Tim Walz as Antidote to Andrew Tate's Toxic Masculinity

Young men are getting exposed to toxic online models of a warped, insecure masculinity by human pustules like Andrew Tate. Tim Walz might just offer a long overdue corrective.

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Within the span of a few days in late August, two stories from halfway across the world intersected around a simple question: what does it mean to be “masculine” in 2024?¹

On that Wednesday evening in Chicago, a former farmboy, geography teacher, and football coach turned Dad, Congressman, and Governor accepted the Democratic nomination to be America’s next Vice President. The next day, in Romania, that all-around terrible human pustule named Andrew Tate was placed under house arrest after fresh allegations emerged that he had been involved in further human trafficking, including of minors.

Walz and Tate are archetypes of radically different conceptions of “masculine” values.

On the one hand, Tate—a fool so dense that light bends around him—embodies what is often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” a whole suite of severe character flaws.² For our purposes, I’ll focus on a subset of Tate’s destructive deficiencies which are much more widely held, a specific model of masculinity that pretends one can only be a “real” man if they engage in constant abusive performative insecurity.

In this world, men must not only constantly be peacocks, but peacocks who overcompensate for their lack of genuinely magnificent tailfeathers by buying big guns and flashy cars while confusing women for property and wrongly conflating high wealth with high value.

Tate sells this form of warped masculinity as a product, including a $50 monthly subscription service to the “Real World”—previously known as “Hustlers University”—where he will teach young disciples how to get rich quick on the internet. Or, for the low, low price of just $7,979, you can join The War Room, an online community of Tate superfans that is billed as being “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” What an erudite wordsmith one must be to create so much meaningless ambiguity with so few words of drivel!

The fact that internet vipers like Tate are so financially successful indicates that there is a social malaise among rudderless young men; if there weren’t, nobody would pay him absurd amounts of cash—or for this demographic, cryptocurrency—to tell them how to amass control over more worldly objects (which includes women in Tate’s antediluvian mindset).

As James Bloodworth writes, for the men on Andrew Tate’s courses, “Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.”

Grotesque as these views are, we must recognize that the darker toxins of Tate-style faux masculine misogyny are infecting large numbers of young men, with dire consequences not just for society writ large, but for mental health and life expectancy. It is quite literally killing women, but also sending young men to premature deaths, too.

Enter Tim Walz.

Thrust into the national spotlight and on the cusp of playing the unexpected role of “America’s Dad,” Walz might just be the right man of the moment—someone who can not only challenge tired, traditional gender stereotypes, but also showcase how modern men can be the best version of themselves through strength of service, not showing off.