Candace Owens & Andrew Tate: Warriors Against The Current
Candace Owens and Andrew Tate make for unlikely bedfellows. One is a black conservative commentator acclaimed by the right for her fiery cultural critiques. The other is a bombastic, hypermasculine controversialist known for his bellicose statements on women and wealth.
Yet in their worldviews, they share an ideological alliance – one that rails against the predominant current of modern liberal values and societal narratives. Their exclusive conversation illuminated surprising points of resonance as well as intriguing divergences.
Backgrounder: Candace Owens – The Contrarian Commentator
Candace Owens wasn’t always the conservative firebrand she is today. Just a few years ago, the Connecticut native identified as a liberal Democrat.
The provocative pundit’s political transformation story began in 2015, when she was working for a progressive nonprofit in New York. At the time, Owens became the subject of relentless online backlash over a website she launched, called SocialAutopsy.com.
Social Autopsy was conceived as something of an answer to the emerging problem of anonymous online bullying. The site would connect anonymous social media accounts to their real-life owners, linking online behavior to real-world consequences.
While founded with good intent, many saw this as a serious ethical breach. Owens and the site were barraged by outrage, accusations of encouraging doxxing and demands to take SocialAutopsy down. The vicious vilification stunned Owens. And in her eyes, laid bare a vicious hypocrisy within the progressive movement.
Candace Owens rocketed to conservative prominence after becoming disillusioned with progressivism over her experience with SocialAutopsy.com (Credit: Robert Lever for The New York Times)
See, Owens herself was a passionate progressive before this incident. But realizing few liberals rushed to defend her free speech rights made her question her alignment. She began engaging with conservatives online. And found them welcoming, not dogmatic or hateful as portrayed.
Soon after, the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA offered Owens a communications role. She haven taken now legendary confrontational interview style on college campuses brought her fame in right-wing circles. And thanks to endorsement from influential figures like Kanye West, she commands a massive audience today.
But her contrarian crusade comes at a personal cost. Owens now faces constant attacks in liberal spaces and media. Death threats, racist abuse and efforts to deplatform her events are commonplace. But none of this deters Owens‘ crusade to pierce liberal shibboleths on race, identity, abortion and systemic inequities. Or quell her drive to keep championing conservative values on the public stage.
Backgrounder: Andrew Tate – Toxic Masculinity Personified?
Like arch-nemesis Owens, Andrew Tate’s path to notoriety was unconventional. The 35-year old began his career as a mediocre professional kickboxer, acquiring fame more through courting controversy than sporting success.
His first brush with fame came in 2016, when Tate was ejected from Britain’s Big Brother reality show over a video showing him hitting a woman with a belt. The clip went viral, cementing Tate’s emergent bad boy persona.
After his kicking career fizzled, Tate reemerged on the internet as a self-help and lifestyle guru. Peddling “rules for life”, his preening, misogynistic outlook and unapologetic shows of opulence quickly attracted impressionable male followers.
Soon, Tate commandeered his own reality empire – complete with exotic sportscars, in-house boxing rings and risqué parties at a Romania mansion he dubs the “War Room”.
Tate projects an unabashedly luxurious, hypermasculine persona to his millions of followers (Credit: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images)
The instigating social media persona has attracted particular ire for misogynistic hot takes like:
*“Women can‘t drive"
- “Girls should bear responsibility for being assaulted if drunk”
But his brazen traditionalism resonates powerfully too. Over 4 million flocked to his social channels before eventual deletion. And male disciples extol his cocksure messaging about wealth, dominance and masculine purpose as an inspirational tonic against liberal political correctness.
Of course, critics excoriate Tate as repellant and retrograde. Accused of human trafficking in his adopted Romania, Tate inhabits polarizing space shared by other Manosphere Internet personalities raging against progressive pieties.
The Interview: Highlights & Analysis
Owens and Tate traverse topics from faith and free speech to mass media distortion and the importance of masculine identities during their exclusive conversation.
On Personal Growth and Redemption
A recurring theme is maturation and personal evolution. Owens argues that reflexively judging people based on past mistakes is facile virtue-signaling devoid of nuance:
This sentiment resonates with Tate‘s own lived experience. Once mired in tabloid controversy over alleged misogyny and other issues, he stresses profound personal development since:
Here both underscore maturity, stressing present character matters more than past actions when evaluating individuals.
Jay-Z and Michael Vick are oft-cited examples of once controversial celebrities who redeemed themselves (Credit: Kyle Terada/USA Today Sports)
This line of reasoning rankles some progressives who blast it as expedient rationale allowing bad actors to escape accountability. But it does raise valid ethical questions around perpetual public shaming versus allowing space for redemption.
Society is rife with examples of once-scorned celebrities who ultimately rehabilitated images and changed tunes – Jay Z, Martha Stewart, Mike Tyson and Michael Vick amongst them. Perhaps the dichotomous social media environment that instantly rewards virtue signaling explains today’s less forgiving atmosphere.
True, not every cancellation target deserves reprieve. But the point around disproportionate forever-flogging does prompt reflection.
On Money and Power
Financial power emerges as another key theme, with both Tate and Owens stressing its necessity to resist societal control:
Owens concurs that wealth enables independence from institutional dominance:
For both, wealth represents kinetic power – the fuel enabling dissent. Consider Owens. While hailed as a principled culture warrior, financial security also grants latitude to speak brazenly without fear of cancellation. After all, polemics may prove more muted absent backing from wealthy conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation.
This explains the hustler aura Tate projects and his Infowars-esque warnings about mass indoctrination and manipulation by nefarious global forces. Material wealth is more than lavish cars and exotic women – it’s weaponized independence.
Tate has monetized his persona into IM academies and other online courses targeting wealth-seeking men (Credit: TateSpeech.com)
And this narrative likely resonates with recession-squeezed Gen Z/Millenial males lacking traditional pathways to status and financial stability.
Little wonder Tate peddles online courses and IM academies targeted towards wealth-seekers. He understands currency conveys credibility – the material base to fund resistance.
On Societal Manipulation
Both guest use dramatic language around mass sociological engineering and population control conspiracies. For Tate, removing classical masculinity allows control via emotional manipulation – keeping male populations docile while feminizing society.
Owens links this to an orchestrated assault on Western identity itself, warning:
This echoes growing conservative angst around identity deconstruction and declining traditions. For Owens and Tate, calculated forces menace freedom by attacking gender, faith and nationhood to create atomized, pliable masses.
And such theories understandably appeal to alienated populaces struggling to explain disorienting social change. By ascribing agency to shadow villains, they make the world legible again.
Conspiracy theories attributing sinister agendas to cultural change hold intuitive appeal for groups experiencing identity threats (Credit: Le Monde)
This conspiracism riles critics who blast Owens and Tate for baselessly demonizing progressivism and intellectuals. But it importantly signals profound conservative angst.
As societies transition from familiar social anchors around religion, nationality and traditional gender roles thanks to modernity and globalization, many now feel adrift and disenfranchised. By providing an architectural schema ascribing chaos to hostile social engineering, thought leaders like Owens and Tate imbue order for confused traditionalists.
On Traditional Values
Both guest express dismay at declining traditions like child-rearing, religiosity, and lifetime marriage – portents of civilizational collapse. Per Owens:
This captures growing conservative angst around intersecting trends:
- Declining marriage rates
Marriage rates have steeply declined across Western nations since 1970s (Credit: National Center for Family and Marriage Research)
- Plummeting religious affiliation
Younger Americans are rapidly abandoning organized religion (Credit: Pew Research Center)
- Retreat from childbearing
US fertility rates have collapsed below population replacement levels since 1970s peak (Credit: Institute for Family Studies)
Owens also laments liberal attempts to “dismantle the nuclear family” via subsidies for single mothers at the expense of traditional households.
Such declinism echoes nostalgia for an imaginary, morally purer past anchored by traditional verities around faith, family and patriotism. But critics caution that weaponized nostalgia minimizes how traditional institutions like religion and marriage oppressively regimented women, minorities and sexual minorities.
Still, the sense-making power of decline theories for alienated groups cannot be discounted. By ascribing object blame for chaotic change, they retail purpose amidst uncertainty.
The Verdict: Unlikely Allies Against Perceived Orthodoxy
The Candace Owens-Andrew Tate kinship reveals overlapping worldviews railing against ascendant liberal values deemed tyrannical and societally corrosive. Both position themselves as defiant truth-tellers pushing back against stifling progressive dogma dominating media and culture.
This Manichean framing of courageous nonconformists challenging oppressive liberal orthodoxy resonates with traditionalists feeling threatened by dizzying social change.
As issues like gender identity, religious disaffiliation and family structure quickly evolve thanks to modernity and globalization, many now feel philosophically homeless and politically impotent.
By fighting back against new ideological settlments around identity politics and postmodern perspectives on truth, Owens and Tate offer restorative elixir. A vision resurrecting familiar values around masculine primacy, absolute morality and traditional institutions.
One need not concur with their diagnoses to acknowledge the allure. As culture shifts, the innate desire for continuity and comprehension grows. By furnishing monocausal explanations and seconding conservative qualms, thought leaders like Owens and Tate proffer much-craved clarity amidst the static.
Of course, detractors will continue decrying their philosophies as regressive at best. But intellectual consistency matters less than psychological resonance to groups perceiving cherished verities under siege.
For those disturbed by reactionary appeals for masculine revanchism and gold-plated moral clarity, that’s exactly what makes this partnership so foreboding. Their call to arms against diabolical social forces reveals deep societal rifts unlikely to resolve anytime soon.
Because this showdown pits two fundamentally irreconcilable visions against each other – one embracing fluid modernity, the other fighting decline through retreat to an imaginary, ordered past.
The Owens-Tate pact simply crystallizes the ongoing values tug-of-war, forcing needed debate about cultural priorities. And no resolution appears imminent.