Sympathy For The Devil: Scottish football needs to move us past Sevco’s pity party.

Earlier this week, I came across a remarkable clip of a Silicon Valley Tech Bro trying to explain why many in the billionaire class, once part of a liberal environment, are now casting their votes for Donald Trump. I also listened to an interesting podcast discussion with former Republicans, now voting for Harris, reflecting on their friends still in the Republican Party.

The key point in their discussion was about showing some respect for people voting for Trump as if they have good reasons. I’m going to be blunt – I don’t believe there are any good reasons. I don’t think anyone voting for him can defend that vote without living in a Trumpian bubble where those around them agree with their choices.

I’ve spent my life immersed in politics, participating in campaigns and focus groups, and I’ve come across opponents I’ve genuinely disliked. As a socialist, I struggle to understand Tories or those who vote Tory, but even with the grotesque policies I’ve seen from their party, outside of Thatcher and Johnson, I’ve never truly loathed or despised any of their leaders. At least with them, I could sort of understand why some people voted for them.

But Donald Trump? He’s the only mainstream politician I’ve encountered with no redeeming qualities. His policies are incoherent, he lacks understanding of complex issues, and his simple-minded solutions only worsen the problems.

Even if he were competent, his repellent personality makes him unfit for office. Trump is a racist, misogynist, convicted fraudster, liar, con man, and cheat, probably suffering from narcissistic personality disorder and possibly psychopathy. He has been found legally responsible for sexual assault. He openly tears people down instead of lifting them up, and this isn’t hidden—it’s right there for everyone to see.

The fact that millions still support him says something awful about American culture. I cannot see any justification for voting for him, either on a policy or personal level. Everyone voting in that election should be forced to confront the moral choice before them.

There is no moral equivalence between Trump and Kamala Harris, regardless of your opinion on her politics. Trump represents something truly dark, and anyone who votes for him should reckon with what that says about them.

Why does this matter to us?

Because Scottish football may face a similarly defining moment in the coming years, and how people respond will reveal who they are.

Last week, I wrote about Zealand, the football manager YouTuber, and his take on the Inverness Caledonian Thistle situation. His incomprehension at the Ibrox fans’ callousness mirrors my own disbelief at Trump’s supporters. Only those viewing it from outside see it this way. The awfulness of Ibrox’s support no longer surprises us, although perhaps it should. Their behaviour seems just as abnormal as that of the Republican nominee for president.

I do know they’re moved by very similar mindsets. Mindsets focused on grievance, hatred, paranoia, and conspiracy theories. It’s all you ever hear from Trump, and it’s all you ever read on the fan forums across the city.

I blame the media for much of this.

I blame the media for stoking these obsessions and viewpoints, for fuelling their anger and hatred. The media has legitimised the victim narrative, and I’m writing this because I wonder how bad things might get if Ibrox’s current crisis deepens into something more existential.

For too long, the media here has fed Ibrox fans the belief that they’ve been wronged, that they’re victims of a conspiracy—both from within and outside their club. People who, in their minds, are intent on doing them harm.

The press should have stamped on that. Instead, many have amplified it. My concern is that we might reach a point where that belief morphs into something truly deranged and dangerous, and the further their club slides from where they think it ought to be the more certain voices are going to speak up and try to justify that sort of anger.

It sometimes feels like we’ve spent the last decade trying to counter Ibrox’s pity party, this Trumpian idea that they’ve been robbed of what’s rightfully theirs.

We’re supposed to feel sympathy for them, for people who believe they’re entitled to things they no longer have. The club has fed this notion, and certain hacks have definitely encouraged it. It’s no wonder so many of their supporters feel justified in their anger. I keep hearing that Scottish football has treated them unfairly, and we owe them something.

Spend five minutes on their forums, and you’ll quickly realise that hatred defines their club. It’s why people like Zealand react with shock when they encounter it for the first time.

I remember when my youngest sister used to say that both clubs had crazy elements in their support and were as bad as each other. But then she was properly exposed to their side after the independence referendum when she got into politics in a big way.

She went on her own journey of discovery, and I didn’t push her in any direction. She’s too smart for that anyway. Her initial reaction was one of absolute shock and outrage that people so filled with loathing and ignorance could exist in the modern world. Some of her opinions on that large section of their fanbase are unprintable.

There’s one question she keeps asking that she can’t wrap her head around: Why is that element of their fanbase tolerated by the rest? The political commentators I watch, the former Republicans now campaigning for Harris because they can’t stay in a party led by Trump, ask the same thing about their former colleagues. How can you be part of this, knowing what it is? Knowing what he is, how can you be complicit in putting that man back in the White House?

My sister still hears songs of hatred coming from their stands every week, and because she didn’t grow up immersed in it like I did, it still shocks her. She always asks me, if there’s this supposed silent majority of fans who don’t approve of it, why are they silent? What are they waiting for? Why don’t they push this stuff to the fringes?

She’s become very media-savvy.

When she reads about “real Rangers men,” she knows exactly what it means. When she sees people connected to the club saying the problem is there aren’t enough of them inside its walls, that there aren’t people who don’t understand the culture, she knows exactly what they’re really saying and what that culture is that they’re talking about.

She doesn’t need me to decode it for her anymore. What she would like someone to explain is why “normal” fans who just want to watch their team aren’t more vocal in calling this stuff out. She can’t understand how it’s possible to be surrounded in a weekly hate fest and still want to go if you don’t feel that way about the rest of the world.

She doesn’t buy the pity party, and none of us buy the pity party. We all know this idea of their club being victims is entirely manufactured. We know what they tolerate in the stands and what the original club was involved in when it came to vile behaviour. We know about Craig Whyte, Charles Green, and what they represented. We know the history of Dave King and the various issues that expose the whole Ibrox operation as fundamentally rotten.

That operation, in its two separate guises, has inflicted far more damage on the rest of the game and society than either has inflicted on them, even if there were a desire to do so. Yet I continue to read comments from people who should know better, suggesting we should feel sorry for their supporters. They say we should seek to understand what they’ve been through, to rationalise their behaviour by considering the circumstances they find themselves in.

I reject those ideas outright, and I am keenly aware that they are going to become more prevalent in the near future as their club slides towards another crisis.

Nobody in their support, or in some of the media, wants to remember that the original Ibrox club went to the grave because of its own mistakes and disreputable practices.

They don’t want to acknowledge the current board’s failure to tackle its extremist elements, or the excuses it makes for them. They won’t recognise that this board has spent more money than the club has raised, and has sought to create enemies rather than allies. After all, it was the former chairman who spoke about “settling scores” on and off the pitch, as part of their delusion about 2012. They know exactly what happened in 2012, but choose to embrace the fiction.

I’m tired of the sympathy talk. I’m tired of their fans being seen as somehow exceptional, and the idea of their club being exceptional. They are not the only supporters who crave success but don’t quite achieve it. They won a League Cup last season and still spent the summer castigating the club for failure. Most fans in Scottish football would see that as a triumph, but they believe they’re entitled to that and more.

I know from personal experience that the longer this crisis at Ibrox lasts, the more we will hear that we should feel pity for them, that Scottish football should feel pity for them, as if they’re the only fans who put their money down and don’t get the silverware they expect.

They’ve won more silverware in the past few years than nearly every club but Celtic, yet have managed to carry a message of hatred towards most other clubs. Their vindictive behaviour towards Inverness was just the tip of the iceberg. Since 2012, they have taken joy in financial crises at several other clubs and seem to harbour a special hatred for the two in Dundee, one of which had nothing to do with 2012 but is hated for so-called ’email gate.’

That was yet another example of the media taking their side, demanding answers to questions that were nothing more than phantoms and fabrications.

The Dundee situation was explained at the time, but that didn’t stop half the Scottish press from claiming the Ibrox club had a case. As it turned out, they got to present that case to a meeting of the SPFL clubs, a meeting at which our own former chief executive and now chairman dismissed it as rubbish, and rightly so.

And so, yet again, they claimed a grand conspiracy existed to either benefit Celtic or harm them. People who should know better gave this nonsense legitimacy, even though it had none.

I wonder – I worry – which version of this farce we’re going to get next. If Celtic runs away with the title and overtakes them in the overall trophy count, firmly establishing ourselves as the most successful club in the country, what new theory will be put forward to justify or explain their decline? What more damage will their club be allowed to inflict?

It was the bloggers—particularly myself, Joe McHugh, and Eric Knott—who wrote about the Ibrox-Inverness situation. We can’t be the only people who care, but the mainstream media didn’t touch that story. How could they? They’ve spent years shilling the victim lie. To cover this would fly in the face of everything they’ve written.

Journalists who’ve spent years writing that Ibrox fans are entitled to their anger and justified in their hatred were never going to write an article criticising one of the manifestations of that anger. This is our version of the stolen election lie, and just like that lie, there are consequences. Without the stolen election lie, there is no 6th January assault on the Capitol, and you don’t have the United States in its current perilous position where Trump seeks to run and avenge the sins that his supporters believe were committed, and which a section of the media amplifies.

Similarly, without the victim lie, there’s no justification for the Ibrox club’s repeated attempts to undermine the SPFL. Without that lie, there’s probably no Celtic ticket standoff, no ongoing assault on away fans, and no Dundee email story. Without all that, they don’t involve themselves in the affairs at Inverness, to try to sabotage that club.

It’s as I’ve said from the start; the victim lie has consequences. It gives their supporters a justification for all manner of bad behaviour.

Scottish football has to move on. The game here has to move beyond the consequences of that lie, and the only way to do that is by calling it out.

We need to stop pretending they’re victims.

We need to stop all this talk about feeling pity for them or treating them as though they’re deserving of it. It’s time to stop letting the media distort what happened with words like “relegation,” which only obscure the truth.

These things matter because if that club is heading for a deeper crisis, we know how they’ll respond. We know how the media will act. They’ll look for someone else to blame, and who knows what the consequences will be.