The hand-wringing about Andrew Tate being an ever-present threat, turning the quiet sons of happily-married white working-class parents into misogynistic “Incel” terrorists is blatantly manufactured as a pretext for online censorship.
But the discourse surrounding the series points to a broader problem: the state’s persistent demonisation of disadvantaged white boys.
I wrote about how Adolescenceis the latest emotive propaganda effort to justify online censorship, and to demonise white boys as enemies of the progressive revolution underway in Western institutions, for Courage Media:
New Netflix drama Adolescence has incited a moral panic in Britain. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called it “a documentary,” and pledged to screen it for free in schools across the country. Its creators were invited to Downing Street. MPs cited the series in Parliament as a casus belli for banning social media for children (good) and granting regulator Ofcom further powers to censor online speech (bad). The police have told parents to report their sons to counter-extremism programme Prevent if they are “watching misogynist videos online”.
If you were just reading the headlines, you would think a generation of sexless white schoolboys have been radicalised into stabbing female classmates en masse after watching a few Andrew Tate videos. This is simply not the case — but the state continues to pour copious resources into counter-extremism programmes targeting “Incels,” “toxic masculinity,” and innocent boys. As the Prevent training and classroom resources provided to me and contained in this article show, the British state has waged a long psychological war on white boys. Adolescence is just their latest emotive propaganda effort to justify it.
The most insidious part about the Adolescence moral panic is the lie it perpetuates: that the reclusive sons of happily-married white working-class parents can be converted into misogynistic murderers, without any prior warning signs, by watching Manosphere content online. The murder that inspired the series disproves that premise. Actor Stephen Graham cited the murder of 15-year-old Elianne Andam in Croydon in 2023 as the reason for creating the show. Hassan Sentamu was given a life sentence for stabbing Andam to death outside a shopping centre, after being dumped by one of Andam’s friends. Sentamu was sent to a Ugandan boarding school where he was beaten, and then placed in foster care. 24% of British adults in prison have been in care. Sentamu then threatened to cut his foster-mother’s cat's tail off, and was given a police caution aged 12 for bringing a knife to school. So, not quite “Jamie,” the quiet working-class white boy with a loving, married mother and father.
Sentamu was raised by a single-mother — as are 46% of children in the UK by age 14. Broken down by ethnicity: 57 percent of black Caribbean and 44 percent of black African families are single-parent (mother), compared to only 22 percent of white British families. 76% of children in custody report having an absent father. These same fatherless ethnic-minority boys are the most likely to hold a favourable opinion of Andrew Tate: polling by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found black respondents reported a 41% percent positive view of Tate, “Asians” 31%, whereas whites only 15%.
Tate’s opulent status displays — expensive cars, large cigars, harems of plastic prostitutes — do not appeal to most young white English boys in a way that it does to black boys, enamoured with imported American gangsta rap (and its “drill” offspring). His polygamy and conversion to Islam are alien to lads like “Jamie”, but not to the thousands of British-born Pakistanis.
More fundamentally, the manosphere’s prescribed “How” for overcoming the austere Houellebecqian dynamics of the sexual marketplace is bereft of any “Why” that rejects the materialistic presuppositions that produced feminism. It at once argues it is both a necessary adaptation to misandrist divorce laws and hypergamous female mate-selection methods, and a return to evolutionarily-congruent relationship dynamics. Many don’t realise their advice is predicated on viewing man as the anachronistic homo economicus, however. The manosphere’s metric of success is that of marginal utility — of reaping material rewards, rather than embodying metaphysical ideals. It is the second sore cheek to feminism on the smacked backside of sexual and economic liberalism.
By putting the focus on earning more, becoming a socially-proofed and financially prosperous “high-value man”, we suggest the path to success is to dominate one’s competition and impress a woman into submission. The foundations of your self-esteem are still transactional. Relationships are still as “self-expressive” as those promised by the sexual revolution: to be severed whenever you no longer feel you are contributing to being one another’s “best selves”.
The Darwinian pragmatism of the manosphere doesn’t provide an escape route for our broken culture — only a ruthless adaptation strategy of being a warlord or well-groomed Beautiful One, whilst our densely-populated mouse utopia descends into cultural cannibalism.
Tate’s offer of being the Genghis Khan of no-tax Dubai doesn’t appeal to most rooted, disillusioned white working class men; nor does it provide a model for escaping the downward pressures on masculinity by the Sexual Revolution.
Black boys are almost three times as likely as white boys to idolise Andrew Tate; and comprise 61% of knife murder perpetrators, 53% of knife crime perpetrators, and 73% of the Metropolitan Police’s gang matrix suspects. There is an undeniable pattern in the profile of these offenders. Pretending there isn’t prevents the problem from being solved, and subjects innocent boys to derision by the state, culture, and their social peers.
However, the purpose of Adolescence is not to solve a problem; but to serve as a pretext for the state to censor social media, to stop the spread of “Red Pill” content. Curiously, the state wasn’t so quick to suggest a smartphone ban or social media controls when adolescent girls were desperate to amputate their breasts and sterilise themselves with puberty blockers after viewing transgender content on Tumblr and TikTok. Nor did the Home Office take action when aware that people smugglers were advertising their services to illegal migrants using videos of British women, taken without their consent, drunk and scantily-clad, on Instagram. The state remains indifferent to the radicalisation of young women by runaway Woke progressivism, because it advances the regime’s revolutionary goals. This censorship effort is driven by ideology, not child safeguarding.
The charities involved in both promoting Adolescence and crafting Britain’s compulsory sex and relationships education curriculum are ideologically captured by Woke intersectional feminist beliefs about the inherent harmfulness of masculinity.
In my Courage Media coverage, I included materials from lesson plans and Prevent training, provided to me by the Family Education Trust and a whistleblower working in a UK school.
The charity promotingAdolescence, Tender, has received £3.9 million in government grants since 2020 — and was co-founded by Keir Starmer’s ex-girlfriend, Phillipa Kaufmann. The charity were invited to Downing Street on the 1st of April, and have partnered with Netflix to make Adolescence free to stream in every UK secondary school. Other materials circulated in schools by Tender include the “Pyramid of Sexual Violence”: which states that “Attitudes and Beliefs” including “Bragging”, “Strict gender roles”, and saying “Boys will be Boys” leads ineluctably to “Gang rape” and genocide.
Tender are one of many third-party providers which schools have consulted since Relationships Education and Health Education (RSHE) lessons were made compulsory in all primary and secondary schools, in 2020. Research by the Family Education Trust in 2024 found these providers’ lesson materials view boys and masculinity through an exclusively intersectional feminist lens. 30% of schools teach children about “toxic masculinity”; and 5% that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society.” Their report included another versions of the pyramid: listing “Traditional gendered roles within the family” and stereotypes that men should be stoic and the financial breadwinners for their families as leading to rape.
If not taught directly to children, outside providers present these ideas to school safeguarding staff in Prevent training. One such organisation is Exit Hate UK: which receives funding from the National Lottery, and the Mayor of London — just like Tender UK. In materials provided by a safeguarding officer, Exit Hate UK presents social media platforms like X and video streaming platforms like Rumble as vectors for fringe far right radicalisation.
Slides depicting social media platforms as “Online Apps To Be Wary Of”.
Exit Hate UK presents the “Tradwife trend” — social media content depicting women who give up work, raise their children, and bake bread — as a recruitment tool by “the Far Right”. According to the course provider, women are “expected to be moderately dressed[,] get married in your 20’s[,] and have 4 children. Priority is Marriage – race – country.” They are “Not allowed TVs as it is believed to be controlled by the Government and Jews.” Traditional gender roles are demonised as leading to misogyny, racism, and fascism — just as in the PSHE lesson materials.
The course provider also dismissed the Pakistani rape gang scandal as misrepresented by the “Far Right” — using the total number of child sexual offences by the ethnicity of the offender, rather than per capita, to argue that child sexual exploitation is worse among whites. Associating concerns about child sexual exploitation by gangs of Pakistani men with racism and far right narratives could lead to child safeguarding officers missing warning signs for children who have been victimised by these very real predators.
Slides depicting “Far Right” pedophiles, downplaying the severity of the Pakistani rape gang scandal.
These charities receive taxpayer funding to shape the curriculum, and safeguarding procedures to help young boys deal with their feelings and frustrations. They depict masculinity as “toxic”, traditional gender roles an ineluctable cause of rape and spousal abuse, and freedom of expression online as a pipeline to far right radicalisation. This is no doubt going to have a detrimental effect on a boy's self-esteem and mental wellbeing; and should be in violation of sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act 1996, which forbids schools from promoting partisan political views to pupils. Despite this, through the media circus around Adolescence, these beliefs are being amplified into every classroom by the Prime Minister himself.
Another provider is Dudley Safe & Sound — partnered with HM Prison & Probation Service, West Midlands Police, and the NHS.
My former colleague Josh Ferme has compiled a thread on X of the materials they made for educators after the release of Adolescence, including a “Factsheet: Incels and Misogyny” on emojis and their supposed meaning to the schoolchildren using them.
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