July 29, 2025
July 29, 2025

Andrew Tate’s empire of cowardice meets Matt Walsh’s gospel of grit

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Matt Walsh and Andrew Tate have had a disagreement. Walsh thinks that marriage is for keeps, and Andrew Tate thinks that marriage is for wimps.

“The smartest move on the chessboard for a man now,” Tate says, “is to get rich and have as many children as he wants with as many women as he wants.”

If you don’t know who Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh are, enjoy the shelter offered by your rock while you still can.

I have no doubt that Andrew Tate devotees are struck by what they see as an original voice crying heroically in a wasteland destroyed by feminists. But as Mr Ecclesiastes said:

“What has been, is what will be,
and what has been done, is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9

And so it is that Mr Tate is simply a modern-day Machiavelli with muscles. While the ancients—Plato, Aristotle, and then Aquinas—saw a connection between being good and being successful, Machiavelli saw a contradiction between the two.

It is hard to find a thinker as influential as Machiavelli who has been so despised, and yet Tate channels him. Don’t underestimate Tate—he is a thinker. “You’re gonna love apples,” he opines, “if you can’t buy bananas.” That one he gives for free! For more such gems, it would be a lot cheaper to purchase Machiavelli’s The Prince (available from all good bookshops and Waterstones) than to sign up for Tate’s online coaching.

Machiavelli teaches how to be successful rather than moral. Powerful rather than good. Everything he says in The Prince follows logically from three assumptions. Firstly, he assumes that reality doesn’t include ideals, goods or values. Reality consists only of material facts. He was implicitly a materialist.

Secondly, man is by nature wicked, selfish, competitive and immoral. For it follows that if only matter is real, then what is real in man is only matter, and matter is essentially competitive. The more food you eat, the less food there is for me; the more money I give to you, the less I have for myself. Only spirit transcends this law.

If spiritual things like love, truth and beauty are real, they can be given away without losing anything. Money, power, territory and fame diminish when shared, while spiritual goods multiply when shared. But if spiritual goods are not objectively real—if all that’s objectively real in man is matter—then any two men are always fundamentally competitive, and life becomes a chessboard.

Thirdly, there can be a formula for success because there are only two variables—virtu (power: the ability to compel objective reality to obey your will) and fortuna (luck, chance: things that cannot be controlled). His formula for success is the maximisation of virtu and the minimisation of fortuna. This is implicitly the metaphysics of atheism. Tate claims he is a Muslim. Either way, it ain’t Christian.

“Politics,” Machiavelli said, “is the art of the possible.” When the gap between the ideal and the real is too great, lower your ideals! For Machiavelli, ideals are to be judged by how practical they are, how they have worked in the past. According to him:

“All unarmed prophets have failed, and all armed prophets have succeeded.”

For the ancients, ideals were the standards for the real, but Machiavelli reverses this: ideals are to be judged by how practical they are. Honour is not an objective ideal to attain, but a thing to attain only to the extent that it furthers earthly success.

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore, if a prince wants to maintain his rule, he must learn how not to be virtuous.” (The Prince)

Machiavelli instructs a man in how not to be virtuous. He teaches vice. Princes, he claims, should only honour their word when it works—and by “works” he means leads to earthly success:

“Everyone realises how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honour his word… Nevertheless, contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and have overcome those abiding by honest principles. Therefore, a prudent ruler should not honour his word when it places him at a disadvantage.”

In other words: because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them. Like Milton’s Satan, he concludes: “Evil, be thou my good.”

Similarly, Tate whines about the state of the world and the people in it:

“Any man with a brain doesn’t hand over keys to his castle to… over-emotional unchecked females. The world’s changed… telling men to just get married, and just be loyal, gets men wrecked. Own your empire and women will respect you… no woman can steal my hundreds of millions… marriage is suicide. If you can’t change the game, WIN the game.”

This philosophy—like Machiavelli’s 500 years before him—makes morality dependent on other people’s morality. How good or evil other people are becomes your standard. No matter how high and hard Tate can kick, that sounds pretty wimpy to me.

Both Tate and Machiavelli advise their audience that if they want to be successful, they need to wimp out of ideals and let others set the standard—be Pontius Pilate instead of Jesus. And why? To survive. To attain success.

One of these two had more influence on history than any man who ever lived (despite being unarmed, tortured, then killed), and one became a byword for “cop-out.” One lived and died in obedience to rightful authority, to high ideals; the other blew in the wind. Who was more powerful? Well, that depends. If life is nothing but a game of chess, Tate may be onto something. But if it’s not?

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Tate’s philosophy.

Among them the ideas espoused by Mr Walsh, who in extolling the virtues of Christian marriage exemplifies true masculinity. It’s easy to stop praying when our prayers aren’t answered; it’s easy to stop loving when the feelings go; it’s easy to abandon ideals when others have done so; it’s easy, if you’re the Son of God, to prevent the Crucifixion. If it were only about the earthly “power” that Tate is hawking, there would be no Resurrection and no hope of salvation.

“Win the game,” Tate says. The game for him is the same game he complains about. It’s the very game which traps him, and it’s the game he entices poor fools to join him playing. Those who choose to play it—winners and losers alike—will be forever trapped by the snares of the devil. Only Christ, true God and true man, shows us the way out:

You would have no power over me unless it were given thee from above.” —Jesus to Pilate

What looks like a win for the devil becomes a devastating defeat from which he can never recover—and it is all achieved through sacrifice. That is what modern-day Machiavellis will never understand. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.” Walsh gets it right.

“No one can fail to admire the divine Wisdom, Holiness and Goodness which, while respecting the dignity and happiness of husband and wife, has provided so bountifully for the conservation and propagation of the human race by a single chaste and sacred fellowship of nuptial union.
When we consider the great excellence of chaste wedlock, it appears all the more regrettable that particularly in our day we should witness this divine institution often scorned and on every side degraded.
For now, alas, not secretly nor under cover, but openly, with all sense of shame put aside, now by word again by writings, by theatrical productions of every kind, by romantic fiction, by amorous and frivolous novels, by cinematographs portraying in vivid scene, in addresses broadcast by radio telephony, in short by all the inventions of modern science, the sanctity of marriage is trampled upon and derided; divorce, adultery, all the basest vices either are extolled or at least are depicted in such colours as to appear to be free of all reproach and infamy. Books are not lacking which dare to pronounce themselves as scientific but which in truth are merely coated with a veneer of science in order that they may the more easily insinuate their ideas. The doctrines defended in these are offered for sale as the productions of modern genius, of that genius namely, which, anxious only for truth, is considered to have emancipated itself from all those old-fashioned and immature opinions of the ancients; and to the number of these antiquated opinions they relegate the traditional doctrine of Christian marriage.
These thoughts are instilled into men of every class, rich and poor, masters and workers, lettered and unlettered, married and single, the godly and godless, old and young, but for these last, as easiest prey, the worst snares are laid.”
Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI

Tate isn’t just laying snares—he’s getting his prey to foot the bill.

For all the disaffected, revolution-destroyed young men out there, Tate is not the answer. But they do need an answer—and if they’re not finding it in Church, at least they can find it in the witness of Catholic husbands like Walsh. The answer, as always, is Christ.

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