USA TODAY National
FONTANA, Calif. – Arthur Espinoza spends most evenings learning to pummel, kick and grapple in “Super” Betiss Mansouri’s no-frills mixed-martial-arts gym in the industrial outskirts of Fontana, California.
The 17-year-old joins a steady stream of fighters on mats spattered with sweat, blood and occasional tears to spar under the watchful eye of Mansouri, a former professional MMA fighter who founded the space in 2020. Actions speak within these four walls: clean hits, hard knocks, tight holds.
The gym is central to Espinoza’s life and the man he is becoming.
It’s where he says he’s building his muscles, his courage, and his self-control. But like millions of young men around the country, Espinoza has also found another guide to life: His phone.
Online, influencers in what is known as the “Manosphere” spread fitness, lifestyle and get-rich-quick advice alongside a toxic blend of misogynistic and anti-feminist rhetoric while insisting they are respectful of women — and Espinoza is a big fan.
“If you just type in anything specific, I'm pretty sure they've said it — any influencer,” Espinoza said. “So that's what I like most about the internet too, because it can help you a lot.”
The online focus on masculinity comes at a time when study after study shows young men in America are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness, fatigue, depression and suicide. Coming to their apparent rescue are groomed, muscular men in polished videos, smoking cigars, sitting in private jets, doing push ups and whispering that men’s pain is because of women. Women are greedy, untrustworthy, weak and inferior, these influencers say. They need to be controlled. Dominated. Owned.
And boys like Espinoza eat that messaging up.
“It's like motivation. It's like dopamine,” Espinoza said, his large, brown eyes shining.
Some of the best-known men on the internet, including some with millions of followers, made their start in MMA. The cross-pollination between gyms like this and the world of online masculinity is strong.
Experts define the Manosphere as a loosely knit network of chatrooms, social media influencers, websites, podcasts, vlogs, TikTok and YouTube channels, merchandise outfits and gaming platforms. The Manosphere isn’t so much a place or a thing or even an online entity. It’s more an attitude, a brand, a nod-and-a-wink.
“There's a whole genre of performative anger that happens online,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founder of the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab or PERIL at American University and an authority on the Manosphere. “They're performing outrage, it's salacious, it feels good. It's like candy for guys who are angry.”And like the best fighters in Betiss’ gym, that messaging hits hard.
‘It helps me a lot’
Espinoza has been training here for a few weeks now, and though he’s still pretty slight, he chomps down on protein bars every chance he gets.
He makes the 30-minute walk to the gym from his home in a trailer community even if the temperature is in the triple-digits.
Sitting in the small bedroom he shares with his sister, under posters of Nipsey Hussle and the Playboy logo and a blank space where his TV used to be (his grandparents took it away because he was getting into trouble at school), Espinoza lays out the value the online world holds for him.
He hasn’t had a bike since his broke. Even if he did, the nearest mall is a 30-minute ride away, often in blistering heat. There’s a park about a 15-minute walk away where Espinoza shoots hoops. And some fast food joints, where he’d eat if he had any money. And the gym. But mainly, that phone is his world.
Sitting on his narrow bed under a rickety AC unit, Espinoza, who grew up in foster care and now lives with his grandparents, described how he sometimes scrolls the internet for hours. He’s not Googling or reading or watching the news. The content he consumes is pure short-sharp-shock video: 30 seconds here, maybe a minute there. TikTok mainly. Some YouTube. Some Insta.
“I do look up to these people,” he said of the influencers he watches. “When I see videos of them putting in the work or talking about certain things that I may be going through, it helps me a lot.”
For example: Espinoza broke up with his girlfriend a few months ago. He’s still hurting. Life now is just that hot walk to the basketball hoop and getting whooped at the gym. And school of course, which he hates.
But in seeking to understand and deal with his breakup, he’s spent hours online searching for videos that help explain what he’s feeling, and what he might have done differently.
Espinoza flinches if you suggest the videos he’s watching are anything but positive for his mental health. That rich vein of knowledge from those powerful, rich men isn’t just enjoyable to watch, he says, it also teaches him how the world really works.
But spend some time in his company and it soon becomes clear how these videos are influencing how Espinoza sees the world.
Walking around the local mall, he points out attractive young women and says how he’d love to have the courage to speak with them. But later, in an uncensored rant, he talks about how women can’t be trusted, and how the only way to really ride out a relationship with a girl is to know what she’s doing every second of every day. Don’t let her go out with other girls. Dominate her. Wear down her self-control a little, so she needs you.
Asked where he’s getting this stuff from, Espinoza pulls out his phone and cues up a slew of videos from his favorite influencer: Andrew Tate.
Man of the sphere: Andrew Tate
It’s pretty much impossible to discuss the Manosphere without Tate appearing in the same sentence. The British-American former pro kickboxer has become synonymous with the broader world of online toxic masculinity.
Tate has amassed more than 10 million followers on X and hundreds of thousands more on other platforms like Telegram and Truth Social. Despite being banned from Instagram and TikTok in 2022, videos featuring Tate are still easy to find on those sites.
Tate and his brother Tristan willfully describe themselves as misogynists. They got their start in the porn webcam business, and they’re facing multiple legal proceedings in the United Kingdom, Romania and the United States involving allegations of rape, sexual abuse and human trafficking. They deny everything.
Andrew Tate has long instructed his legions of followers how to sexually exploit women using the "loverboy method," a manipulation technique used to target vulnerable women. His online "educational" courses at Hustlers University − rebranded in 2022 as "The Real World" − offer advice on tax evasion as well as picking up and controlling women.
Tate’s social media activity and media appearances are boosted by spreaders of mis- and dis-information and anti-government conspiracy theorists including Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich. Candace Owens, who is at the center of hate-speech allegations, is also a fan.
“Andrew Tate is, if not the most popular, certainly one of the most popular Manosphere alpha male masculine self-improvement influencers, period,” said Meredith Pruden, a communication and media studies professor and a fellow with the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. “In the UK, they’re doing workshops in schools about the dangers of Andrew Tate.”
'I believe that you should take in all of it'
The boys and men at Betiss’ gym in Fontana laugh at the idea they might need some sort of workshop or guidance on Tate.
“I’ll applaud everything the man says because it’s hilarious,” said 24-year-old Mario Flores.
Sitting around on a hot June evening after several hours of training and sparring, Flores, Espinoza and a half-dozen other boys and men ranging in age from 13 to 33 told USA TODAY they believe Tate and other male influencers they aspire to are misrepresented in the media – especially by mainstream outlets.
Tate doesn’t really mean it when he says women can’t drive, the aspiring MMA fighters said. He’s just joking around when he states that he’s “absolutely sexist and absolutely a misogynist.” Shocking soundbites like that are just for the views, they said. They’re fertilizer for social media algorithms, helping his videos and his persona sprout and blossom across the internet.
And in a world filled with junk content, where everyone is a wannabe influencer peddling their lifestyle and products, Tate’s a pretty good pick for learning how to live your life, said 21-year-old John Fitch, who spars at Betiss’ gym a few times a week.
“We have a lot of pressure on us to be successful, especially on social media. You're seeing rappers, musicians, you're seeing actors – all these people with a lot of money that we don't have,” Fitch said. “He (Tate) just gives people hope, as far as men go.”
Espinoza agreed.
He acknowledges there's "a lot of stuff" Tate says that's not "the right way to put it." He doesn't always agree with Tate, he said, and he concedes the influencer can be offensive or – sometimes just plain wrong. However, like the other fans at Betiss’s gym Espinoza believes Tate is routinely mischaracterized and maybe even misunderstood.
"I believe that you should take in all of it," Espinoza said of the way Tate mixes motivational comments about healthy eating and working out while advocating for men to "discipline" their girlfriends with violence if need be.
'Misogynist, what does it even mean?'
Tate declined a request for an interview. Through his New York attorney, Joseph McBride, Tate sent USA TODAY a long statement.
In response to questions about his professed misogyny, he wrote:
“Misogynist, what does it even mean? Yes, I think men and women are different. Do I hate women? Of course not. My message is not against the good mothers and wives in this world. My message is against the wolves in sheep’s clothing that rape and pillage men’s lives.”
McBride, who said he has had many discussions with the Tate brothers about the criticisms of what they say, said his client feels he is performing an essential role in America’s political discourse.
“Andrew speaks in absolute terms and his messaging represents a correction in the marketplace of ideas that has been heavily tilted to one side for the past 20 years,” McBride said. “The higher political context here is that we’re trying to get you back to center. One side is stretching you left — we’re going to stretch you right.”
In essence, that reflects what the young men in Betiss’s gym said.
The sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia and transphobia espoused by Tate and his ilk, isn’t really serious, they said. It’s just men pushing back on political correctness – expanding the political discourse – bringing it back to some sort of “center” via a bunch of sexist and racist jokes.
But research shows it’s not just boys in their late teens, and men in their 20s and 30s watching these videos and engaging in the sort of rhetoric Tate and others espouse. Recent studies have shown how social media algorithms mercilessly push manosphere content towards children and young men, whether they’re searching for it or not.
And that content is quickly interspersed with other even more extremist ideas. Antisemitism, white supremacy, conspiracy theories, even school shooter videos quickly flood young men’s and even children’s timelines, said Miller-Idriss, the Manosphere researcher.
Boys search for “‘How to get my life together?’ ‘How do I get a date?’ ‘How do I talk to a girl?’ or ‘why am I so depressed?’” she said. “And they'll land on an influencer who gives them really helpful advice — actually just some basic kind of things that might help like ‘Hey, get eight hours of sleep, drink more water, go to the gym, make your bed in the morning, do your laundry,’ so you feel a little bit more sense of efficacy and accomplishment.”
But it can also be the start of a slippery slope, said Miller-Idriss, who is part of a growing chorus of analysts and researchers sounding the alarm on online toxic masculinity.
“Misogynist and sexist attitudes are foundational to mass violence and violent extremism – as a gateway to later radicalization, as a red flag or warning sign for subsequent violence, as an integrated part of all far-right ideologies and as an ideology that motivates mass violence,” Miller-Idriss writes in her latest book, “Man Up,” which examined the deep roots between the Manosphere and other extremist beliefs and violence.
Examples abound of men with histories of misogyny – often expressed online – who go on to commit violent crimes in the name of their hatred.
In Britain, for example, a man named Kyle Clifford murdered three members of the same family, all women, one of whom was his ex-girlfriend. Prosecutors said Clifford searched for Tate's podcast less than 24 hours before the murders.
The GOP courts the manosphere
During his 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump appeared on a slew of manosphere and manosphere-adjacent podcasts and vodcasts, including Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys and Theo Von.Some of Trump's allies and family members have expressed support for the Tate brothers.
Donald Trump Jr. has called the case against the Tates in Romania "absolute insanity." One of Tate's lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now a White House liaison at the Department of Justice. Alina Habba, a Trump lawyer, has also backed Tate and summed up his message to American boys and men as equivalent "to stop being wimps."
For his part, Tate has backed Trump and appeared to build relationships with Trump Jr. and Barron Trump, with whom Tate claims to have spoken directly following the attempted assassination of his father. Tate has also used social media to amplify "the big lie" allegations from Trump and others in the wider MAGA world that Democrats rigged the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden and that the presidency was "stolen" from Trump.
Those White House relationships, such as they are, appear to have benefited Tate in one specific way, according to reports. The Trump administration reportedly pressured Romanian officials to release the brothers from house arrest while authorities investigate the allegations against them.
Alex DiBranco, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, said her team has never seen the Manosphere rally around a political candidate like they have around Trump.
“Most of the misogynist online movements were fairly apolitical before Trump,” DiBranco said.
That relationship is symbiotic, said Pruden:
“There is certainly a concerted effort by the GOP, or at least certain segments within it, to actively court angry young primarily, but not exclusively, white men,” she said.
In the 2024 presidential election, 56% percent of men under 30 supported Trump, compared with 41% four years earlier, according to the AP VoteCast Survey.
Children of the manosphere and how to protect them
Espinoza and his sparring buddies said that when Tate and other influencers say offensive or disrespectful things about women, they have the ability to filter them out.
They take Tate’s efforts to “stretch out” the political discourse as a natural hazard of online communication, they said. There’s good. There’s bad. You just have to tune out the bad stuff.
But what if you haven’t yet learned the skills – or the defense mechanisms – to do that?
During the late-night discussion at Betiss’ gym, as sweat cooled on bare shoulders and insects began to buzz outside, 24-year-old Brenda Zarate who had come to support her boyfriend, stepped forward shyly to offer her take on the Manosphere.
Zarate, who works as a childcare assistant at a local school, said there’s a group of second-grade boys she supervises who she loves. But recently, she’s started to get concerned about some of the things they’re saying.
Like Espinoza and the others, these boys are often glued to their phones, Zarate said. They love watching videos from Tate and other influencers.
“I've noticed this past year, it's been a serious issue with the way that they have started treating the girls,” Zarate said, her voice shaking slightly. “I have these little girls who I also adore constantly coming up to me and telling me that the boys are bullying them — that they're telling them all these horrific things in second grade.”
The boys aren’t learning these messages at home, Zarate said.
The boys’ parents “Hear these things they're saying and they're appalled. The parents themselves are like, where are you learning that? And then they go to school and they tell me that they're watching these influencers.”
Espinoza and his friends acknowledge this is a problem. But they say the fault lies with parents, not with the men who put videos voicing misogyny out into the world.
Parents shouldn’t let their kids watch just anything online, they say, shrugging. There’s bad stuff out there. Everybody knows that.
Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. This story is part of a new docuseries "Extremely Normal," exploring the new frontlines of extremism nationwide. Kim Hjelmgaard is USA TODAY's world correspondent and reported from London.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘It's like dopamine.’ Looking for role models, troubled young men find Andrew Tate.
Reporting by Will Carless and Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Essentiallysports Basketball
The Denver Gazette Sports
Fitness Volt
Cache Valley Daily
TODAY Health
Entertainment Tonight Music
Raw Story
Fit&Well
AlterNet