Every so often, a ridiculous event in the media will rise above the endless river of absurdity and spectacle in such a way as to showcase something we need to think about more than we do, or in rare cases, teach us something we didn’t know. The kerfuffle between celebrity misogynist Andrew Tate and the Gen Z climate activist Greta Thunberg seems to qualify.
In case you missed it, a tweet exchange occurred between Tate, a 36-year-old former kickboxer, and Thunberg, the (then) 19-year-old star of environmental responsibility. Tate likes to preen for the young men of Gen Z, dipping an entrepreneurial hand in their pockets as he intoxicates them with the aroma of his own toxic masculinity.
Well, toxic masculinity is certainly big business, but Tate wasn’t thinking before he tweeted when he baited Thunberg with the following line:
Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.
Lots to unpack there. Probably owing to his youth, Tate seems unaware that the parading of the sports car is more often than not a divulgence of masculine inadequacy; the rest of us caught on way back in the early Seventies. He is clearly even more blind to the enormous emissions giveaway that he is compensating with what he hopes will be a convincing metaphor.
The surface processing here is simple: the baiting was Tate attempting a send-up of Thunberg’s climate activism by way of a brag that he is a shameless polluter, an attempt at mockery to thrill his fan base. Folding his overt intentions in with his covert signaling, he was inadvertently sending her an ironically unflattering dick pic.
Thunberg, who is just barely old enough for this gesture not to be legally actionable, served Tate’s genitals back to him on a platter with her reply:
yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.
Within hours, her tweet soared into the Top 10 Tweets of All Time, garnering 3.5 million Likes and almost three-quarters of a million shares. News organizations around the world ran stories about it.
There was much useful and insightful commentary provoked by the incident, including this from Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian:
“There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe,” she wrote. “It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.
“’Men resist green behavior as unmanly’ is the headline for a 2017 story on the phenomenon. Machismo and climate denial, as well as alliance with the fossil fuel industry, is a package deal for the right, from the ‘rolling coal’ trucks whose plumes of dark smoke are meant as a sneer at climate causes to Republicans in the US who have long opposed nearly all climate action (and are major recipients of oil money).”
This stance is almost as hilarious as it is pathetic, but there’s a deeper thread, and it emerged when Tate, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, followed up with a video in which he recapitulated his masculine aura in a dressing gown, smoking a macho cigar (how Freudian can you get?), throwing in a pizza box. Unfortunately, the pizza box tipped off the authorities in Romania, where Tate was hiding with his brother, to his location – and they were promptly arrested in connection with allegations of sex trafficking.
Thunberg followed up his follow-up with
this is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes
...cementing the own for all time.
Tate’s brand was already bound for the dumpster; despite his huge popularity with the Gen Z man-toxic, he had been banned from most social media platforms (Elon Musk, in an eerily similar subconscious reveal, had reinstated him upon taking ownership of Twitter, setting up the whole thing; I suppose we owe him a genuine debt of gratitude).
“He was looking for attention,” wrote Solnit. “He got it.”
The deeper reveal surges with greater irony still. Brief as the exchange was, it conveys all that we need to know about the participants’ group dynamics.
On the one side, we have Tate, who woos young white men to the cause of male toxicity and overt, extreme misogyny with a cultivated guruism that has made him more sought-after in Google search than Donald Trump or even Kim Kardashian, and pulled more than 11 billion views of his videos on TikTok. The controversial millennial preaches to his Gen Z fanboys that women belong in the home, that they are the property of their man, and that they shouldn’t be allowed to drive.
And on the other is Thunberg, a young Swedish woman born in 2003 (barely half Tate’s age) who surveyed the world around her, became concerned that it was going to hell in a handbasket, and at age 15 convinced her parents to alter their lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint. She then prevailed upon the Swedish Parliament for greater climate action, organizing school strikes to get their attention. She went on to draw international attention to the cause of climate activism, addressing the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, attended the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit, was Time’s Person of the Year in 2019, joined Forbes’ list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize four years in a row (2019-2022).
The essence of both dynamics is right there in that four-tweet exchange.
In Tate’s handful of words, we see three defining characteristics: there’s a posture of dominance, an open expression of perceived superiority that expresses itself in copiously violent terms and without empathy; a stunning obliviousness, a lack of self-awareness that is so stark and jaw-dropping that it almost draws pity; and a palpable self-loathing, a steady stream of subconscious messages that profiles the absence of an inner life hosting anything approaching meaning.
And in Thunberg, we likewise see three clear markers: wit, in abundance, and beyond her years; crystal intelligence that grasped her taunter’s dynamic instantly, rendering a response that would dismantle him top to bottom; and a fierce commitment to her principles, openly attacked so publicly (not that she isn’t used to that by now), in defense of which she did not hesitate to call her attacker out for what he was, with surgical precision, just as publicly. Perhaps best of all, her second tweet conveys a firm awareness of cause, effect - and, above all, consequences.
This contrast is satisfying enough in itself; but what is even more satisfying – and, ultimately revealing – is that the attributes unveiled in the exchange, side for side, are not just descriptive of Tate and Thunberg: they define the groups they represent. And that was for the whole world to see, in that brief dust-up of tweets.
This is, in a nutshell, why liberals fall down laughing with those who hate them crow about “owning them.”
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