The Ibrox fan’s meltdown on Celtic’s dressing room clip is hilariously hypocritical.

Recently on the politics blog, I did a piece on the so-called free speech absolutists—you know the type. The ones who insist that all speech should be protected, nothing should ever be restricted… until someone says something they don’t like.

Then suddenly, they’re more draconian than the wokest lefty with a grudge and a Twitter account. Their attitude is hysterical: free speech, but only when it suits them. The rest of the time? To hell with it.

I was reminded of that mindset during the whole John Brown fiasco.

I caught plenty of flak from Ibrox fans for saying that it was perfectly reasonable for the SPFL to discipline him for what he said.

And it was perfectly reasonable. What Brown said was absolutely idiotic, blatantly against the rules, and if we’re just going to ignore the rules, then we may as well give up on any kind of structure. If we want the game to descend into a lawless banana republic, fine—don’t enforce anything. But if we believe in keeping things in order, then rules, once broken, have to be acted upon.

I wasn’t being inconsistent either.

When Brendan Rodgers made his comments at the end of the season before last about John Beaton, I said right away that Celtic didn’t have a leg to stand on. I knew Brendan would be sanctioned, because it was clear he’d broken the rule.

But I also said he’d only told the truth—said out loud what everyone already knew. And maybe instead of getting precious about a manager criticising a referee, the SFA should’ve focused on the reason he was criticising the referee.

Still, Rodgers got a one-match ban, and I wasn’t surprised. It was proportionate, probably fair, especially considering the media were talking about the possibility of a multi-game suspension. And I remember exactly what Ibrox fans were like at the time—they were desperate for Rodgers to get hammered with a long ban. So when he didn’t, they were furious.

Now contrast that with their reaction to John Brown’s punishment. You couldn’t invent a bigger hypocrisy. Suddenly they’re all free speech advocates again—his right to say what he said, apparently, should be sacrosanct. It stank to high heaven. The sheer double standards were staggering.

And this selective perception they live by? It was on display again when the video of Callum McGregor and Brendan Rodgers surfaced from the League Cup final. It’s a short clip from the dressing room—Calmac talking about our superior quality, Brendan saying we didn’t need to play particularly well to win.

And suddenly, you’d think someone had declared war on freedom of expression. These are the same people who want Brown to be allowed to say whatever he likes—but now they want to shut Celtic players up for stating plain facts in a private team talk?

The overreaction on their forums was unhinged—rage, hysteria, and a weird obsession with shutting people down. And again, all it does is highlight their double standards. Apparently, speech is free only when they’re doing the talking.

When it’s us? Cue the meltdowns.

Let’s be real—nobody was insulting their team. Rodgers and McGregor were just telling the truth in what they assumed was a private moment. Nobody knew that footage would ever be made public. They were speaking to their own dressing room, expressing honest opinions that reflected what we all knew anyway: we had better quality than they did, and we didn’t have to hit top gear to win. So, what’s the problem?

Well, the problem is always the same. They feel slighted. They feel disrespected. They feel made to look foolish. And they especially don’t like being made to look foolish by us. The insult is hard for them to swallow—not because it’s nasty or arrogant (it wasn’t either), but because they can’t bear being on the receiving end, and especially – and this is the part that truly hits home – when it’s the truth.

What really stands out to me in all this isn’t the so-called insult—it’s how fragile they’ve become. There was a time when they didn’t take things so personally. There was a time when they were proud to be disliked.

They had a whole song about it—no one likes us, we don’t care. They still sing it. But they do care now. They care a lot. About who likes them. Who respects them. Who’s saying nasty things about them on the internet.

They’re brittle. They’re easy to wind up. It doesn’t take much—a single sentence in a post-match video, and their whole day’s ruined. Suddenly they can’t think about anything else.

I don’t know if they’re taking themselves too seriously, or not seriously enough. But either way, there was a time when this stuff would’ve rolled right off them. Now every barb, every comment, every slight seems to cut deep.

Maybe the truth really does hurt after all.