The Ibrox fans are being gaslit, by the fan and mainstream media both.

I think I’m a pretty smart guy, but it’s only been maybe a decade since I first heard the term gaslighting. It wasn’t always the in-vogue phrase it is now. It was an obscure psychological tag for a very specific syndrome. Its definition has since been expanded to include a lot of things that were never originally relevant to it. And now, it’s chronically overused and widely misunderstood.

The term comes from a 1944 movie called Gaslight. In that film, a husband attempts to psychologically annihilate his wife using various tricks and strategies to convince her she’s losing her mind. Amongst these is a recurring bit where he keeps messing with the lights in the house—dimming them and brightening them depending on what mood he wants to provoke in her. I’ve never seen it, but I’m aware of the basic premise.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which one person or group causes another to doubt their own perception of reality, memory, or judgement. It often involves persistent lying, denial, contradiction, and misdirection—all aimed at making the target question what’s true and what isn’t.

It’s not just about being lied to. It’s a psychological strategy which creates a state where someone begins to question everything about the reality in which they live. It came into broader usage because it’s often used in abusive relationships as a particularly diabolical control mechanism.

It’s now used to describe situations in politics and social psychology. And that’s where it’s often misapplied. The term has come to mean a general use of lies to affect a certain mindset. That’s close to the original definition, but it’s not 100% on the nose. It’s a distortion of what the term actually meant.

Recently, I’ve been looking again at the term and whether it applies to our friends across town—the Ibrox fans—and the way they’re treated not just by the mainstream media but also by their own fan media.

And I’ve pondered whether or not it meets the definition of gaslighting. Whether that holds to the modern definition, even if it’s a slight distortion of the original. I’ve concluded that yes, it probably does meet the standard.

Why? Because their fan media and the mainstream media have warped their perception of reality. They’ve made them doubt the veracity of the world they actually live in.

You can see the evidence for this everywhere in their fanbase—a support so used to being lied to that they now seem to view it as the normal state of affairs. Everyone lies to them, all the time. But when the lies are comforting—soft, soothing nonsense—they snuggle into them.

Take what happened in 2012. The club they originally followed died. It went out of business. It’s gone. Not only have they been gaslit into believing they still support the same club, but standard gaslighting tactics have been used to convince them that they’re victims of some vast conspiracy designed to hold them down.

Think about the psychological impact of that—how it’s warped them, poisoned their view of the world, and distorted their understanding of their place in it.

The reality that you and I live in is not the one they occupy. And the media—especially their own fan media—has played a pivotal role in building the fictional one. They are lied to daily. It’s no wonder they have such a warped perception.

They were told to expect a big-name manager. They got Russell Martin. Now they’re being told he is a big-name manager—some kind of elite-level boss. They were told tens of millions would be made available because the Americans had arrived. The Americans would open the vaults. And they believed it, despite there being no statement—not one—from the new owners to support that.

Where did the belief come from?

Their own fan media and the mainstream press. A complete fabrication, spoon-fed to the support as if it were gospel. No wonder so many of them swallowed it whole. If that’s what everyone is telling you, why wouldn’t you believe it?

Another hallmark of gaslighting is being told that what you see with your own eyes isn’t real. That contradictory evidence is a trick of the light. That it’s a figment of your imagination. Not only are they force-fed a fictional version of events, they are also encouraged to dismiss anything that conflicts with it.

On last night’s podcast, I ended by talking about my bafflement about why the obvious contradictions in the takeover fantasy aren’t clear to them. Their club is a mess financially. We all know this. The directors rushed to sell because they had no interest in pumping more money into the void. The club spends far too much. It needs constant infusions of cash just to keep the lights on.

That much is acknowledged, in some small way, by the media and fan outlets. But their proposed solution is to replace the current owners with people who’ll spend even more. As if the natural consequence of that—spiralling debt—hasn’t dawned on them. They talk about professionalism and smart ownership, but the very first thing any sensible owners would do is turn the taps off.

The solution to a club which spends too much and makes annual losses as a result of that is to … spend more? In what universe does that make sense? In the universe they have been conditioned to live in.

Why can’t they grasp that? Because their media outlets keep ignoring the reality and pushing a fantasy that “more money” is the answer. That these Americans, with supposedly deep pockets, will bankroll success while also extracting a return. The contradictions are staggering. Obvious obstacles, like UEFA regulations, are just brushed aside. It’s like financial gravity doesn’t apply.

So yes, I think it’s gaslighting—particularly from their fan media. The mainstream press might be clueless, but fan media ought to know better. And some of them must. They choose not to say what needs to be said. They paint a pretty picture. They tell the support what it wants to hear. Whether that’s out of cowardice, or the need for clicks and hits, is almost irrelevant. It all amounts to the same thing.

They churn out a daily diet of guff, and it warps their support’s perception of the world. That’s classic gaslighting.

And another key element of gaslighting is misdirected blame. If the perpetrators aren’t blaming the victim directly—and let’s face it, sometimes they do—they’re pointing the finger outward. At outside enemies. At imagined threats. They stoke paranoia.

You see this in politics all the time. It’s never the government’s fault. It’s immigrants. It’s dole scroungers. It’s foreign powers. Anything but the choices made by those in charge. We’re told, absurdly, that people are living in luxury off social security; anyone who’s ever been on the dole knows how ridiculous that is.

We’re even told to brace for war, which, if it happens, will be more about diplomatic failure than any existential threat.

For Ibrox fans, the enemy is almost supernaturally powerful; what I’ve long called “The Great Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand.” That hand apparently controls everything—the SFA, the courts, the government, the media, even HMRC. Hell, I’m surprised it hasn’t taken over X by now. It’s madness. But go on their forums and you’ll see just how completely they believe in it.

So yes, even by the classical definition, I think the term applies. I think they are being gaslit—and I think their fan media and sections of the mainstream press are doing the heavy lifting. Between them, they feed the Ibrox support a relentless torrent of fiction, distortion, and denial. And the impact on their collective mindset has been nothing short of catastrophic.

But I’ve never seen it amplified to the extent that it is right now, in the way they’ve covered this takeover story.

Almost everything in their field of vision is distorted and warped into a shape that doesn’t even resemble the truth. From the moment the takeover plan was made public, the media has filled their heads with an endless barrage of fiction. There’s no other word for it—fiction. Absolute fiction.

At no point did those involved in the takeover outline a clear plan. The media provided that for them. The media—both mainstream and fan media—basically constructed its own version of what the takeover would be like.

In the absence of any concrete set of proposals, they built an entire structure out of nothing at all. I’ve never seen anything like it. It makes what happened with the Craig Whyte takeover look like a masterpiece of due diligence.

Even now, they continue to amplify, distort and outright lie.

When those executives sat with the manager yesterday, they got the obvious barrage of questions about how much of the £20 million would be made available to him. This, in itself, goes some way towards proving that much of the narrative the press has been spinning has been manifestly untrue; many outlets which were waiting on that answer yesterday had already provided their own version of it.

The actual answer they finally got from the board was about as vague as it’s possible to get. He would get a “substantial part of it” is what they were told. Notice they didn’t even go as far as to say he would get the bulk of it—which would be anywhere from £10 million upwards.

No, just a “substantial part.” What does that mean? Well, some of the media, fan and mainstream both, ran with their own interpretation. Some of them even claimed, in their headlines and in the introductions to their articles, that the board had given a definitive answer to the question—when they had done nothing of the sort.

This £20 million has been the source of numerous false claims. In fact, almost everything that has been written about it has been fictitious. From the moment it appeared in the circular announcing that the takeover was complete, it has been the subject of endless speculation and distortion. The statement explicitly said that it would be there for stability and flexibility.

How did that leap into the consciousness of the fanbase as a fund that was going to be spent on players? The media. Fan and mainstream both. You’d have to ask the people who pushed that fiction what their reasoning was, but that’s where it came from, and people who usually are much smarter than that – like Graham Spiers himself – repeated the utter falsehood that it was earmarked for that purpose.

That’s how pervasive some of these lies have become. That even those outside the intended audience believe that they are real.

I have always said that no football support in this country is as badly served by the mainstream media as the one across the city is. That’s nothing compared to how abysmally they are served by their own fellow supporters.

When I look at the role that Celtic fan media plays—holding our club to account, tackling widespread problems within the game itself, and keeping people grounded and realistic about the challenges we face both in Europe and here at home—the difference could not be clearer between what we do and what the fan media across the city does.

Ibrox fan media actually serves their own support more poorly than the mainstream press does. It is completely uncritical except when demanding the sacking of managers. It is completely unwilling to do any serious digging into what ails their club.

Its relationship with reality is patchy at best—and that’s being generous. So much of it seems to exist simply to feed off information given to it by the club itself, and much of it has become dependent on the club—something that a lot of our own fan media has made a point of refusing to do.

I was, for a while, part of the fan media rotation that got to interview the manager and players on a regular basis. But I was determined that I would not, in any way, shape or form, become a creature of the club and it certainly never shaped my writing about Celtic, which remained as critical at times as it ever was.

My decision to withdraw from those fan media conferences was due, in no small part, to my wish to put even greater distance between myself and the club—and also my utter disgust at the treatment of a fellow blogger at the last AGM.

Ibrox fan media is far more closely tied to their club than Celtic fan media is to ours. That’s in part because the club here maintains a deliberate distance between itself and fan media—which may be one of the best decisions the club has taken. I’m not convinced they’ve done it out of altruistic motives, but it’s the right approach if you want to maintain the independence of fan media.

It’s an approach that the Ibrox club clearly does not follow.

Now, that may change under the new board, but I can absolutely see why they would want to maintain that level of control.

What is absolutely clear is that Ibrox fan media is a willing participant in the gaslighting of their own supporters—not an accidental participant. As I said, enough of these people have to know that at least some of what they’re shovelling every day is utter BS. The misrepresentation of facts—and even the outright creation of an alternative reality—has become the norm amongst their fan media outlets.

I understand, in part, why the mainstream media behaves as it does. I understand that they have a target audience they don’t want to offend, and they know that this audience predominantly wants to read positive news. That’s a commercial decision. It doesn’t make it any less reprehensible—but it does make it understandable.

Fan media is not supposed to act that way. It’s not supposed to view its audience simply as consumers of whatever rubbish gets the most hits.

Fan media is supposed to hold the club to account and to represent the views of the supporters—in much the same way as your life partner is supposed to care for you and nurture your best qualities. When they behave counter to that and act in their own interests, and in doing so warp your perceptions and understanding of circumstances and reality… that’s called gaslighting.

And the accusation sticks to their fan media like glue.

They ought to be ashamed of that.