Forrest Gump famously said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Forrest Gump clearly never spent a Wednesday night tuning into a much-hyped interview between livestreamer Adin Ross and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which was crashed by masculinity influencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
More than 330,000 people tuned into the livestream on Kick Wednesday night, according to streaming data, which featured not the dictator himself, but a Hong Kong native in a pinstriped suit that looked like it had been pulled from a Sheboygan dinner theater production of Guys and Dolls. During the stream, which reportedly broke Kick records, Ross peppered Howard X, a professional Kim Jong Un impersonator, with such hard-hitting questions as “Is North Korea a fun place to visit?,” followed by “Can I come and visit North Korea?”
At a certain point in the livestream, a deadpan Andrew Tate joined in, puffing a cigar while saying to the impersonator, “I see you’re working on your missile tech, trying to keep your country sovereign. Good luck.”
A 22-year-old Tate acolyte who has platformed white supremacists like Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his channel, Ross was banned from Twitch earlier this year after multiple suspensions for violating its rules governing unmoderated hate speech in the comments. He has since become one of the most popular streamers on Kick, a Twitch competitor with more lax moderation policies.
Ross spent days hyping up the “interview” with Kim Jong Un on his social platforms, with many of his fans speculating that he had actually procured the dictator for an interview on his channel, despite Kim Jong Un rarely speaking to press. (The last public-facing interview he did was with a Russian news channel in 2019, and most recently wrapped up a trip to Russia to visit Putin.) In a livestream two days prior, he “confirmed” that he would be going forward with the interview, saying, “We definitely got government officials hitting up my legal team” and “They saw and hit up, basically, my team and they just let me know there could be consequences for this.”
The “consequences,” apparently, were getting lots and lots of clout. Though many disappointed viewers checked out of the livestream after seeing that Un was an impersonator, enough stuck around to watch Ross parley with Tate, the kickboxer turned masculinity influencer who has been charged in Romania with rape and human trafficking and is awaiting trial (Tate has denied all charges).
During the livestream, a vaguely amused Tate lightly negged Ross, as is their bizarre fashion, chiding him for “having more money than you deserve” while still not being able to snag a girlfriend. Tate addressed the Kim Jong Un impersonator as “my G” and chortled as he urged him to “fuck [his] sister” because she “really needs a big dick.”
“When I had no money at all, and I was growing up in Luton on a council estate with a single mother with no money, I had all these dreams of what I’d do if I ever got rich,” he said, “Turns out I go to Romanian jail and get waken up at three in the morning by Adin Ross to come talk to a Kim Jong Un impersonator. What am I doing with my life?”
While we never thought we’d type these words: Andrew, we couldn’t have put it better ourselves.