This is an experience of showing the Andrew Tate takedown segment on The RNL Show to a grouping of Black and Latino high school students who live in the inner city. I am a new teacher, and recently a discussion/debate began when one student came into class saying they were having a debate in his last class, and I asked about what? And he answered it was about Andrew Tate, and that one student in the debate was really defending Tate. There were four students, juniors and seniors, who participated in a discussion of this where we watched the revcoms take down of Andrew Tate from The RNL Show.

None of the students were supportive or for Andrew Tate, but they were somewhat sympathetic and apologetic of him saying he should have free speech and that he shouldn't be banned from social media. “It's his opinion,” and, “What about all the crazy feminists?” The students felt he's just an extremist who doesn't represent what most people think which we got into further after watching the clip from The RNL Show.

Before this, one of them was saying he sees people bashing Andrew Tate but with no substance. After they watched the whole thing, the same student said that this was the best argument he's ever heard and he really liked it. Two other male students were also in agreement with Prose from The RNL Show. The only young woman was a bit quiet, but when I asked her what she thought, she said she agreed with everything in it. The one student who said that's the best argument he's ever heard and was the one who started the discussion subscribed [to The RNL Show] on the spot afterward, and then we had a whole debate about reform vs. revolution. We defined imperialism, and when one student tried to compare Hitler to Stalin, I said he can't make that comparison and that people don't know shit about actual communism and that there's a new communism. He said he doesn't like capitalism, but doesn't consider himself a communist and that there's some benefits to capitalism, but then I laid out how capitalism has us living off the backs of the people of the world. He agreed with that, and then a debate about human nature came up where he felt that that was why we're in the situation we're in. I brought up the fact that there's no such thing as “human nature,” that it is not “natural” for someone like Tate to act the way that he does, and that our ideas and behaviors flow out of this oppressive system and get reinforced and taught in a million ways—just look at the music, look at the culture, billboards etc.

I also was arguing how Andrew Tate is not just some fringe extremist, or an anomaly, but that he actually represents the thinking of, and is training much of the thinking of, millions of young men in this society because we live in a male supremacist patriarchal society. What he's saying is actually in the mainstream and in the halls of power—just look at the Republican Party and the fact that they just took away abortion. So this kind of thinking has backing and gets a hearing because it goes along with how this system operates and oppresses women here and all over the world.

They were in agreement with that, but it did take some struggle and a few rounds to get them to that place, with one of them not fully won over.

By the end of it the students were saying, “Why can't all classes be like this? Can you be our regular teacher?” They were very open to discussion and hearing other opinions and weren't taking things personally—which was very refreshing. It does show the potential for teachers to show clips of the Bob Avakian interviews in these classes and shows that there's a good amount of youth who are hungry for these kinds of discussions and debates. It kind of gave me a sense of what education would be like in a future society where this kind of ferment would be very much encouraged with the spirit of going for the truth and changing the world.