The Groomer Litmus Test: How Andrew Tate Revealed Right-Wing Hypocrisy
I left my career as a high school history teacher in 2022 after calling out what I believed was ideological grooming in my school district. Like many conservatives, I’ve been outspoken against the exploitation of children in public schools, both sexual and ideological. But when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who has been charged with sex trafficking and grooming underage girls, landed on US soil for a publicity tour after his travel ban was lifted, I watched many fellow conservative voices fold. Suddenly, grooming didn’t seem so bad, so long as the groomer in question shared some of our political beliefs.
The case of Tate — accused of grooming young women using the “loverboy method”, in which a man builds emotional trust to manipulate and exploit — has become a litmus test for the chorus of conservative figures who’d long wielded the term “groomer” as a cudgel against anything they believed harmed or manipulated children. Many failed that test, such as Candace Owens, popular right-wing commentators the Hodgetwins, and Benny Johnson, who gave him a warm and flirtatious long-form interview. Yet for most on the right, it was their deafening silence that revealed them to be morally inconsistent partisan hacks. Protecting children, it appears, is something many conservative influencers are vocal about only when it’s directed against the other team — only when it doesn't cost them social capital.
To understand the depth of this hypocrisy, it helps to examine how the word “groomer” evolved during the COVID-era culture wars. What began as “two weeks to stop the spread” extended into months and, in some areas, years of prolonged school closures, long after it became clear that severe COVID outcomes were extraordinarily rare among children and adolescents. For many parents, this shattered the illusion that public education operated first and foremost in children's best interests.
Conservatives — long skeptical of government-run education — seized the moment. They positioned themselves as defenders of children and launched a multi-year campaign to expose the failings of public schools, focusing primarily on highlighting political indoctrination, or what I and others came to describe as “ideological grooming.” While some, such as myself, successfully brought attention to the issue of sexual grooming in public education on social media and were invited to discuss it on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax show, it never attracted the same level of attention as allegations of ideological grooming.
Grooming, broadly defined, refers to a process by which an individual, often a person in authority, conditions someone, usually a minor, to act, think, or behave in a way that benefits the groomer. The most egregious and universally condemned form is sexual grooming, in which an adult builds emotional trust with a child to exploit that relationship for abuse.
There is another form — ideological grooming — that I helped popularize in a 2021 video that went viral thanks to being shared by Dan Bongino. In that video, I criticized lesson plans in my school district that I believed were designed to lead students toward predetermined political conclusions in order to foster particular activist political identities. I later defined ideological grooming as “the process by which educators exploit their authority and emotional connections with students to condition them to think in structured ways and adopt key ideological beliefs.”
While the stakes and outcomes differ enormously, both forms of grooming rely on a similar dynamic: the abuse of trust and authority to shape a vulnerable person’s worldview or behavior for the benefit of the adult in power. In both cases, the individual being groomed is not given the tools or autonomy to form independent judgments, but is subtly manipulated into compliance or belief.
To be sure, the phrase “ideological grooming” carries extra weight and stigma by piggybacking off the association with sexual grooming. But while weaponizing language is a dirty business in politics and the culture wars, the term “ideological grooming” is more than just rhetorical flair. When I first used that word in 2021, it was purposefully founded in a firm conviction about our ethical responsibility as teachers. While ideological grooming of one’s students does not typically lead to sexual abuse, it is nevertheless a vile, manipulative, and exploitative abuse of the power dynamics between teacher and student. It deserves to be more strongly stigmatized than it has been.
Although critics often strawman those such as myself as reactionaries who “don’t want students to learn about Black History,” ideological grooming is real. I’ve seen it firsthand. One of the most outrageous examples I uncovered in my former school district was an end-of-year “equity conference” that brought together staff and students for the express purpose of “committing to a life in the struggle [of activism] and fighting for liberation.” Students and staff pledged an indigenous land acknowledgement at this conference, were instructed to “Defend Ethnic Studies”, and were greeted as “comrades.”
Other smaller but still appalling examples in which students were ideologically groomed to be junior revolutionaries regularly occurred in classrooms across my high school. Of particular note was the so-called African American History course at Waukegan High School. The course had students explain how America’s modern police force is allegedly linked to Confederate slave patrols and articulate how the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” is supposedly responsible for mass incarceration. Students were even assigned to create their own Ten-Point Program for Social Justice based on the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point program.
These were not teachers making isolated lapses in judgment, nor were these lessons intended to be open debates about controversial topics (which I would applaud). They were part of a program designed to foster revolutionary critical consciousness by conditioning students to accept various presuppositions supplied by their teachers as objective fact. Where it crosses the line from indoctrination into ideological grooming is the role the teachers played using their position as authority figures and the relationships they built with their students to foster the development of activist identities involved in activist work. If that doesn’t qualify as a form of grooming, I don’t know what does. But once we had expanded the definition of “grooming”, its boundaries just kept expanding.
As the term (ideological) “groomer” gained popularity, it was broadened to also include school programs that brought critical queer theory and trans ideology into the classroom. Later, it became the primary word used to describe LGBT educational programming. It became increasingly used — not always fairly — to label any teacher who discussed LGBT topics in the classroom. And before long, the term was being hurled at anyone who was LGBT, or who had left-of-center politics.
As the bar for what qualified as a groomer sank ever lower, the term lost some of its power. While LGBT programming in schools often crosses the line into “ideological grooming”, I don’t think that a high school teacher having a Progress Pride Flag on display is grooming, even if it is inappropriate for a civil servant. Grooming describes behavior. It is an active process. Reflexively calling these individuals groomers based on limited evidence, much less smearing people just for being gay, bi, or trans, dilutes the concept and lends credence to the claims that conservatives are undisciplined reactionaries.
As conservatives, particularly those of us in the classically liberal branch of conservatism, one thing we pride ourselves on is consistency. In fact, the argumentative consistency of intellectuals on the right, such as Christopher Hitchens, Michael Medved, and Ben Shapiro, played a prominent role in my own rightward political shift. And so I expected, perhaps naïvely, that prominent conservatives would use the word “groomer” consistently.
Which brings us back to Andrew Tate.
In February 2025, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan touched down in Florida after Romanian authorities lifted their travel restrictions. Their arrival followed reports that allies of the Trump administration had pushed for their release. Within days, Florida’s Attorney General launched a criminal investigation into the brothers, and Governor Ron DeSantis made it clear they weren’t welcome in the state. While in the US, Tate was accused of assaulting his then-girlfriend, Brianna Stern, at a Beverly Hills hotel — an allegation he denies. None of this, however, stopped him from cozying up to prominent conservative figures and making the podcast rounds, further elevating his profile among the very people who once claimed to draw a hard line against the exploitation of women and children.
Take, for example, the Hodgetwins. With an audience of over 16 million people across platforms, they once called President Biden a groomer for a rather run-of-the-mill virtue-signaling post. Then they jumped at the chance to host the even more famous Andrew Tate for three hours on their podcast, which was a largely amicable and deferential affair. It raises the question: Do they believe people like Joe Biden are actual groomers, or do they simply throw the term around for clout and shock value?
And what about Candace Owens, who once said, “I have no patience for this child groomer movement. I always have the time to protect children.” Does she, though? Because sitting down with a man charged with human trafficking and sexual intercourse with a minor to hear his story and express support seems more than a little misaligned with that stated goal to me.
Many of these influencers and defenders are quick to remind us that Andrew Tate hasn’t been convicted — and that’s true. His trials are still pending. But let’s not pretend the bar for being labeled a “groomer” online has ever been particularly high. If conservative influencers have no problem loosely using the word, then it’s fair to ask why they’re showing such restraint and deference for a man who is facing a serious, documented pattern of allegations. Tate has been charged in Romania with human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. He’s accused of recruiting young women by luring them with promises of love and security, only to manipulate, isolate, and groom them into sex work under constant surveillance. Multiple alleged victims have provided sworn testimony. And yet, for many on the right, he receives a level of charity they would never extend to a public school librarian with a rainbow sticker on her laptop.
Some may chalk this discrepancy up to homophobia and anti-LGBT bias — that conservatives are only quick to accuse teachers of grooming when it involves LGBT content. This may be true for some, but when it comes to high-profile right-wing influencers, I think the truth behind their inconsistency is far more pathetic: they don’t operate from principle, but from vanity. That’s what the appeal of amplifying Andrew Tate, with his tens of millions of followers, offered people like Benny Johnson, Candace Owens, the Hodgetwins, and Tucker Carlson. Clout. A chance to borrow a bit of his infamy to raise their social capital and grow their audience.
The most common deflection I’ve encountered when voicing these criticisms is the accusation that I’m trying to “cancel” Tate. Ironically, I’ve even been called “woke” simply for holding conservatives to the same standards of consistency I’ve always held myself to. This isn’t about censorship. Tate is free to speak. You’re free to support him. But if you’re going to label a gay children’s author a groomer for writing a book about a boy who likes princesses, you don’t get to suddenly become a champion of nuance and free speech when the alleged groomer has a Bugatti, the right politics, and 10 million fans.
If grooming in all its manifestations is a serious issue — and I believe it is — then moral clarity must apply no matter who the accused is. Either the word carries real moral weight, or it becomes a meaningless insult cynically flung at ideological enemies.
If conservatives want to maintain any credibility in the fight to protect children, that commitment must be based on principle, not popularity or partisanship. If your outrage only shows up when it’s politically convenient, then it was never about protecting kids — it was about protecting your brand.
Published May 2, 2025
