Ibrox’s culture of craziness is killing their club but they just embrace it tighter.

Yesterday, I wrote a spoof for the site called Fear And Loathing At The Ballot Box. It was a joke, a satire of the Union Brats and Ibrox internet culture, but underneath it there was a serious point I didn’t want to make inside that piece itself.

So, I’m making it today.

The candidate “Colin” was supposed to vote for in that story was not really the point.

Craig Houston himself is not really the point.

I’m not especially interested in writing a profile of him. I am interested in the gutter he came from, the one he now swims in, and the connective tissue between the two.

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been intending to write something about Ibrox fan culture and the more extreme versions of it we see online. I knew it would take work. I knew it would require a bit of digging. I knew I’d need examples.

I didn’t realise that almost every example I needed would be lined up in one place, sitting there on one man’s YouTube channel.

I am not going to suggest you soil yourself by going and looking at Craig Houston’s page. Do yourself that favour and take my word for it. It is gruesome stuff. Before we get to the deeper cultural issue, though, we need to talk about him.

The subculture Houston is part of comes from the wider culture around Ibrox, an ultra-nationalist strain that grows out of Orangeism, loyalism, hard-line British unionism and all the other strange little institutions and organisations some of us know far too well. It has connections with Northern Ireland loyalism, with right-wing activism south of the border, and with a broader online ecosystem that thrives on grievance.

None of this should surprise anyone. These people all know each other. They share platforms. They share language. They share enemies. They share a worldview. Or maybe worldview is too generous a word.

A lot of the people prominent in these circles are not stupid. Some of them know the difference between right and wrong. Some of them know perfectly well that a lot of what they are pushing is rubbish.

They are grifters riding the wave of right-wing populism because they know there is an audience for grievance, racism, bigotry and hate. They know social media platforms are happy to promote this stuff because it creates engagement, and where there is engagement, there is money.

But do I believe Craig Houston is merely a cynical grifter selling nonsense he does not believe? No. Absolutely not.

I think he believes every bit of bile and bigoted nonsense that comes out of his mouth.

That is what makes him interesting. That is what makes him useful as a case study.

He is not some clever operator who found a crowd and decided to fleece it. He is a product of that crowd. He comes from the pro-Ibrox substrata we write about so often on here, where grievance is oxygen, paranoia is currency and hatred is passed off as heritage.

He has discovered that there is money and notoriety to be made from it, and that means he is not quite as daft as some of those around him.

But we are not dealing with a genius here.

What he has discovered is what so many online personalities have discovered over the years. You can build an audience by filling people’s heads with hateful rubbish. You can get yourself a following by promoting the most loathsome ideas about your fellow human beings.

Hate sells. It is why X is still around despite being owned by a man who seems determined to turn it into a sewage outlet. It is why YouTube and Facebook will never truly fix their algorithms. Rage pays. Fear pays. Bigotry pays.

Every day, millions of people log on to these platforms looking for reasons why they are better than others. Millions of people seek out content that blames the problems in their lives on immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, gay people, trans people, nationalists, liberals, foreigners, or whoever the enemy of the week happens to be.

There is always someone to blame. There is always a conspiracy. There is always a shadowy hand moving against them.

And when Houston talks that language, he is speaking from a tradition that has believed that stuff for a lot longer than the internet has existed to profit from it. They invented The Grand Conspiracy of the Unseen Fenian Hand.

Of course he believes it. That is his native tongue.

The fact that so much of it is poisonous garbage with no real connection to reality is almost beside the point.

His audience believes it. His audience laps it up. Audiences for people like Andrew Tate, Russell Brand and every other online carnival barker lap up their own versions of the same thing. Social media is a gigantic lunatic asylum where the doors have been thrown open, the inmates have been given microphones, and the worst of them have worked out how to monetise the screaming.

A lot of these people do not believe any of it. They have simply latched onto a bandwagon because the audience is always thirsty for more poison.

But Craig Houston? No, I think he believes it all.

He believes it so much that when he created his election website, he posted his YouTube stats and called himself Glasgow’s Voice. On the strength of thousands of followers and millions of views, he seems to have believed that he could turn online noise into a seat on the gravy train for life.

Then the verdict of the ballot box put him right. He ran on the regional list and got fewer than 2,000 votes.

That is the thing about social media. It makes small men feel enormous. It turns a corner of the internet into a kingdom. It convinces people that a few thousand subscribers, a few friendly replies and a handful of hard-core fans amount to a movement.

Then real life comes along, puts a ballot paper in people’s hands, and asks them what they actually think. There are fans and then there are people who would trust you to make major decisions affecting the course of their lives. He confused one for the other.

Maybe, like Colin in Fear And Loathing At The Ballot Box, many of his followers were in the wrong constituency.

Maybe some of them wandered into polling stations across Scotland, stared at the ballot paper, could not find his name, and voted for someone else.

Maybe they could not remember who they were supposed to vote for.

Maybe they thought the pencil was a trick.

Maybe they stayed at home and shouted at immigrants on Facebook instead.

Who knows? But fewer than 2,000 votes? Can you really call yourself Glasgow’s Voice when most of Glasgow does not know who you are, and almost nobody who does know appears to care enough to vote for you?

Yes, I took some satisfaction from that.

Not just because of his football club, but because of his politics. It is good to see people who wrap themselves in grievance and bile get a public reminder that their echo chamber is not the world. It will not stop him posting. It will not stop him preaching to the choir. Loudmouths always find an audience. There are always weak, desperate people who think proximity to the loudmouth makes them special.

But the point is not that Houston failed. The point is where he came from. He found a way to exploit grievance culture because he comes from a culture built on grievance. That is why he is a good advocate for it.

He is a true believer. Unlike some of the online merchants who are simply in on the grift, he carries the stuff in his bloodstream.

That unique cultural background is the source of much of the misery that surrounds the club across the city. That club has never been more firmly or completely enveloped in it. It is a one-way ticket to another unmarked grave, and if the Americans did not know that before they arrived, they will find out very soon.

It begins with supremacy. It begins with the slogan.

We are the people.

There is a great scene in Taxi Driver where Senator Palantine’s office receives a supply of campaign buttons. The campaign organiser, played by Albert Brooks, argues with the supplier because the wrong word has been underlined.

The slogan is “We are the people.”

But there is a difference between underlining “we” and underlining “are”.

It is not just a typographical issue. It is not a minor semantic quibble. It changes the whole meaning of the phrase.

“We are the people” can be a unifying statement.

“We are the people” is a supremacist one.

Albert Brooks’ character understands that instantly.

He understands that one version says, “We are part of something.”

The other says, “We are the only thing that matters.”

Guess which one the Ibrox culture believes in.

That slogan is not incidental. It is not decorative. It is the foundation stone.

The supremacist nature of that statement runs all the way through the cultural ethos. They believe they are exceptional. They believe they are special. They believe they are somehow better than the rest of us, unique little organisms unto themselves.

Once you understand that, the rest begins to make sense.

It explains the hatred, because to say “we are the people” in that way is to imply that the rest of us are not. It explains the entitlement, because if they really are the people, they should get whatever they want without having to work for it. It explains the delusions of grandeur. It explains the casual bigotry. It explains the way defeat becomes impossible to process.

When you start from a premise like that, the number of things you can justify to yourself is virtually limitless.

So, when defeat happens, it cannot simply be defeat. Not for them. It cannot be that they are not as good as they think they are. It cannot be that their club is badly run. It cannot be that other people made better decisions. It cannot be that reality has caught up with them.

There has to be another explanation.

That is how conspiracy thinking begins.

One referee is biased against them. Then, if he is biased, his bosses must be biased too, because they have not removed him. Then the SFA must be biased. Then the SPFL must be biased. Then all of Scottish football must be corrupt.

Then the media must be in on it because they will not expose it. Then the Scottish Government must be in on it because surely, they would investigate if the corruption was so obvious. But the Scottish Government is full of nationalists, Greens and, in their imagination, Fenians, so of course they must be in on it as well.

Once you are on that merry-go-round, it just gets faster and faster. You get sicker and sicker, and the world becomes less and less real.

When Rangers were on top, back when there was a club called Rangers, back when David Murray was funding it apparently out of his own pocket, though we later learned a lot more about banks, debt and the fantasy economics behind the empire, the supremacist culture was merely unbearable. They thought they were the cat’s arse.

Murray once described them, embarrassingly, as Scotland’s second-biggest institution after the Church. There is no doubt he believed it, because he was an egomaniac and since he sat at the head of that institution, it had to be grander than everything else in the country.

The fact that he was digging out the foundations the whole time was not obvious to everyone then, but some of us were writing about it from around 2008.

I published my old Etims article, The End Of Rangers?, three years before liquidation, and it laid out the possibility plainly enough.

Those of us who saw it coming did not possess special powers. We were not prophets. We simply were not conditioned to believe every word the club and its friendly media voices told us. We could also do basic maths.

Liquidation changed everything.

It was only with the death of Rangers, the birth of the new company and all that followed that the truly vast conspiracy theories became central to the modern Ibrox culture. I am not saying there were no links between Ibrox and far-right politics before then.

Those links are real enough, and they have been discussed for years. But the present state of the culture, this enormous web of betrayal myths, secret cabals, institutional corruption and permanent victimhood, took on a different intensity after 2012.

The club that crawled out of Rangers’ grave could have been born with a clean slate. It could have ditched the old poison. It could have severed the link with Orangeism, loyalism and ultra-British unionism. It could have stepped away from the weird militarism, the sectarian baggage and the endless theatre of grievance.

It could even have embraced the contradiction between celebrating a generation that fought fascism and allowing elements of its own culture to flirt with the language and instincts of the far right.

But Charles Green did not care about any of that.

He cared about money.

If that was the audience he had to tap into, he was going to tap into it. Like every online opportunist riding the wave of hatred, he surfed the moment he found himself in. He said what he had to say. He fed what he had to feed. He played the hate card.

Scottish football conspired against us.

Rangers did not die. They were relegated.

Scottish football, in an act of hatred, tried to destroy this club.

But this club survived.

That was where the Survival Lie and the Victim Lie were born together, because one required the other. You could not say Rangers survived and then fail to explain why they were not in the same league, why there was a new licence, why there was a new SFA membership, why they lost their Scottish Cup seeding and why they were starting again in the bottom tier.

None of that would have been permissible or legal had the club itself remained intact. So the second lie had to be born. They were not a new club. They were a surviving club that had been punished. Preyed upon. Kicked when they were down.

That Green was doing nothing a million snake oil salesmen hadn’t done before did not stop the media from lapping up every word, and from their fans embracing it as fact. But it’s not fact. It’s a toxic fiction, which is one of the many reasons that many of us abhor the use of the Old Firm phrase to describe this weekend’s fixture.

That was the point where the media should have stamped on both lies. That was the moment when journalists should have understood what was being built. Instead, the media jumped aboard. They endorsed the Survival Lie and the Victim Lie, and they have been promoting them in one form or another ever since. Those of us who challenged it were told we were bitter, obsessed, or that the matter was settled.

But the issue has never been settled truthfully, and because it was never settled truthfully, a lie was allowed to dominate the game. That has been bad for Scottish football. It has been worse for the club across the city.

That club was already steeped in paranoia, suspicion and hatred of the other. Elements of its support were already half-convinced that HMRC had been nobbled into acting against them, rather than simply doing what HMRC does when a business breaks tax rules.

Scottish football followed its procedures. One club went out of business. Another took its place. The governing bodies attempted their switcheroo, and the clubs rejected it. Not unanimously, but in enough numbers to kill it stone dead. Those clubs insisted that the game obey its own rules. New clubs start at the bottom.

For people raised on superiority and entitlement, that was incomprehensible. How could this have happened to them? How could the people who believed themselves to be The Peepul find themselves in the bottom tier, mocked, exposed and powerless?

The only answer they could accept was conspiracy.

So, the conspiracy expanded. It did not just include Celtic. It did not just include the SFA or the SPFL. It began to include media, finance, government, civic Scotland itself. Scotland became the enemy.

That was easy enough, because in that worldview Scotland had already become suspicious. Nationalists were the enemy. Liberals were the enemy. Catholics were the enemy. Immigrants were the enemy. The modern world was the enemy. Anyone who did not bend the knee to their version of Britishness was part of the plot.

Into that toxicity came groups and voices convinced that Scottish society had been warped into a shape designed to crush their culture.

They believed the same forces had tried and failed to destroy their football club. From there, the harder edges of the support found kinship with like minds elsewhere, not just in England and the North of Ireland, but across Europe, railing against liberalism, multiculturalism and “woke ideology”, a phrase many of them could not define if their lives depended on it.

That is the sewer Craig Houston speaks to. That is the culture from which he emerged. That is the audience he hoped would propel him into Holyrood.

It is a toxic soup of ultra-British nationalism, anti-immigrant activism, far-right conspiracy thinking and a permanent terror of the Unseen Fenian Hand.

It is a great hive mind that never sleeps.

It is built on a culture of supremacy that cannot accept it is not special. Hatred of the other flows naturally from that. Looking down on any culture that is not their own flows naturally from that. Seeing every defeat as theft flows naturally from that.

This is how the online world bleeds into the real one.

This is how men in masks and dark clothing end up charging out of a stand and across a pitch towards Celtic supporters. This is how a football rivalry stops being a rivalry and becomes something uglier. This is how a club ends up trapped by the worst elements around it.

The Ibrox club is now a prisoner of this mindset. It is locked in tight. Any chance it once had to sever the tie is gone, or close to gone. Whoever advised the new American owners to embrace ultra culture in its Ibrox form did them no favours. Not the Americans, not their investors, and certainly not the club itself.

That is what has to be rooted out of the club.

The problem is not just bad songs, bad behaviour or embarrassing banners. The problem is a whole cultural ecosystem. The club stinks of it. It has no future except to become more warped, more insular and more detached from reality unless someone inside those walls has the courage to confront it.

This is how you go through manager after manager in the space of 14 years. This is how you place impossible demands on people the moment they walk through the door. This is why half the players who sign for that club must find themselves reeling from the craziness inside the walls. The more you talk about the greatness of the institution when the world sees only a paranoid, hollowed-out shell, the more ridiculous you look from outside. I would bet that you start to look equally unserious from the inside.

For a long time, I was happy enough to sit on the sidelines and laugh.

I would happily have watched that club eat itself from now until the rapture. I would have got the popcorn, found myself a front-row seat and enjoyed The Banter Years, season after season, episode after episode, until the whole mad franchise finally collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity.

But I have not laughed about the culture for a few years now.

Do not get me wrong. I still laugh at the football team.

I still laugh at the boardroom chaos, the managerial churn, the transfer disasters, the moonbeams, Statement O’Clock, the delusions and the endless attempts to convince themselves that the next reset is the real one.

But I no longer laugh at the culture itself in quite the same way.

Because the culture is dangerous.

There are people in and around that ecosystem whose relationship with reality is badly warped. There are people who live inside a world of hatred and paranoia, and people like that can justify almost anything to themselves. That does not mean every Ibrox supporter is the same. It does not mean every person who walks through those gates is some kind of extremist. That would be lazy, and it would be false.

But it does mean the loudest, ugliest and most radical elements around that club have been indulged for far too long.

Manchester happened in 2008, before liquidation, before the present mythology fully hardened, before the grand conspiracy of the Unseen Fenian Hand became a daily article of faith for online halfwits. Even when Rangers were successful, even when the supremacist myth was being indulged, violence still broke out.

The difference now is that the old certainties have gone.

The club that crawled out of Rangers’ grave has not delivered the life they were promised. Even some of the most hard-core fans are starting to worry that all the money, time, effort and passion they invested might have been for nothing. They might never see the glory days again. They might be stuck forever in the shadow of a past that cannot be recovered.

But they do not question the four words that started it all.

We are the people.

They do not ask whether the creed itself was rotten. They ask why, if they are the people, the people are having such a terrible time of it.

That only feeds the conspiracy theories. It fuels the outrage. It makes the next betrayal easier to imagine and the next enemy easier to name.

The longer they spend under the boot, the crazier some of them become. I am not saying we should let them up for air. I am saying the rest of us should understand that the culture is going to move further off the page.

It is killing them.

It is killing their club in ways they cannot comprehend, ways they are too invested to acknowledge. The very culture they think protects the club and its traditions is suffocating it. Grievance culture always does that. It convinces people that the thing destroying them is the thing keeping them alive.

They do not get it. They will not get it until the walls start falling down around them. Even then, because they already believe our Unseen Fenian Hands are on those walls, it will not be hard to convince them that we pushed them down in the first place.

God knows what comes next.

Rangers 3, maybe.

Can you even imagine the circumstances in which that would be born? Can you imagine the madness, the rage, the mythology, the betrayal narratives, the claims of sabotage and the endless search for somebody to blame?

That is the real danger here.

Craig Houston stood for election and found out that the echo chamber isn’t as large as he thought. It certainly does not translate into his being The Voice of Glasgow. That part is funny. That part deserves a laugh.

A man who believed his online audience was political power got fewer than 2,000 votes, and there is comedy in that. There is always comedy when a megaphone booms out a message to discovers the country has not been listening.

But the culture that produced him did not lose an election.

It is still there. It is still feeding itself. It is still telling people they are special, that they are victims, that everyone else is conspiring against them, and that the world they were promised has been stolen.

Humiliation does not cure supremacy. It radicalises it. Eventually it will consume them. I don’t have the slightest doubt about that. It has done it over there before.

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