Celtic Fans Will Never Be Short Of Laughs Whilst We Have The Madness Of Sevconia.

The best political story of the year so far broke yesterday, in the United States. American politics is absolutely fascinating right now.

Looking at it from the outside is like peering through the windows at a freak show. I know this is serious stuff – if Trump wins the consequences will be enormous, and global – but instead of campaigning right now he’s sitting in a courtroom listening to a porn star talking about how gross he is in bed and how she spanked his ass with a rolled-up magazine, and that’s not even the weirdest story, the one I want to talk about.

Robert F. Kennedy Jnr is running for President as an independent; his father is my political hero. For a lot of the Irish, it’s John F. Kenndy who occupies the place of honour, but for me Bobby is the guy, he’s the one who would have transformed America and the world.

So, it’s sad to see the crazy lunatic who grew up bearing that name and carrying it forward. To call Kennedy Jnr a nut would be kind.

He’s a conspiracy theorist … and although he and Trump are basically very similar and believe in similarly wacky things, Democrats are worried because some of their less than enlightened voters see that famous name and believe he stands for something … and so he was probably going to cost Biden more votes than he’d have taken from his fellow traveller through Crazy Town.

Or at least that was the operating theory, until yesterday.

Now his campaign is desperately firefighting after divorce deposition paperwork from years ago surfaced and exploded across a disbelieving American press which thought it had seen it all. He blamed his history of bizarre behaviour on having gotten mercury poisoning from eating fish … and this had led to him having a worm in his head which ate part of his brain and then died. Let me say that again in case you’re sitting there like, “Eah? What?”

RFK Jnr, running as an independent for President, a man who could have tipped the race by taking away from the main candidates enough votes to tip the balance, has said he has behaved irrationally at times because a worm ate part of his brain and died in his head. Yes, you are reading that right. This is the world we live in now.

(Aside from one of the nominees sitting in court being grilled on his relationship with a porn star, this week is also characterised by one of his potential Vice President’s trying to rescue her career after she tried to impress likely voters who worried that a woman couldn’t be tough by confessing, in the book that was meant to impress them, that she once shot a puppy. God Bless America, right?)

Take a minute if you need one to process all that.

Social media’s reaction to the RFK story was a mixture of stunned disbelief and glee. And one particular tweet stood out for me, a writer at a left-wing magazine over there posted; “Some are asking, what kind of worm eats a brain? Ask instead; what kind of brain kills a worm?”

And I read that and thought, “Well, I can think of a few …”

Our sports media is actually full of them, and a lot of the craziness we see across the city might well be starting to make more sense at the same time. Brain eating worms … and the kind of brain that can kill a worm. See if a lot of pieces don’t start slotting into place as you think about that, and we don’t need to worry about how those worms got there. Re-heated Ibrox pies or something; pick your own explanation from the wide range of possibilities.

“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kenndy Jnr said in the deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

Does that or does that not sound familiar? Glasgow needs to consider a mass testing regimen for this stuff. I mean, a lot of these Peepul definitely have cognitive problems. Clearly. Short term memory loss is obviously common, especially amongst those who talk about “momentum” all the time. Longer-term memory loss is even more obvious. They don’t even know their club died for God’s sake, or remember the circumstances in which it happened.

Today, for the third time this week, someone asked me to take a look at the craziest fan site in all of football; Ibrox Noise. I don’t cover it as much as I used to, but there is a wealth of insanity on there for those who want to take a peek.

Amongst their articles today is one which suggests that Celtic’s “interest” in Liam Kelly is an effort to unsettle their team before the game at the weekend because they’ve apparently been interested in him for ages. Is that the work of a sane writer? Or has the worm grabbed the command chair and started to operate him like a remote-control toy?

One of their fans, on Twitter last weekend, admired the Union Bears banners and suggested that as many people try to get them trending as possible, because the owner of what’s now known as X (I won’t call it that, ever, any more than I’ll call Sevco Rangers) might see them and buy them just to annoy as many of our “woke” fans as possible. As if he doesn’t own enough over-priced junk which spews bile all day, every day.

When told that Henry Winter will be writing for The Herald this weekend on the derby, one of the posters on a certain Ibrox fan forum broke into a bizarre rant that reads as follows; “England is a cultural Marxist cesspit. In small town England, where you’ve got good Brexit strongholds that hold out against the elites, you’ll find strong (Ibrox) support. But when you get into the far-left academic and media elites that congregate in places like London you will get filth all over the place.”

Entire sections of that forum are devoted to a number of favourite subjects; The Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand; referees are out to get them; Celtic fans control the media and the SFA … I mean, you have to laugh reading some of them, but you also have to marvel, and you also need to recognise how dangerous it is to be so outside of reality.

Check out this particular post, on why their club is powerless to call out biased refereeing.

“How exactly do you propose the club do this? If you want something said in the public domain the only way it gains proper attention is through mainstream media. The main players on that front in Scotland are BBC, STV, Sky, The Record, and The Sun. All these organisations are literally crammed with employees who utterly despise us.”

You don’t even need to pick that apart, do you? It’s nuts. If that’s not evidence that we might have a brain eating worm epidemic on our hands, you tell me what is?

The head of one Ibrox fan forum has a newspaper cutting up tonight, with its own thread, accusing the writer (Graeme McGarry) of a bias against their club. What’s the article about? It’s about how Silva shouldn’t have had a dig at the fans last weekend, and that he and the players around him have let those fans down and the fans are right to be on his back.

Where the Hell is the pro-Celtic, anti-Ibrox slant in that? Even if you looked through that with a fine-toothed comb, you’d struggle to find any justification for having that interpretation. They get randomly pissed off and ranting over the smallest things …

And you know what? All of this is from one day’s social media stuff, and it’s only what I found in the “Kit-Kat and a coffee break” I took to look and find it all. Had I spent longer, had I taken an hour, I’d have found more. Much more. There is tons of this out there. The worm infestation is widespread. We should be having these people checked out.

As I was writing this, a mate of mine, John, messaged me on Facebook to ask if I’d seen an Ibrox Noise piece wherein they said that Dessers is the best striker in the country, even more so than the other two best strikers, Miovski and Shankland.

There’s at least one player missing from that short list. Maybe the worm ate that bit of the writer’s brain.

John laughed when I told him the premise of this piece, but without telling him what inspired it, and he said that he didn’t know that RFK Jnr was an Ibrox fan!

He reminded me that he too enjoys looking at US politics, and so we traded some funny stories, including the one about Trump’s potential VP Kristi Noem boasting about shooting her dog and writing, in the same book, about how she stared down, and intimidated, Kim Jong Un, who she’d never actually met.

And he said to me that he wouldn’t be surprised to find that Trump himself had an Ibrox connection; I didn’t know where to start.

With the deal they signed a few years back with the Trump Golf Courses and hotel chain, or with the stories from 2012 about how his advisors had looked at buying Rangers, but walked away as it represented too big a risk?

I sent him an article from 2017 on that failed deal, and one from around the time it was all going on.

How close we were, folks.

How close to a scenario in which there would have been literally decades of articles!

Think how glorious that would have been!

Or you can think about that question; not what kind of worm eats brain, but about what kind of brain could kill a worm?

An Ibrox brain. A Sevco brain.

The US comedy shows are having an absolute blast at the craziness of their political landscape, but the best joke on the RFK brain worm came from Stephen Colbert, who on The Late Show the other night speculated on what could have killed it.

“Cause of death?” he said. “Starvation.”

Yeah, that’s probably close to the mark.

It’s what kills most of those you get around here.