If the Tates are here to stay, I fear that soon they will become more of a fixture on our alternative media landscape than ever before.

Yesterday, Haley Strack wrote with appropriately righteous disgust about the surprise arrival of former MMA fighter Andrew Tate and his brother — to describe both as proud pimps and pornographers is to be charitable — in Florida. (Previously, they had been living in Romania while being investigated by the authorities there over various criminal charges related to their proud sexual vices.) After explaining why the Tate brothers and their emphasis on misogynistic hypermasculinity have developed an outsized influence among right-leaning youth, Haley ran down what is only a partial list of all the foul deeds the Tates have been accused of (or been videotaped doing or bragging about doing).

I’ll note in addition only that since the Tates are American citizens — though they were primarily raised in Luton, England’s most notorious slough of despair, they were born in America to an American father — their stay may be a permanent one. They are nominally “expected to return to Romania” according to reports, but I wonder whether that will ever happen; Romania has had them under a travel ban for over two years after arresting them multiple times for multiple serious charges. The Tates cannot return home to the U.K. either, because there they face charges of rape and human trafficking. Given that the Trump administration is widely understood to have directly pressured the Romanian government to allow the Tates to travel to the U.S., it is quite likely that they will end up calling here their home. The wretched refuse from Europe’s teeming shore, indeed.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis reacted to the news of the Tates’ arrival with typically sane bluntness: He announced they were “not welcome with that type of conduct” in his state, even though there’s little he can do to actually expel them from the Sunshine State. But you know who doesn’t seem to mind having this filth wash up on Florida’s sunny beaches? The Tampa Bay Young Republicans, who just did exactly what Haley begged them not to do in the title of her piece yesterday: They rolled out the royal welcome mat for the Tates and invited them to address their group:

TBYR formally welcomes [the Tates] to Florida. As free speech absolutists, the Tate’s haven’t been formally convicted of any crimes and are welcome to speak to our group. We’re old enough to remember when a *”Convicted Felon.”* won the Presidency.

Well done, excellent job, young Republicans — great for the national brand, too! (This is almost certainly a publicity stunt, for what it’s worth; the Tates have only been “invited,” after all.) Haley already explained well enough the underlying motivations of these people in extending this offer: Tate has a huge following among disaffected young males. But public displays of post-adolescent feral misogyny, however deeply they may resonate with a fraction of young men, are sulphurously toxic to the rest of the world.

The deeper question to be asked of course is why they have developed such a devoted audience of young males, and it’s been asked and answered so many times already by other writers that I barely feel the need to re-explore it. (I can only tell you from personal experience that hopeless nerds of an earlier age solved their problems meeting girls by learning to tell a joke and play an instrument, or by making obscene gobs of money.) What matters most is that many young Republicans feel lost in modern society, have turned to celebrity sexual predators, and parts of our party are welcoming it. If the Tates are here to stay, I fear that soon they will become more of a fixture on our alternative media landscape than ever before.