Ben Shapiro on right-wing media “touting” the Tate brothers: It’s “really quite insane”
Shapiro: “You have members of the administration who are very close with the Tate brothers. ... You have Tucker Carlson traveling over to Romania … and basically claim that they were innocent. Candace Owens doing exactly the same thing.”
Published
Citation
From the July 19, 2026, edition of Ben Reacts, uploaded to YouTube
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now, again, it was a gigantic mistake for so many people on the right to embrace Andrew Tate just because Andrew Tate was transgressive. There's this thing that has happened. I've talked about it a lot on the show, obviously. I've been talking about it for years. That if somebody is transgressive of leftist orthodoxies, it doesn't matter if they're a complete piece of crap, there's a willingness on the right to then give them extraordinary credibility even if they're a piece of crap. In fact, sometimes because they are pieces of crap. Like, the worst they are, so long as they're saying transgressive things, this is now taken as a sign that they ought to be part of quote-unquote, “our team.” And so, you have members of the administration who are very close with the Tate brothers, taking pictures of the Tate brothers. You have Tucker Carlson traveling over to Romania to massage the Tate brothers and basically claim that they were innocent. Candace Owens doing exactly the same thing.
Now some of us were a little bit, I should say, more cautious about all of this given the fact that Andrew Tate was a self-admitted pornographer. He got rich making pornography. He got rich pushing what he called the pimping hose degree, right -- which is a way of teaching men how to essentially get young women to quote-unquote, “fall in love with them,” and then bring those women to do cam work for them, essentially pornography for them. That's who Andrew Tate was.
The fact that there are members of the right who are not only willing to go along with that, but were touting that and talking about how wonderful these guys were, is really quite insane. Again, we'll have to see the charges. We'll have to know what the accusations are. There's been widespread reporting as to the levels of abuse that Tate engaged in.
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Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are not people that you would want to be associated with. And yet, there are members of the right who will associate with that. It is something the right is going to have to separate off from, for both moral and, yes, political reasons. Morally, you should not be associated with these people. And then politically, it will be poison, and it should be poison to be associated with people like the Tates. And it always was, even if they weren't actually engaged in criminally prosecutable behavior, which it seems like they may well be. I mean, they were pornographers bragging about their pornography.