white male equivalent, a mediocrity picked to run for national office because of his race and gender. His refusal to call out Minnesota’s National Guard quickly during the 2020 George Floyd riots encouraged widespread looting and arson.

Still, the speed of his collapse is stunning, and proof of the confluence of three powerful political and media trends:

• Anger over unchecked immigration, which is growing, not shrinking, as the Trump Administration proves the Biden White House and Democrats could have effectively shut down migration at any time from 2021 to 2024 and instead allowed and even encouraged it.

• The realization that waste and outright fraud in quasi-welfare programs, particularly those administered by blue states but backstopped by the federal government, has reached massive levels. A federal prosecutor in Minnesota suggested that it might be $9 billion in that state alone in the last few years, or $1,500 per resident, in just a handful of Medicaid programs. That estimate suggests that hundreds of billions of dollars might have been wasted or stolen in New York, California, and other states.

• The rise of X as an outlet for citizen journalism, particularly on stories that conservatives favor and liberals would rather ignore (like the two above).

What happens next? Time will tell, but all three of those forces only seem to be becoming more powerful.

And so Walz’s reckoning feels like the beginning, not the end, of a trend.

—

(To read the archives, including last year’s piece about Walz’s National Guard adventures…)

Subscribe now

—

Almost six years ago, Democrats published the world’s longest political suicide note — their 2020 election platform on immigration.

CREATING A 21ST CENTURY IMMIGRATION SYSTEM has now vanished from the Democratic Party Website. But the Internet is forever, and the archived document remains easily findable. It makes a fascinating read.

In almost 2,000 words, the platform does not mention “border security” once. It does use the word “illegal” — referring to “President Trump’s illegal, chaotic, and reckless changes” to immigration. “Undocumented” comes up once too, in a promise to offer citizenship to “millions of undocumented workers, caregivers, students, and children.”

—

(The news you need. Even on holidays. With your help.)

Subscribe now

—

Among the platform’s other high notes:

We will protect and expand the existing asylum system and other humanitarian protections… Democrats will end Trump Administration policies that deny protected entry to asylum seekers… we will end prosecution of asylum seekers at the border and policies that force them to apply from “safe third countries,” which are far from safe.

We will also eliminate unfair barriers to naturalization…

Democrats believe family unity should be a guiding principle for our immigration policy. We will prioritize family reunification for children still separated from their families…

[W]e will end workplace and community raids. We will protect sensitive locations like our schools, houses of worship, health care facilities, benefits offices, and DMVs [Note: this may be the first time anyone has ever called a DMV office a “sensitive” place] from immigration enforcement actions…

We believe detention should be a last resort, not the default. Democrats will prioritize investments in more effective and cost-efficient community-based alternatives…

—

(You want reckless? We’ll give you reckless!)

(SOURCE)

—

In other words: Come on in. The water’s fine.

The platform promises an interlocking series of guarantees and policy changes that would not merely reduce but as a practical matter end any restrictions against immigration, legal or otherwise.

Basically, the Democratic Party vowed that if it ran the federal government, it would open American borders to anyone and everyone in the world who could reach them.

The asylum promises were especially important.

As even the “American Immigration Council” — which despite its anodyne name is funded by immigration lawyers and relentlessly pushes open borders — has explained:

Since the second term of the Obama administration, however, U.S. asylum policy has become hopelessly entangled with border management. As part of global displacement challenges, many more people than ever before started coming to the United States to request asylum; at the same time, those people came from places beyond Mexico and had more complex needs than the working-age adults who had made up most migration in the past.

“More complex needs” is a polite way to say “people uninterested in working.”

The Democratic platform explicitly encouraged those arrivals. All they had to do was make an asylum claim, with or without credible evidence. How could border officials possibly check their stories? At that point they would be allowed in — and would not face any meaningful enforcement, ever.

—

Given these incentives, it is no surprise immigrant caravans started moving north only weeks after Election Day in 2020 — even before Joe Biden was officially sworn in.

And the flood continued, as migrants very quickly realized the Democrats had meant every word. They understood they would be greeted with open arms — and checkbooks. An increasingly professionalized industry of smugglers emerged to organize and transport them.

Supply creates its own demand, whatever the product.

In January 2023, the Biden Administration took the inevitable final step, a creating what it called a “Humanitarian Parole Program.” The plan allowed in another 360,000 migrants a year from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela without even requiring them to reach the southern border or have any legal basis for admission. If they could afford a plane ticket and find someone — anyone — in the United States to sponsor them, they could fly in.

The goal of the Bidenites was nakedly political. They hoped to make the border look better. But as a practical matter the program eliminated the last barrier to entry — that would-be migrants physically arrive at the border. Even the 2020 Democratic platform hadn’t (explicitly) gone that far.

—

(Sometimes the truth, like the devil, is in the details. Help me explain them.)

Subscribe now

—

How the Democrats got to this point is its own story, and worth exploring. So is the question of what happens next.

But for now it is simply worth understanding that the collapse of any immigration restrictions was a feature, not a bug. Nearly 10 million people came to the United States under the Biden Administration — the largest surge either in raw numbers or as a percentage of the population at least since the Civil War.

The only surprise is that the total wasn’t even higher.

Nairobi, Kenya, December 2011:

I am in Kenya to research my seventh John Wells novel, The Night Ranger. Wells is chasing American missionaries taken into the bush by Somali mercenaries. It’s a change of pace for him, lower stakes than his usual. It will turn out to be one of my favorite novels.

I have visited a vast Somali refugee camp in northern Kenya and the Indian Ocean coast, where Somali kidnappers have recently captured and killed several Europeans.

Now I am back in Nairobi, talking about the problem of Somalia, which Kenyans face up close. Kenya is mostly Christian. Somalis are Muslim — and poor even by African standards. Further, Kenya needs Western safari tourism for jobs and cash. The kidnappings have not helped. Kenyans would rather keep their neighbors out. But the United Nations and aid groups have given them little choice (oh, the irony; poor countries hate open borders even more than rich ones).

Anyway, I am having drinks at a hotel talking about Somalia with (white) non-governmental aid workers — they live well, these NGO types. And one says:

Here’s what you need to know about Somalia. It’s on the ocean, right? [Somalia has the longest coastline in Africa, almost 2,000 miles.] But most Somalis, they can’t swim, can’t fish, they have no interest in the water. That’s how inward-facing they are, how tribal.

The words stuck with me. And 14 years later, they help explain the multi-billion dollar Somali corruption scandal in Minnesota, which has exploded into one of the biggest stories of 2025.

—

(On the news, wherever it goes. With your help.)

Subscribe now

—

The Somalis are tribal, but they are not alone.

It is impossible to understand the massive chunk of the world that runs from Morocco 4,000 miles east to Pakistan and south across Africa without realizing the importance of tribes. This area covers nearly two billion people, mostly Muslim — but including hundreds of millions of Christians too. It is mostly poor, but it also has the wealthy Gulf Arab nations.

What it shares more than anything is a commitment to tribe as the center of identity. In Arab and Muslim countries, cousin marriage helps sustain tribal identity; marriages between cousins account for two-thirds of all marriages in Pakistan and nearly as many in some Arab countries.

—

(Consanguinity = Cousin marriage. Because if you can’t keep it in your pants… keep it in the family!)

SOURCE

—

Rates are somewhat lower in Somalia, because marriages help bind “clans” — not just already closely-related families — to each other.

Still, as a book on marriage in Arab and African countries explains:

Overall, in the course of the marriage process in Somalia and Djibouti collective interests are put before the interests of the two individuals getting married.

I do not think most Americans can easily wrap their heads around how foreign these cultures really are to our way of thinking.

A society that does not even allow its members to choose their husbands or wives has a very different structure than Western societies that focus on individual rights — and the rule of law.

Yes, in both the West and tribal societies, the family is the core unit, which may be why Westerners haven’t seen this difference as clearly as they should.

But in the West, each family is effectively independent. More powerful groupings are political, not familial, organized by population size and geography — cities, counties, states, nations.

In tribal societies, families stack together to gain power, which is why cousin marriage matters so much. Me against my cousin, me and my cousin against our second-cousin neighbors, our extended family against yours, all under the leadership of a clan leader. The clans may share territory, but not political leadership.

In the West, nation-states gather legitimacy from (at least theoretically) providing all citizens equal justice under the law.

Tribal societies do not have a similar overarching philosophical foundation. They work in practice as tribes compete and cooperate, sometimes in relatively calm equilibrium, sometimes under the autocratic leadership of the strongest tribe and its chiefs.

And sometimes in open conflict, up to and including civil war, like the wars that wracked Somalia for decades.

—

When individual families from tribal societies come to Western countries, they have little choice but to adopt Western stacking mechanisms — to accept the rule of law and the authority of independent political jurisdictions. Plenty of individual Somalis have done just that.

But when they come en masse, as the Somali immigrants of Minnesota did, they may try to keep their tribal structures at least partly intact. In November, the independent newspaper County Highway ran an extraordinary piece about the Somali fraud in Minnesota explaining how easily the community had reestablished itself along clan lines:

The community is the result not of a voluntary movement of ambitious people seeking a new life in America, but of the US-government’s mass resettlement of entire families at once…

The Somalis brought the language, culture, and complex clan system of their shattered homeland to Minnesota… the cultural forces that allowed Somalis to resume a version of their prior lives also had the effect of walling them off from other Minnesotans.

“The historic Somali society is a kind of Janus-faced society,” explained Ahmed Samatar, a political scientist at Macalister College in Saint Paul and the founding editor-in-chief of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies, at his skylit campus office. “On one side there is the intimacy of the local community, the family subgroup and kin group. Here there is mutuality and responsibility and respect… But the civic culture was not part of that tradition.”

—

(John Wells rides again.)

SOURCE

—

In other words, many Somalis believe they owe their tribes hard work, integrity, and honesty.

Their tribes, and no one else.

So when Minnesota’s Democrats decided to drop any guiderails and effectively open federally financed programs to mass looting (a decision both overtly cynical and weirdly naive), a stunning number of Somalis took advantage.

As County Highway explained:

The fraud spread so widely and quickly that it appeared to have no real architect… gallop[ing] through the Somali community, which kept the secret from non-Somali Minnesota with ironclad discipline. The clan system acted as both pathway and protection for the fraud…

Through every fraud case, the Somali community displayed what Professor Samatar described as “the solidarity of thieves.” Bad actors within the community would approach potential coconspirators without any fear of betrayal.

Honor among thieves!

No, not every Somali in Minnesota can be blamed for this fraud.

But that doesn’t mean that the decision to accept large numbers of immigrants en masse from a tribal society didn’t set the stage for it. Europe has seen a similar crisis with Syrian and Afghan refugees in the last decade, though Europe has faced more violence because it has taken in so many young single men.

—

(The big picture. For pennies a day)

Subscribe now

—

The post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States has now ended.

President Trump has proven the Democratic argument that the United States could not maintain its borders was a lie. He has proven that with reasonable and politically tolerable steps, new illegal immigration can be reduced nearly to zero.

For a least a couple of Presidential cycles, I doubt any serious Democratic candidate will call for allowing mass waves of unskilled migrants (whether illegal or through dubious programs like the ones the Biden Administration concocted).

At some point, though - maybe in a decade, maybe a generation — the pendulum will swing again, and the United States will be ready to accept large numbers of immigrants once more.

When it does, I hope it remembers the lessons of the last decade — and does not let in large groups from tribal societies, encouraging them to recreate their clans en masse on American soil.

We cannot be certain all our new immigrants will accept the ideal of America.

But we can do our best to be sure they do not arrive with fragmented allegiances.

• Event Contrast: Attended Bonnie Blue’s Channel 4 premiere and Scrutopia dinner, noting very different tones between a porn documentary launch and a conservative summer school.
• Documentary Content: Film features Blue’s marathon gangbangs, family in audience, and her mix of outrageous acts with mundane pastimes, framed as humorous and calculated.
• Business Model: Blue intentionally provokes to boost subscriptions, touts herself as educating men, and stages sex scenes in everyday settings while seeking unfiltered participation.
• Channel 4 Reaction: Backers and director wrestle with whether the film celebrates empowerment or undermines it, urging audiences to suspend judgment about Bonnie’s behavior.
• Scruton’s Sexual Ideal: Draws on Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire to contrast personal, mutual eroticism with the depersonalized objectification on display in Blue’s work.
• Cultural Consequences: Warns that mainstreaming violent practices such as choking forces reluctant compliance, and that formal consent rituals may not prevent harm.
• Call for Moral Judgement: Urges conservatives to reject degrading spectacles, keep cultural standards high, and avoid letting platforms like OnlyFans define modern sexuality.

This article was first published on 29 July 2025. 

***

Variety is the spice of life and all that. Last Thursday I was at Channel 4, attending the premiere of porn star Bonnie Blue’s new documentary, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself. The next day I was in the Cotswolds to give an after-dinner speech at “Scrutopia”, the annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. One of these events was much more fun than the other.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

More from this authorVirgin Island’s humiliation kink

By Kathleen Stock

With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgemental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanisation. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualising, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

“It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas”

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalised objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammelled by civilising religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalised human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

More from this authorWhy liberals love an AI friend

By Kathleen Stock

Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualised choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster-in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgements out of the carpark and back on the road.

---

Kathleen Stock is contributing editor at UnHerd.

Docstockk

---

• Labour’s focus: Jess Phillips announced a £20-million effort to train teachers on spotting misogyny, citing Andrew Tate’s fanbase as evidence of prevalent attitudes.
• Tate’s supposed patriarchy: After returning to the ring following five years away, Tate suffered a decisive defeat to Chase DeMoor, undermining his portrayed physical dominance.
• Patriarchal succession: True patriarchies rely on grooming successors, unlike Tate, who lacks a visible family dynasty or loyal protégé.
• Fatherlessness context: Tate’s upbringing without a present father, and his own absence from his children’s lives during incarceration, mirror broader patterns linking missing fathers to male delinquency.
• Sex differences and socialization: The piece argues that differences in boys’ energy and aggression require clear boundaries and strong male guidance, which erosion of traditional patriarchy has weakened.
• Fratriarchy explanation: Andrew Tate’s online following is framed as a fratriarchy—boys bonding through dominance over women due to a lack of structured male hierarchy.
• Policy avoidance: Labour is criticized for avoiding discussions of fatherlessness and male bonding through sexual violence, focusing instead on internet censorship and curriculum tweaks.
• Tate’s legacy: Without succession planning or a family empire, Tate is portrayed as a “chief bro” whose defeat reflects the limitations of his moral and practical formation.

If you were to ask Labour’s Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips, what “patriarchy” looks like, she’d probably gesture in the direction of Andrew Tate. The bête noire of school teachers and feminists, this self-styled “misogynist” influencer is notorious for a message of aggressive masculinity, flashy moneymaking, and contempt for women. And he evidently lives rent-free in a lot of Labour heads. The £20-million package recently announced by Phillips, to train teachers to “spot and tackle misogyny” in the classroom, explicitly mentions Tate’s large fanbase as evidence of how widespread these attitudes are.

But how convincing a patriarch is he, really? This week, he made headlines not for inciting misogyny, but for losing a fight. He was an MMA fighter long before he was an influencer or porn producer, and has always traded on his physical prowess. But this week, after a five-year break from the ring, Tate went up against the boxer Chase DeMoor in Dubai — and was brutally outmatched.

Taller, stronger, and 10 years younger, DeMoor taught Tate a lesson so conspicuously absent from Tate’s own brand of “patriarchy” as to disqualify it from being properly patriarchal. Namely: it doesn’t matter how aggressive you are, as a young man. Eventually you will get older and lose physical dominance, and you need a plan for holding onto power when younger and hungrier rivals come snapping at your heels.

In patriarchy properly understood, the core of this is “succession planning”, which is to say training a loyal heir. The 21st-century’s foremost storyteller, Taylor Swift, captured this dynamic in the recent song “Father Figure”, sung from the perspective of a mafioso-like patriarch:

I showed you all the tricks of the trade
All I ask for is your loyalty
My dear protégé

A patriarch may be an adoptive “father figure”, as in Swift’s telling, or else a literal father — as, for example, in historic royal families, or more recently the Murdoch, or Kennedy, or Trump families. Whether the family trade is running an organised crime network, a real estate business, a media empire, or a country, a patriarch of this kind will ensure his kids are taught to manage the empire. If he doesn’t have kids, successors will be identified, groomed, and in time granted power and responsibility.

In this spirit, Rupert Murdoch’s children have largely taken over from the ageing tycoon. George Soros has handed over his global social-engineering activities to his son Alex. Trump’s offspring are often seen in his entourage, and play important roles in his commercial and political activities. These are all patriarchs in the old pattern. But where is Tate’s dynasty?

Reports vary on whether he has kids, or how many. But there are no reports of any family visits during his incarceration in Romania. The inference is that however many kids he has, they don’t live with him. This would make sense: it would, in fact, replicate Tate’s own upbringing.

More from this authorZack Polanski’s degrowth dystopia

By Mary Harrington

When Tate mentions his father, the American chess player Emory Tate, it’s usually in admiring terms — for all that the anecdotes often describe what sounds like a cruel, violent narcissist. This determination to deify his father’s memory has always seemed piteous to me, for Emory abandoned Andrew and his siblings in 1997, just as Andrew approached adolescence. In their father’s absence, Tate and his siblings grew up in a single-parent home amid Luton’s grim, crime-ridden council estates.

Tate’s escape shows genuine grit and ability. It also sheds a light on how Tate’s own potential was crippled by his own father’s failings. But to grasp this, we need to bracket the assumption, axiomatic among the world’s Jess Phillipses, that “patriarchy” is bad by definition in all its manifestations. For while there are forms of patriarchy I would not wish to embrace, such as the kind that legitimises child marriage or “honour killings”, some traits may have been decried as “patriarchy”, or even just “toxic masculinity”, that are better understood simply as average sex differences — and which come in positive, prosocial forms as well.

It is, for example, not an effect of “patriarchy” that on average boys are more wilful, aggressive, and high-energy than girls. I’m not going to waste paragraphs citing statistics; naturally there are outliers, but on average this is simply true and obvious. It also has implications for the socialisation of boys; implications that were well understood until about 10 minutes ago. Boys benefit from clear boundaries; plenty of exercise; and, especially as they get bigger and bolshier, authoritative older men to keep them in check. Among the kind of common-sense people who don’t generally get to write newspaper columns, this folk wisdom is amply conveyed by the phrase “Boys are like dogs”.

“In the case of both boys, and dogs, the liveliest ones need clear boundaries.”

To be clear, I don’t mean this rudely: I like dogs, and I like boys and men too. But on average they’re not interchangeable with girls. In the case of both boys, and dogs, the liveliest ones need clear boundaries. Sometimes enforcing these requires someone big, strong, and authoritative enough to make those boundaries clear. And when we set about smashing “patriarchy”, one of the things that got smashed with it was a healthy appreciation of the contribution made by older men to this aspect of young male socialisation.

Fathers are not all perfect, obviously, even when they stick around. But there’s plenty of evidence that their absence is a significant risk factor in young, energetic, wilful men going off the rails. Prison Reform Trust data show that among young offenders, 76% report growing up with an absent father: a vastly more significant proportion even than those growing up in a deprived home (51%). There’s also, unsurprisingly, a strong link between fatherlessness and urban gang membership, as much in the USA as the UK, where one report showed that two-thirds of gang-involved young people came from lone-parent households.

Is this what happened (or rather didn’t happen) to Andrew Tate? A great many lone parents do their best in difficult circumstances, and this really isn’t to criticise. But I sometimes wonder how effective a harried, exhausted, full-time-working single mum can be at disciplining an adolescent son who is now a foot taller than she is and more interested in the approval of his new gang friends than her curfew.

In What Do Men Want?, the philosopher Nina Power argues that much of what the contemporary world decries as “toxic masculinity” is better understood not as patriarchy but its absence: a “regime of the brother” characterised less by orderly power structures than comparatively flat, sibling-like rivalries. We should understand the Tate phenomenon in this context: a kind of online Lord of the Flies fratriarchy, in which lost boys desperate for affectionate guidance from authoritative older men struggle to prove their manliness against one another.

And while Labour is obsessed with Tate as a vector for “misogyny”, really he’s more an accelerant than the cause. For in a “regime of the brother”, without well-defined male hierarchy, what’s the most low-risk way to perform dominance? You don’t attack your bros; you bond with them, by tormenting a group you can be reasonably sure won’t fight back: women. Tate is currently the subject of multiple court cases in relation to such cruelties, but the Tateosphere is hardly the only fratriarchy whose main social glue seems to be hurting women for fun and profit. From the Pakistani rape gangs to the Epstein network, such squalid brotherhoods use violence and sexual cruelty as a form of bonding.

To my knowledge there’s no research on the prevalence of fatherlessness among the boys and men who make up Tate’s fanbase. But I’d bet any money that boys from broken homes are over-represented. His fratriarchal message is perfectly calibrated for this group: emotional numbness and a kind of brutal, venal self-fathering, overlaid with contempt for and performative cruelty toward the women who care for but can’t control them.

But I doubt Labour’s strategy on “misogyny” will ever go there. Notoriously, where the rape gangs are concerned, Jess Phillips has as little as possible to say about male bonding through sexual violence, where this might offend her electoral base. But it goes deeper. The party is enthusiastic about tackling “root causes”, particularly where this can be parlayed into new funding for their favoured NGOs. But addressing fatherlessness as an accelerant of adolescent male misogyny would require definitive, heretical admission that some family structures are better than others. Safer to stick to internet censorship, and tinkering with the curriculum.

Suggested readingWhen Andrew Tate met Bonnie Blue

By Poppy Sowerby

Ironically, then, Phillips really is doing her bit to destroy “patriarchy” — even if the fratriarchy now replacing it is even less to her taste. I suspect no one really likes it — not even the bros themselves, whose critical weakness Tate just demonstrated in a boxing ring in Dubai.

For where there’s no father figure, all you can ever be is chief bro. Tate is evidently not a family man but a chief bro. And the trouble with being chief bro is that eventually a younger, hungrier rival will come along. Then what? In Swift’s song, the mafioso father-figure sees off the challenge from his rivalrous protégé, because he’s long since parlayed physical dominance into subtler forms of power:

Whose portrait’s on the mantle?
Who covered up your scandals?
Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card cancelled

Tate, though, is not a boss on this model. He had no father, not even an adoptive father figure, to show him how to ascend from chief bro to patriarch. So when a younger rival beat him bloody this week, the reaction was the kind of scornful glee you’d direct at a sibling rival. It’s the brittle machismo of the fatherless: both a driver of misogyny, and also evidence of patriarchy’s absence.

Are you building the kind of empire that will outlast you? Or did you stake your reputation on staying top dog forever, and forget that everyone gets old? Tate’s tragedy lies not, or not only, in his noxious online output. It lies also in how his father’s failures blighted his considerable natural potential. He was bright, aggressive, able, and ambitious, but like so many other lost boys had no one to form him. No one to show him what to do, or who to be, so as to become genuinely admired and loved — or even to retain his position, once past his physical peak.

Now, he’s a bloodied loser. But there’s no portrait on the mantel, and no loyal protégé in the wings. His children will grow up as fatherless as Tate himself. There will be no “Top G” dynasty. Save a trace or two in historic UK PHSE curricula, and some Romanian court papers, “Bottom G” will leave no legacy.

---

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

moveincircles

---