Now, Richard is left worried about the sorts of vulnerable young men that he used to help being constantly exposed to alpha male dating gurus, such as Tate. To have the best chance of getting people to sign up, they are advised to stoke controversy to improve their chances of going viral. In another video, he says he has been investigated by police for allegedly abusing a woman, which he denied, in a case where he had his house raided, devices confiscated and was held in a cell for two days. Hope Not Hate found that only around half of boys had heard of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with opposition leader Keir Starmer trailing behind at 32 per cent. But the 35-year-old is not a fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. Instead, he is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times.

The safeguarding expert added: "Politics is also often a way of shoring up your own position and making material gain and in that sense, Tate has got rich through taxing the fear of boys. There’s always going to be lonely men, the question is what to do with them,’ he explains. ‘There’s no moderate content aimed at them which focuses on self-improvement. The responsibility does not lie completely at Tate's door, however, as Conroy points to porn as a major factor in "desensitising" boys. He explained: "I don't know that many people really grasp exactly how ubiquitous it is, and how much of a formative force it is in young minds.

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Brace, who advises the Home Office, is also concerned. “It is bleeding out into mainstream society,” he says. “This whole idea of male supremacism is growing and on the rise.” It is disturbingly easy to ‘gamify’ the algorithms on some social media platforms to churn out whatever bile you like. For all of Tate’s garbage that he put out, he wasn’t the only person actually posting it. Deindustrialisation killing traditionally male jobs, perceived injustices some fathers experience in divorce courts - all contribute to a sense of grievance and abandonment, he says. “Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45,” he notes. “The words men who [take their own life] most use to describe themselves are ‘useless’ and ‘worthless’.”

And it is that attitude which seems to have attracted Tate to Islam, or at least his own interpretation of it. Tate is winning other extremist supporters too. Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist, has defended him, which seems bizarre for a man who has described Islam as a “disease”. Just how is Tate managing to bridge such divides? Long before his rise to TikTok fame, Tate’s views on women were also becoming clear. On Facebook in 2018, he bemoaned the “decline of Western civilisation” after seeing a poster at Heathrow airport “encouraging girls to go on holiday as opposed to encouraging being a loving mother and a loyal wife”. So if you've been brought up understanding sex through the prism of porn. It desensitises men in terms of women and shows that they are the doer and the done to, subject and object, that has very powerful force on a child whose brain is nowhere near fully developed."

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Imran accepts that many “patriarchal, Salafi” Muslims lap up Tate’s rhetoric. Last year, Nadeine Asbali, a Muslim mother and teacher, wrote powerfully of her fear that “this content has its hooks into some within my own community. I’ve seen [Tate’s] content shared on social media by Muslim boys, who see this iteration of violent misogyny echoed in some of the warped interpretations of gender dynamics that surrounds them.” Andrew Tate is not smart or savvy,’ he explains. ‘But he’s figured out that there’s lots of men who have podcasts and if he shows up with sunglasses, smoking a cigar and says the craziest thing you’ve ever heard, that clip will go viral. In 2016, his public-facing career appeared to be over when it had barely begun, when after being cast in Big Brother he was ejected from the house over a video of him hitting a woman with a belt. A second video emerged shortly afterwards, in which he is shown telling a woman to count the bruises he apparently caused to her. Both Tate and the women denied any abuse occurred, and said the clips showed consensual sex.