Keith Jackson’s demented attack on Celtic fans plumbs new depths of hypocrisy.

Depending on which source you prefer, people usually credit the line about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt to Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain or the Book of Proverbs.

The line has endured because it remains true.

Yesterday I wrote about journalists and former players who think they can condescend to supporters.

Nobody has ever mistaken Keith Jackson for a great intellect, but there is still something remarkable about the consistency with which he manages to prove his limitations all over again. His contribution to the Brown controversy may be the worst of the lot, which takes some doing when Ryan Stevenson has already stumbled into the same debate with all the grace of a man walking into a glass door.

What makes Jackson’s comments worth examining is not simply that they are offensive. That would hardly be new. It is that they are incoherent. They collapse under even the slightest pressure. He is not making an argument so much as reaching for a pose. He wants to defend Brown, scold supporters and perform moral seriousness all at once, but the pieces do not fit together. That is the interesting part.

I have referred to Jackson’s bizarre tendency to leave you feeling whiplashed before; this is a sterling example of his ability to contradict his own argument, rather than descend to his level, let’s do something he doesn’t have the ability to do himself. Let’s take the claims one by one and test whether they stand up.

Scott Brown might have used a phrase that some Celtic fans didn’t like, but he’s absolutely right. These are vultures.

No, we are not, and Jackson needs educating as to why.

A vulture circles the dying. It feeds off decay. Celtic supporters are not feeding off the club. They are the ones paying for it, sustaining it and arguing over its condition because they care what happens to it. If he wants to talk about people feeding off institutions in decline, he might begin a little closer to home. He works for a paper in obvious long-term trouble and still draws a wage for producing this sort of rubbish. He ought to be careful with his zoology.

These are people who are circling, and they want to have a go, and they want to have their say on a guy that’s out there breaking his back for their football club.

That line is more revealing than he probably intended.

Yes, supporters want to have their say. They are perfectly entitled to. That is not evidence of moral failure. That is part of being a supporter. The idea that fans should fund the club, fill the stadium, buy the shirts, pay the wages, live through the consequences of bad decisions, and then politely keep quiet when a player is underperforming is absurd.

More to the point, criticism of Callum McGregor’s form is not criticism of his effort. Those are two different things, and Jackson either cannot or will not distinguish between them. McGregor can be trying his utmost and still be below his best. He can be a great servant and still need taken out of the team. Serious football people understand that. Serious commentators should as well. If only Jackson was one.

I think Scott Brown had more than every right to say what he said. And I can’t believe what people say on the internet. Some of the stuff that you see swirling about is horrendous.

Even from Keith Jackson, that is a line of almost heroic self-unawareness.

This is a man who built his career inside a media culture that routinely thrives on malice, gossip, innuendo and selective indignation. This is a man whose profession has spent years sticking the boot into managers, players, executives and clubs whenever it suited. Now he wants to recoil in horror because supporters online suggest that an underperforming player deserves to be dropped.

That is not just thin-skinned. It is intellectually dishonest.

If Brown has every right to use contemptuous language about supporters, then supporters certainly have the right to say a player is out of form. If one is fair game, so is the other. Jackson does not get to invent a code of manners that applies only to fans.

Scott Brown uses ‘vulture’ and oh my God, have you ever heard anything like it?

Yes. Often enough, in fact. Usually in his own paper, sometimes in his own columns.

That is the problem with this entire performance. Jackson wants to act scandalised by a level of discourse that the mainstream media has normalised for years. He wants to behave as though fan media has dragged standards down into the gutter, when in truth many of us learned how the gutter worked by watching people like him operate in it.

It’s pathetic. Grow up, everybody.

This is where the whole act finally gives way.

Who is being asked to grow up here?

The supporters discussing the form and fitness of their captain in the middle of a title race?

Or the former player lashing out at those supporters in language that was plainly designed to belittle them? Or the columnist rushing to defend that outburst with all the balance and sobriety of a man throwing his toys across the room?

What makes all of this so revealing is not merely that Jackson is wrong. It is the particular way in which he is wrong.

He starts from a premise he never even tries to justify, namely that former players are entitled to scold supporters from on high, but supporters must accept the scolding in silence. Jackson treats criticism of a player’s form as some kind of moral transgression, while excusing language from Brown that was obviously contemptuous.

He wants standards for fans that he would never dream of applying to the media class he belongs to, a class that has spent years trafficking in spite, character assassination and selective outrage. Most of all, he gets the relationship wrong.

Supporters are not intruders in the life of Celtic. They are not scavengers hanging around the edges of it. They are not unwelcome noise.

Fans are the financial, emotional and cultural core of the club. They sustain it and fill it. They fund it and carry it. And with that comes the absolute right to form judgements about what they are watching and to express those judgements without being lectured by men whose own profession has shown far less restraint, far less dignity and far less self-awareness than the supporters they now sneer at.

That is the point Jackson cannot grasp, perhaps because he does not want to, or perhaps because he lacks the brain cells for it. Maybe he avoids it because grasping it would force him to abandon the old hierarchy in which people like him speak and everybody else listens.

But those days are gone. Fan media exists because too many in the mainstream media squandered our trust back in 2012, when they swallowed spin, told lies and tried to browbeat all of us into toeing their line.

They mistook access for authority, arrogance for expertise and contempt for insight. Now they are angry because people answer back. Well, we’re here to stay.

Because this is not about whether Scott Brown, Keith Jackson or anyone else in that little circle likes what supporters are saying. It is about whether supporters have the right to say it. They do. They always did and from now on they always will.

And if the best Jackson can offer in reply is a string of sneers, a collapse into melodrama and a demand that everyone “grow up”, then he has not defended his position at all. He has confirmed every negative thing we think of him.

That is the thing about speaking and removing all doubt that you are a fool.

Once you have done it, there is not much left to hide behind.