No matter which way you come at it, it’s the Celtic fans talking sense about this fakeover nonsense.

Let me, as I sometimes do, open with a story.

January 1995. Two bank robbers called MacArthur Wheeler and Clifton Johnson held up two greater Pittsburgh banks at gunpoint without wearing masks or making any real effort to disguise themselves—except that they had covered their faces in lemon juice. They believed this would make them invisible to security cameras.

They did this because Johnson had read—or heard—that lemon juice could be used as invisible ink. So, he reasoned that it might also make you invisible. Wheeler was sceptical, as any sensible person would be, but he went along with it. He even tried to test the theory by taking a photograph of himself with a Polaroid camera. When his face didn’t appear in the photo, he believed the lemon juice had worked.

This sounds almost too stupid to be real, but it’s true.

When they were arrested, Wheeler was stunned to be told they had been identified on CCTV. His comment to the police—“But I used the lemon juice…”—should have been the motto for America’s Dumbest Criminals. It’s now widely accepted that, apart from being a terrible armed robber, he was also a terrible photographer; he aimed the camera but somehow missed his own face.

A professor of social psychology at Cornell University read that story and speculated that Wheeler and Johnson weren’t just too dumb to be armed robbers, but that they were so dumb they didn’t know they were too dumb to commit armed robbery. Their stupidity was such that it had prevented them from recognising their own stupidity.

So, the professor, working with one of his graduate students, set up a controlled experiment and they wrote up their findings in a 1999 paper called Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognising One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.

In doing so, they gave us a brand-new syndrome. And because they put in the work, it’s named after them: they were David Dunning and Justin Kruger.

The Dunning-Kruger effect can be summed up in David Dunning’s statement: “Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.”

Or to put it in Charles Darwin’s terms: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Which brings us nicely around to the Ibrox takeover saga, and the way some in the media are getting very snippy and snarky whenever it’s suggested that this might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. That this might not be as ironclad, as concrete, or as transformational as they all hope, expect, and wish that it were.

We were getting it tight on Clyde last night. We’re getting it tight elsewhere on a regular basis.

It’s as if we’re the stupid ones here.

But are we?

Let’s not forget, folks, that the origin of this whole story is not some smart investigative brain; it’s Keith Jackson. And his source is Dave King.

So, you have, on the one hand, a notorious liar—branded so by a judge in South Africa and damned by the sheer weight of falsehoods he’s told ever since—and, on the other, a discredited journalist who cheer-led the last serious Ibrox takeovers: King’s own, Charles Green’s, and Craig Whyte’s. All of them turned out to be disastrous. In Whyte’s case, Jackson believed everything he was told by a PR company acting on his behalf and did no due diligence whatsoever.

Thus Whyte will forever be known as the “Motherwell born billionaire”, heavy on the irony and the sarcasm, and to Jackson’s eternal shame.

No one in the media has a clue what the plan here is.

They think they know who’s leading it. They think they know who might be involved. They don’t know where the plan currently sits, but they keep being told that it’s “close.” But if you look at the shareholding they would need to acquire and the number of shares held by current investors, it’s clear that if even one of the big investors doesn’t want to play ball, the whole thing is dead in the water. And yet we’re still being fed the line that this is a complete revolution. That it’s a “takeover.”

Except it’s not. Not unless it’s the genuine article—something that would stand the test of time and a lot more besides, and for that, you’d need a 75% shareholding, not just the 51% they’re allegedly trying to scrape together.

Yet the hacks sneer at us. They claim we are trying to poke holes in this. But in fact, we’re not poking holes at all—we’re simply pointing out the holes that are already there. We’re highlighting the flaws that are glaringly obvious. And this isn’t the first time we’ve been right and they’ve been wrong. This isn’t the first time they’ve hailed an Ibrox “revolution” as a new beginning, or something we should fear.

Fear. You hear that one a lot.

“Celtic fans are only acting like this because they’re scared.”

Well, actually, we’re not acting any differently than we have every other time we’ve been told that a major challenge is on the horizon. We’ve looked at the basis for that claim, and when we can’t find one, we’ve dismissed it as bluff and bullshit. That’s exactly what we’re doing here too.

I didn’t fear Craig Whyte—but I wrote about him a lot. I wrote about him because I couldn’t believe the rubbish the media was writing. I didn’t fear Charles Green—I wrote about him because it was very clear to me, if not to the people who got overexcited by his big talk and wild promises, that his history didn’t back any of it up. He had no major visible wealth, and when he talked about his big Yorkshire hands grabbing money, he was talking about theirs. That was obvious.

I didn’t fear Dave King, who was probably the last person in the country to realise David Murray was leading Rangers to destruction.

Dave King, who fancies himself a genius, is the Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate. A man who submitted tax returns in South Africa claiming he was on a modest salary, and then appeared in the newspapers boasting about the millions of pounds’ worth of paintings he’d just bought. This is not the smartest guy in the room. This is a clown. This is a fool. This is a blowhard and a pretentious dickhead—one who, bafflingly, will always have a fan club in this country, even amongst the hacks.

So if not fear, then what?

Simple perception. Because let’s say it again; none of it adds up. All the stuff you’re reading in the Daily Record and other outlets who’ve done nothing but trumpet how brilliant this is going to be—they all seem so certain, don’t they? As certain, I suspect, as Wheeler was that his lemon juice would work.

None of them is asking questions. They’re not even looking properly at what’s actually happening at Leeds—although they’re all invoking Leeds as the model for Ibrox’s future. Leeds, who just posted £70 million in losses. Leeds, who spent less in the transfer market over the last year than Celtic did, despite having a potential return to the English Premier League as the prize.

But even when you see the flaws, even when you know it doesn’t add up, it’s natural—obvious, even—to wonder if maybe they know something you don’t. Hell, they must. It’s alright to assume they must. Otherwise, why would they be so certain?

So you go away and crunch the numbers again.

You look at corporate law. You look at how a deal like this might be structured. You look at deals involving American investors in England. And you realise—this doesn’t make sense on any level. Not even as a leveraged buyout.

I thought that was the route, initially.

But the reason I no longer believe it is because you couldn’t realistically pull one off without either 75% of the shares or a cast-iron guarantee that you could get that kind of vote at an AGM or EGM. And you’d need to be upfront about your intentions. Even Ibrox fans won’t go along with something like that if they can stop it.

Without a special resolution to restructure the company and assume debt—probably using the assets as collateral—the leveraged buyout angle collapses. Once that door closes, we’re left with the deeply improbable scenario that people with no emotional connection to the club are coming in and sinking £50 million into just acquiring the shares, to get control of a Scottish football team that has never posted anything but losses and whose long-term value is uncertain at best.

As David Low pointed out on a recent podcast, you could buy a club in Portugal for that kind of money and stand a better chance of seeing a return. You could buy a dozen clubs in England and still have plenty left over to fund a transfer budget.

Remember what David Dunning said: “The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is that you do not know you are in the Dunning-Kruger club.”

So what I’m saying is that it’s okay to have doubts.

It’s okay to look at all the available information, to see that it doesn’t work, that it doesn’t fit and still to wonder if we’re the ones who are wrong.

Because if we were uninformed fools—too stupid to know that we were uninformed fools—we wouldn’t have those doubts.

It’s the likes of Jackson and the rest who are going about covering this uncritically, who don’t even see the holes who’ve got the problem.

Too dumb to spot the holes, and too dumb to know they’re too dumb to spot the holes.

That’s what we’re dealing with here.

The kind of people who’d walk into a bank with a gun and nothing on their faces but some lemon juice.

No matter how many times they try to tell you that Ibrox is on the brink of a revolution, that robbery attempt makes about as much sense as this takeover story does.