Substack Chooses Andrew Tate Over the Human Race
Do I have to pack my Black knives and go once again?
A note from Kamau: Because this piece focuses on Andrew Tate that means that there’s a lot of discussion of violence against women and children. If you don’t need that today, please feel free to skip it. I promise to make next week’s piece less intense.
"You cannot be responsible for a dog if it doesn't obey you, or a child if it doesn't obey you, or a woman that doesn't obey you." - Andrew Tate
I joined Substack just over two years ago. From the moment I joined, I heard that in addition to it being a friendly space for independent journalists, writers, illustrators, food influencers, and creatives of all kinds, it was also a friendly space for white supremacists… specifically Nazis. I didn’t think much about the last part, because as a Black man living in the United States, I’m aware that my whole country is a friendly space for white supremacists. I would say that Black people are used to navigating white supremacist spaces, especially since we were brought to this country to build the white supremacist spaces in the first place.
Because I started Who’s With Me? with a built-in audience, I was quickly invited to some Substack VIP events. I was introduced to one of the heads of Substack at one of those events. In the middle of a crowded San Francisco bar, they asked me if there was anything they could do to make my launch better. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Get rid of the Nazis.” In response, I got a sheepish laugh and some shoe-gazing.
To be honest though, I hadn’t yet encountered any white supremacists on Substack, so at that moment I didn’t push particularly hard. Since then, I have seen a few white supremacists here and there. Mostly, they reveal themselves when I post a note where I allow everyone to comment. Apparently, white supremacists are too frugal to pay the five bucks a month for my newsletter. Gotta save up for the race war!
When the occasional white supremacist does show up in my feed, I generally just block them quickly without thinking too much about it. With over 20 years of social media-ing under my belt, I have gotten pretty good at blocking the trolls. Plus, I get regular troll-blocking practice over on Instagram. I think of Substack as a city, and I don’t live in Nazitown. I live in the Black section of DestroyFascismVille. I’m sure I could find more white supremacists if I went looking for them. After all, I am the guy who willingly met with the Ku Klux Klan.
There’s a video from 2023 that resurfaces whenever Substack makes news. In the video, tech journalist Nilay Patel is left rightfully shocked when he finds out that Substack CEO Chris Best does not seem to be particularly interested in whether or not there is violent, racist hate speech on Substack. Yikes on bikes!
I have heard the arguments against Substack, mostly from people who are not on Substack. The social media platform Bluesky seems to be the anti-Substack hub. Over there I hear things like
“Kamau, I wish I could read your article, but I don’t do Substack, BECAUSE NAZIS!”
OR
“Kamau, why are you on Substack? Don’t you know they promote Nazis?”
OR
“Why don’t you join another platform like Ghost or behiiv or Fleb or Bubble Pro?”
(Those last two platforms aren’t real. At least I don’t think they are.)
My arguments as to why I don’t (or haven’t) moved off of Substack are simple.
As a creator of content who makes a living off of the content I create, it makes the most sense to go with the biggest platform, the platform that currently has the juice and the most eyeballs. Currently, Substack is that platform. I’m not in love with Substack. I’m using Substack just like Substack is using me. When that relationship no longer serves me and/or my best interests, then I’m out! Don’t believe me? Then talk to Friendster, MySpace, and Twitter.
Despite all the racists on Substack, there are a bunch of Black folks creating communities on this platform. In fact, one of the first people to talk to me about joining Substack was KJ Kearney. KJ is Black, Blackity Black all day long. His Blackness way outranks mine. He’s so Black he proudly labels himself a community organizer. THAT’S BLACK! KJ has won a James Beard Award for his Instagram account Black Food Fridays, a space where he promotes Black restaurants. His Substack is named Who Made The Potato Salad?
I was part of the Substack welcoming committee for The Gen Z Historian Kahlil Greene. The incredible journalist Karen Attiah came to Substack and started The Golden Hour after she was ousted by Biliionaire Bezos’ Washington Post. Joy-Ann Reid did the same after she was ousted from MSNBSeeYay. Acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay is also here. There is such a big presence of Black folks on Substack that author and editor Jacquie Verbal founded Blackstack on Juneteenth in 2024, as a way to bring Black voices on the platform together. Think Black Twitter but with a publishing arm. The Trump administration’s threats on TikTok brought a bunch of young Black voices to Substack–voices like Conscious Lee and Earnest Crim III. I say all that to say that leaving Substack feels like leaving the party just as it is getting started only to go home by yourself. Admittedly, that usually sounds like a great idea to me, but not in this case. This time it feels like the digital version of the Great Migration. Once again Black folks being forced to leave our spaces in an effort to try to escape white supremacy. If we always leave the spaces we’ve built, then we always have to start over and white supremacy gets everything it wants...and then pees on it.
One of the things that puts Substack ahead of other newsletter platforms is that it is a community–a vibrant, diverse, and currently well-populated community. You can sign up to keep up with your favorite comedian, W. Kamau Bell, but then you can stumble across the work of artist Wendy MacNaughton and her platform DrawTogether with WendyMac, and suddenly you’re doodling with hundreds of people. Or after reading one of my scathing, yet hilarious diatribes you come across Ben Sheehan’s Politics Made Easy, and he explains what you can do about all the stuff I made you angry about. Mehdi Hasan has started a whole news network with Zeteo. Of course there is also the godhead of Substack, historian Heather Cox Richardson and her Letters From An American. All these different perspectives lead to audience cross-pollination. That adds up to more than just a simple newsletter platform.
The inconvenient truth is that all the biggest platforms are problematic and letting far too many anti-humanity voices through. Meta, X, and TikTok are all owned by people who I wouldn’t want to sit next to on a city bus. While new platforms have emerged, they don’t all have the same benefits of Substack, at least as far as I know. I try to post on Bluesky, but on there I feel like I’m shouting into the void while my peers are performing at Carnegie Hall. There’s also the key fact that Substack comes with the ability to make money directly from your audience. I gotta be honest. The five bucks a month I get from many of you really is an incentive to keep up my writing practice, a practice that I know makes me a better writer. It is certainly a big part of why I felt ready to try to sell another book last year. How to Have a Conversation will be my first solo book since The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell. Special thanks to all of you that are able to throw a few bucks my way in these hectic times.
"If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare [sic] some responsibility." - Andrew Tate
Then there is the Andrew Tate of it all.
Andrew is a mixed race British man who identifies himself as Black when it suits his generally nefarious needs. Andrew has been criminally charged with and/or accused of human trafficking and rape in both England and Romania. Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, of all places, is investigating Andrew for human trafficking in this country. Even the state of Florida has opened a criminal investigation into Andrew. In addition to these charges, there is an assortment of other crimes and accusations that has been levied at Andrew and his brother Tristan. So far all of this has only added up to a few months in a Romanian jail from end of 2022 to early 2023.
I think the technical term for Andrew Tate is a piece of shit and his younger brother is a piece of shit jr.
When they’re not trafficking humans, Andrew and his brother run Internet scams that are basically MLM’s for men, really cool Alpha bros, bros who could totally have sex with hot chicks if they wanted to but they just don’t want to. Andrew and Tristan promise to help bros generate googobs of money (another technical term) for the low, low price of allowing the brothers to empty your bank account every month. The only problem is that the only people who seem to be getting rich are the Taints Tates.
Andrew has been one of the loudest and most caustic voices of the right-wing, Trumpian, white supremacist, manosphere that rose out of the pandemic. Andrew is in fact so toxic in his presentation that one of the nicest things I can say about Joe Rogan is that he has never had Andrew on his podcast. Nice one, Joe! A broken clock and all that.
Like 75% of the pieces of shit who are currently walking around, Andrew first came to the public’s attention through reality TV. After that he bounced around, failing at things, including (OF COURSE!) a rap career. Andrew regularly talks about having been a champion kickboxer, but those who know the sport say that’s not in the vicinity of truth. While he did, in fact, kick, and he did in fact, box, there was nothing champion-y about it. Eventually Andrew and his brother, Tristan(!) started a webcam scam where they groomed women into dancing on porn sites in order to separate customers from their money. You’ll notice that I never used the word “business” when I described the enterprise. Andrew is proud to call himself a pimp, meaning he and his brother didn’t pay the women for their work. These aren’t my accusations. These are things Andrew has said… repeatedly.
These days Andrew spends most of his time yelling misogynistically into podcast mics and making videos where he poses next to fancy cars. Andrew also constantly brings up the movie The Matrix, like he just finally saw it on TBS. Why does he do this? To convince young boys and gullible men to sign up for whatever Andrew’s current wealth-building scam is. The scams have gone by different names over the years. Cool bro names like Hustler’s University, Hustler’s University 2.0, Hustler’s University 3.0, Hustler’s University 4.0, The Real World (A reference to The Matrix!), and The War Room. Andrew has to occasionally rename the courses, you know, like all the legitimate business owners do! He is very good at his job scam. He has millions of followers. Many under 18. I’m guessing 99.9999999999% male.
Yes, we are doomed.
OF COURSE ANDREW IS VERY FRIENDLY WITH THE EPSTEIN FILES’ NUMBER ONE SON, DONALD TRUMP!
OF COURSE ANDREW IS BUDS WITH THE UNCOWED WIFE-SLAPPER, DANA WHITE!
I wanted to present his myriad accomplishments so you could really feel it when I say
WELCOME TO SUBSTACK ANDREW TATE!!!
“Feminism is a lie and women have zero power without men.” - Andrew Tate
Yup, Andrew Tate is on Substack, slinging his scams and toxic behavior. The news of his arrival broke last week. Just like on other platforms, Tate is killing it here on Substack. As I was writing this, Andrew was number 2 in the “Rising News” category. THE NEWS CATEGORY! So that means we have Jim Acosta, Katie Couric, Aaron Parnas, Scott Dworkin, and Andrew Tate as some of Substack’s biggest news sources.
WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE, SUBSTACK?
And yes, I’m talking directly to YOU, Substack. I’m talking to the founders of Substack: CEO Chris Best, COO Hamish McKenzie, and CTO Jairaj Sethi. What are you all even doing with this? Andrew Tate is not just a “controversial voice.” Andrew Tate is not even your run-of-the-mill white supremacist. (I can’t even believe I’m saying that.) Andrew Tate is a scam artist, a man who has been credibly accused of heinous crimes in multiple countries. And Andrew Tate promotes an ideology that turns boys into angry misogynists. Do you all have sons? Daughters? Do you know people with sons and/or daughters? Would you sit them down in front of Andrew Tate’s content? If the answer is that yes you would, then let me know. These aren’t rhetorical questions.
Why would you allow Tate to be listed in NEWS??? The only “news” you see on Andrew’s platform is the news about the latest scam he is promoting. To be fair, Andrew is often a subject of news reports due to all the crimes he’s been charged with committing, but why would you want to tarnish the other journalists in that category just to feed Andrew Tate’s clearly fragile ego? (Maybe I answered my own question there.) Is it truly just the money? Or are you all afraid of him? Do you want him to think you are cool? Or do you agree with Tate and his ideas and you want to help him clear his bad name? Andrew Tate is so toxic that TV host and celebrity chef Guy Fieri was shamed into apologizing just for being seen shaking Andrew’s hand.
WHO KNEW GUY FIERI WAS CAPABLE OF SHAME?
Maybe 2026 is just the year we all are forced to cover ourselves in the chunkiest parts of the cesspool. I guess it’s not enough that Black people are surrounded by white supremacy every single day in the United States of America. We also have to be stewed in it for the profit of others. Is that what it is, Mr. Best, Mr. McKenzie, and Mr. Sethi?
Remember, we discovered that you all have imposed the final boss of misogyny, Andrew Tate, on Substack the same week that Justin Fairfax, the former Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, murdered his wife and then killed himself, leaving behind their two teenage children. Apparently, Fairfax did it all because he didn’t like how his divorce was going. Then, last Sunday, a story broke of a man named Shamar Elkins who murdered 8 children (8!) between the ages of 1 and 12. Seven of them were his own kids. Sadly, it gets worse. Elkins also shot two other people, including his kids’ mother. Fortunately they survived. Elkins was upset about his wife wanting a separation. Elkins died in a shootout with the police. We haven’t yet learned how far these men had advanced in Andrew Tate’s Real Hustler World War Room University.
All of this happened the middle of a news cycle that featured the previously-unimaginable nightmare phrase “rape academy.” There have been serious debates about whether or not 62 million individual men have visited the rape academy website OR if it was just 62 million clicks on the rape academy website. Either way, I’m guessing that the Venn diagram of “rape academy website visitors” and “Andrew Tate fans” is a circle.
Mr. Best, Mr. McKenzie, and Mr. Sethi, hosting Andrew Tate on Substack puts you in league with all the bankers who made millions moving Jeffrey Epstein’s money around, while knowing that Epstein was raping AND coordinating the rapes of children. Do you all like millions that much? (Did I answer my own question again?)
I like Substack. I have grown an audience here. I am able to say what I want on this platform without edits from anyone but the person I have hired to edit me. But I promise you, if I am accused of running a global pyramid scheme with a soupçon of ponzi scheme AND several countries have accused me of human trafficking and rape, I will totally understand if you shut my page down.
I don’t really want to move on and start over somewhere else, but the idea that my presence on this platform in some way validates Andrew Tate’s criminal history and helps to enrich him is a no-go for me. The idea that I bang my head against my keyboard to come up with writing that is worth five dollars a month, while Andrew just reposts his scammy MLM videos here so he can further drain the rubes dry actually makes my stomach hurt, and my stomach was already hurting from the chunky cesspool you all have put me in.
Like I said, I bounced on MySpace, and at the time I thought I would never recover the platform I had built there (embarrassing but true). My Twitter profile, which was once a steadily growing space for me, is mostly a ghost town now, and I have survived. So serious question, what does it take to get kicked off of Substack? What if Andrew Tate posted himself raping a fifteen year old? Would that get him banned, or is that still free speech? Is that content? Could you at least start a new category for the white supremacists? You could call it the Piece of Shit section. Don’t be offended. Remember, I’m in the Humor section. Could the rest of us opt out of the white supremacist content being shared with us, so we don’t have to deal with the push notification many people on Substack unwillingly got when Andrew Tate joined? Ew!
In the words of Andrew Tate
“Baking is such an all-encompassing art, it’s very difficult to explain everything, and pimping is very much the same." - Andrew Tate
So now I turn to you, my paid subscribers, should I stay or should I go? Sound off in the comments. Some of you followed me here. Many of you met me here. Will you follow me elsewhere? Is it time for us to leave the party and go home? Or go to Fleb? Ghost, get at me.
WHO’S WITH ME?
NEW STAND-UP COMEDY TOUR DATES!
The show in North Bethesda, Maryland at the Strathmore Center went well. It was a giant venue that is set up for a symphony orchestra. But me and Dwayne Kennedy did our thing. And for those of you who read my Jack Harlow piece a few weeks back, we had a special guest open the show, comedian Zach Mama.
I just added Stamford Connecticut’s New York Comedy Club, September 25 and 26. Get your tickets NOW
On NPR Dave Chappelle Said The GOP “Weaponized” His Jokes Mocking Trans Women
I remember seeing this coming waaaaaaaay back in 2021 when Chappelle mocked trans women in his Netflix special, The Closer. Back then, Don Lemon invited me on his CNN show to talk about it. I found the clip on YouTube and posted it along with some new thoughts on the matter. I recorded my thoughts right before my plane took off for home.
ANOTHER BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT!
My friend, author Adam Mansbach, and I collaborated on a children’s book. We are both dads with three daughters. We talked over ways we have fun with our girls and what emerged is our NEW BOOK!
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, CHEESE
An ordinary game of rock, paper, scissors riotously goes off the rails in this rhyming, rollicking celebration of family and fun from two three-time dads: Peabody and Emmy award-winning producer and stand-up comedian W. Kamau Bell and mega-bestselling author Adam Mansbach.
A bit after lunch
on day eight of the rain
The youngest Bell, Peanut
remembered a game . . .
Sometimes, she thought
nothing else quite delivers
like the old school fun
of rock paper scissors.
But the Bell family doesn’t play your grandma’s version of the game . . . In their household, paper may beat rock, but what beats paper? Well, cheese, of course!
Join the Bells on a delightful romp with the most chaotic and inventive game of rock, paper, scissors you’ve ever seen! Featuring hilarious illustrations from Breanna Chambers, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Cheese is an infectiously fun rhyming read-aloud about making the best of a boring day stuck indoors. And how, ultimately, any place shared with loved ones can be the best of all.
This is a true labor of love. It is a beautifully illustrated book, perfect for little kids. It features my family—all three daughters, my wife Melissa, and my mom. It is the kind of book I have always liked to read my kids. We made sure it is funny for children and parents. Most importantly for children’s books, IT RHYMES!
Never leave substack W Kamau because all that happens by removing your all important voice is that there leaves more room for the Nazis to move in. Stay with us. We have your back and are so grateful to you for sharing your courage and wisdom. 💔🇺🇸
We were here first, and we used the platform to do good. Mr. Tate is a violent misogynist, a criminal, and truly vile excuse for a human. He deserves to rot in jail. I blocked & reported his account immediately, and whether the platform owners heed the demands to remove him or not (we all hope they do) I'm not letting 1 more dickwad like him push me out of a place I like and where I thrive. I am Trans and Autistic. It is already hard enough finding such places. Pieces of trash like Mr. Tate won't take this one from me.