Andrew tate

Today

Adrian Pascu-Tulbure

The rise of Romania’s right-wing disruptor

Strange things are happening again in global politics. In Romania, a former UN sustainability adviser who has made admiring remarks about the fascist 1930s Iron Guard movement has just won the first round of the presidential elections. If you like Andrew Tate, the notorious ‘manosphere’ influencer who also happens to be a Romanian resident, you’ll love Calin Georgescu. A trim 62-year-old former national judo champion, he likes to post videos of himself swimming in ice on TikTok. ‘I believe in my immune system because I have faith in my creator,’ he says. He’s a Putin admirer who ran on an explicitly anti-Nato, anti-EU and anti-Ukrainian platform. And he caused particular

Sunday

Julie Burchill

What do Munroe Bergdorf and Andrew Tate have in common?

For inadequate men scared by self-willed women, by the start of the 21st century, things were getting dangerously out of hand. The old right-wing ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ method of corralling and controlling us had been woefully discredited with the second world war. (Like the old brand of anti-Semitism, coincidentally, which was also looking for a new angle – and found it in the fresh’n’funky Islamist kind.) A ‘caring’ and ‘progressive’ way to thwart uppity women was needed, but repeated and risible attempts at ‘men’s rights’ movements were rightfully mocked. So how could men abuse women while not being accused of sexism? Simple, say: ‘We’re women too. How can we be misogynists?’ And so the shock-frock-troops of transvestism formed a pincer movement with the aggressive masculinists embodied by Andrew Tate to assault the gains