Gamergate to Andrew Tate

Nick Monroe is a writer, researcher, investigator, activist, and crab. he creates detailed Twitter threads on subjects in our culture. More than that he performs research on a level not often seen in modern journalism.
Nick started his journey into the culture wars via Gamergate and was baptized in the fire of the right-wing alternative media. clearly presenting a strong moral compass he is set on making right the things he sees as the faults in the world.

Lately, Nick has been working tirelessly to do whatever he can to help take down Andrew Tate. providing information to large press outlets, he has been instrumental in bringing the Tate story to the public. Along with a few anonymous comrades, Nick hopes that the work he is doing will help tip the scales in favour of victims in the Tate story.
The next few pages contain an interview with Nick. They tell a story of a journey through the online landscape and the trials he ran through to get there. As with all articles FOMA produces the goal is to understand and see points of view other than our own. Please enjoy the following with an open mind it is quite the trip.

You were involved in gamergate?

For me personally it was seeing Anita Sarkeesian come onto the scene in 2012 and watching the gaming industry fall for her dogma hook, line, and sinker. Even as a teenager I could tell that something was very wrong with her entire business model. Everyone that criticized her body of work were written off as basement dwelling, neckbeard harassers. Swept under the rug. For me I first got “red pilled” when someone released a video pushing back against Sarkeesian.

They found her college thesis and it outlined the holes in logic for how Sarkeesian interpreted masculine and feminine depictions of media. That was on top of examples where Anita admitted to not even playing video games. How GamerGate started was when Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend Eron Gonji released a lengthy wordpress blog called “The Zoe Post.” His personal intentions for publishing the thing were to tell the world what it was like dating indie game developer Zoe Quinn. But in doing what he did, Gonji inadvertently also revealed to the world that Quinn had intimate sexual connections with people working in games media (specifically Nathan Grayson/Kotaku). People saw this and realized pretty much immediately how Zoe Quinn’s text-based choose-your-adventure browser game, Depression Quest, was lauded by the press in the first place. It was pretty amaetur stuff for the time.

The whole affair escalated into the gaming community questioning the Patreon support between indie gamers and the journos who supported them. From the outset: outlets like Kotaku and Polygon recognized the concerns raised and made policy changes to enforce disclosure as necessary. But in terms of larger goals we helped enact federal-level changes for FTC guidelines when it came to social media ads and the need to label them. Another focus was taking down Gawker media. GamerGate came to saw it as the source of a lot of problems, and we organized an ad boycott campaign that ended up costing the outlet “seven figures” worth of financial damage. Then on top of that, Hulk Hogan sued them “for posting a video of the wrestler having sex with a friend’s estranged wife.” Gawker ended up shuttering as a result. Someone tried bringing it back years later, but that revival effort in of itself ended up failing.
What accelerated the amount of attention to the topic was the suppression of it on places like Reddit and 4chan. People became increasingly curious about Zoe Quinn after the issue was declared taboo. Zoe Quinn herself, or some claiming to be her, had gotten a YouTuber’s video taken down with an illegitimate copyright strike or something like that. The censorship angle also attracted stragglers looking for the next big thing after the Occupy Wall Street movement. GamerGate’s biggest supporter that helped it through its first year was Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.

People would say you hate women what would you say to that?

People only brought up that claim to deflect from the questions asked about ethics in gaming journalism. Zoe Quinn didn’t want people questioning her sleeping around. Anita Sarkeesian didn’t want people questioning her efforts at injecting feminism into the industry. I personally grew up in a house where the number of women outnumbered men, so I’m not sure it’s possible for me to have that kind of gendered resentment. There’s something to be said, generally speaking, about the polarized status of males and females nowadays.

The fear that political correctness means women are now supposed to be in charge of everything is what Andrew Tate played into. Again you can see this sort of thing in Hollywood. When you let the uber-feminist crowd take charge of a project, you get abortions like She-Hulk or that new Velma show. These are things that were blantant self-inserts of their creators without any interest in respecting the source material. That’s the sort of thing people always hated. It’s the fact that diversity obsessions took priority over the fundamentals of storytelling. Despite my key role in GamerGate back in the day, people are accusing me of being “woke” now when it comes to my vocal pushback against the Tate brothers and what they’ve done.

From a societal standpoint I think normalcy went off the rails after 2019. With the earthshattering changes made to the world from 2020 onward? The pandemic. The corporate adoption of critical race theory and the introduction of ESG programs. Arguments about “muh women in video games” seem so innocent and quaint now compared to the argument surrounding transgenders now.

After gamergate what was your involvement in the community?

There was never really a formal end to GamerGate. After that first year, a lot of the political fervour spilled over into the 2016 elections and Trump. That became it’s own thing. However the cultural foothold carved out by GamerGate since 2014 has never really gone away. People still talk about the flaws and corruption in the video game industry in a lot of the usual places. We GamerGaters all still know and talk to each other, though. For the most part. If the movement didn’t make you go insane in the first place. Mr. Metokur was one of the people who first started everything.

At the end of 2022 he announced his own sort of retirement for the sake of his health. He told everyone in his final livestream he wanted GamerGate to be over. But really things keep going on, in their own
way. As for me? I became a video game journalist for roughly a year. First at Escapist Magazine,
and then at Gameranx. The Society of Professional Journalists even gave me a
second place award for that.

I spent a few years as a freelancer and that’s how I found my way into politics.
That led me to write for The Post Millennial from October 2020 until roughly June 2022. So it all gels nicely together to around the same timeframe that I began looking into the Andrew Tate situation. But essentially I got involved in this so-called “scene” long enough to be familiar with nearly everyone. Some people forgot about me after my original Twitter got deplatformed in May 2019. But even then, I’ve rebounded. One of the highlights I recall was calling out the Wall Street Journal in early 2017. This was around the time that mainstream media started pushing for an “adpocalypse” on YouTube.

What are your thoughts on the pick up artist male self help type stuff?

It’s a disengenious scam meant for people like Andrew Tate to make bank. They’re teaching young men to tattoo women as property, and to keep multiple of them at a time. The Tates have both described what they do as a sport on multiple occassions. Andrew Tate compared it to collecting belts.

Tristan Tate described it like catching fish. On the one hand it’s entirely appropriate and even important to stress to young men they need to live confidently. If the Tate brothers were only doing that, I’d believe they were innocent. Easily. But there’s so much more to it going on here. What Andrew Tate himself has described is that he misleads the women he picks up with false promises of love and marriage, only so that he can lure them to Romania and make them employees. It’s a destabilizing premise.

Tell me about how you first found out about Andrew Tate?

I had heard the rumors of sexual misconduct prior to 2022. Technically the first time I heard about Andrew Tate was when he contacted me to drown Jack Murphy’s career in January 2022. Murphy made a knock-off version of the War Room called the Liminal Order, and Tate saw that as a threat to his businsess model. What it showed to me was that Tate didn’t give a shit about the politics scene at all.
He was more than happy to run anyone over and he had his own motives.

I caught word about Andrew Tate’s raid in April of last year and it was eye-opening. That’s when I decided to dig up everything there was to find about him on social media. Not many people gave a hoot about it at first. Some people in the commentary community did their rounds. The first time most of the rest of the world found out about Andrew Tate is after he got deplatformed from all the major social media sites.

Then the right-wing media apparatus happily propped up the Tate brothers are martyrs. But it also set up this sort of narrative that in of itself was shattered in December 2022 when Romanian police arrested them. That’s when people re-discovered my old thread I made months earlier, and it’s what set up the current discourse surrounding the situation.

Why do you think there is such high support for Tate amongst the right wing?

The way that Andrew Tate courted support from the right wing is because he was able to influence the likes of Paul Joseph Watson or Mike Cernovich, who in turn introduced him to the gaggle of various right-wing figures during the hey-day of the Trump administration. For the most part people couldn’t see the evil that was going on in the background. All they saw was another ally in the culture wars.

Mostly the difference nowadays is having to contend with admitting they were wrong. That’s a hard thing for many people to do. For people like Tommy Robinson they had no other option in a few different ways: money and politics. If Tommy financially depended on Andrew Tate over the years, he wouldn’t want to lose that. But just as well there’s the issue of Tate being such an easy target for the likes of Hope not Hate. Tommy would never admit to something that gives his sworn enemies a win.

There’s not exactly as much support as one might think. Instead it’s more like there are people out there who have been victimized by the Tate brothers with too much to loose. When it comes to people who supported Andrew Tate in the past, there isn’t as much vocal pushback in an argumentative way. Rather, there are those who want to ignore evidence as it begins leaking out through the Romanian media. In some cases, like Tam Khan, they won’t even accept the results of a trial against the Tate brothers if they’re found guilty.

Have you had much pushback going after him in your personal life?

Tate’s mates made fun of my appearance on some Twitter spaces and called me “emotional.” At the time of writing, Tate’s army of marketers/”fan club” have gotten bored and stopped bothering to come after me. People in my personal life don’t really keep too many tabs on what I do online. They know that I do what I do online. It’s a thing they’ve known about for years. So what that boils down to when it comes Andrew Tate? People in reality see human trafficking by default as a serious subject. They put more weight on the fact that Romanian authorities have in fact detained the brothers.
People IRL have a harder time believing that people who found themselves profiting off of a criminal lifestyle are innocent. One of Tate’s biggest defenders, Sartorial Shooter, ended up going quiet on Twitter around the same time that I came across an interesting discovery.
In March 2020, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, Andrew Tate boasted about having insider information when purchasing $400,000 worth of healthcare giant Abbott’s stock. All I did was point out the coincidence that Sartorial Shooter’s day job back then was acting in a global role for the company. It’s Andrew Tate who set up and ran an expansive “war room” cabal of insiders who all got rich off one another.

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