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Lil Baby 5th Annual Back-To-School Fest 2025
Source: Prince Williams / Getty

Lil Baby went all the way to Dubai and somehow still managed to find mess.

The Atlanta rapper was recently out of the country and ended up going to dinner with professional misogyny mascot Andrew Tate, a man whose entire brand is built on saying the quiet, hateful part out loud and then charging men a subscription fee for it. 

And there doesn’t seem to be any chains or handcuffs in the photo, which means that Lil Baby wasn’t being held against his will and freely chose to take his latest comeback tour into a toxic masculinity tailspin it didn’t need. 

Lil Baby’s career has always been a blood pressure reading. Early on, he stacked hits with Gunna, Drake, Young Thug and damn near anyone else who mattered out of Atlanta. When My Turn dropped, Baby wasn’t just winning—he was lapping the field. But by 2023 and 2024, the whispers got louder. Fans started saying the music felt repetitive, the spark dimmed, the hunger gone.

Then 2025 happened. Projects like The Leaks reminded folks why Baby was that guy in the first place. The bars sharpened up, the energy returned, and the narrative started to flip again. Redemption arc loading.

And then he went to dinner with one of the worst people in the history of the world. 

And now the argument against Lil Baby has moved away from beats or bars. Fans are mad about optics—and rightfully so. Tate, a self-styled “red pill” influencer, has spent years going viral for deeply hateful rants, trashing women, and positioning himself as some warped avatar of hypermasculinity. He rose to internet infamy in 2022 and later faced sex trafficking and related charges in Romania. After spending time detained, he’s currently out and awaiting trial. 

Despite Tate regularly sneering at Hip-Hop culture, Lil Baby looked more than happy to pose with him, grinning like he’d just met a Marvel character instead of a walking content warning. And fans noticed.

The backlash was swift. Social media lit up with disappointment, confusion, and anger—especially from women who felt alienated by seeing an artist they supported cozy up to someone whose whole platform revolves around disrespecting them. Some even vowed to block Baby’s music entirely, turning a photo op into a quiet protest playlist purge.

To be clear, we don’t know how the meetup happened. Maybe it was random. Maybe it was planned. Maybe Dubai is just one big celebrity crossover episode. But intention doesn’t always matter as much as impact.

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