I asked why Australians were chanting about Trump at a football match. I got Epstein, fascism, rape, Nazism, Iran, and war crimes. Not one person answered the question.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide | Dead Reckoning
The question was simple. Thousands of Australian supporters had traveled to a World Cup event, and instead of singing about their national team — the thing they had crossed an ocean to watch — many were chanting about an American politician. I noted the observation online. I found it curious. I meant it, more than anything, as an irony worth remarking on: imagine explaining to your grandchildren that you flew halfway around the world and spent part of the experience performing your opinions about a foreign country’s head of state.
The replies came quickly. What they did not contain, in any meaningful number, was anything about football.
I went to sleep. I woke up to more of the same. By hour three, the explanations had outrun the chant by roughly eighteen to one. At some point, I noted it directly: the chant lasted ten seconds. The explanations were entering their third hour. For people insisting it was just football banter, there were a remarkable number of political manifestos in the replies.
And that, more than anything in the thread, is the story.
Identity Performance, Not Political Debate
What I watched unfold was not an argument. Arguments have a subject. Arguments stay, at least loosely, tethered to the thing being argued about. What happened in that thread was something different: a coordinated demonstration of tribal membership, triggered by a single word.
The word was Trump. The context was irrelevant.
This is worth sitting with. I did not post anything about Trump. I did not defend him, attack him, or invite any discussion of him. I noted that supporters at a football tournament were chanting about him. That observation — about a crowd’s behavior at a sporting event — was sufficient to summon, from multiple continents, a fully formed dossier of accusations, grievances, and ideological declarations that had nothing to do with football, nothing to do with Australia, and nothing to do with the actual content of my observation.
These were not responses to what I wrote. They were responses to what I apparently represent — which is to say, they were not responses at all. They were scripts.
Scripts are different from arguments. An argument engages the specific claim in front of it. A script runs regardless of input. You could swap half the accounts in that thread and the thread would be identical. The same names appeared across dozens of replies from people who had never interacted. The same accusations. The same emotional register. The same certainty. The same inability — or unwillingness — to remain on the subject for even a single exchange.
The Football Fans Who Never Mentioned Football
The most instructive participants in the thread were the ones who opened by establishing their football credentials. Several informed me, with some irritation, that they had been watching the sport for decades. These were people who wanted it known that they were serious supporters — that they had standing to weigh in on this matter.
And then they talked about Epstein.
It did not seem to occur to them that this was in any way contradictory. They had established their football bona fides and immediately proceeded to discuss American political scandals. The sport they claimed to love served, in their own responses, as a two-sentence credential before the real subject — Trump, and everything attached to him — took over entirely.
One account pushed back on the premise: they were hyping themselves up before the match, not abandoning football for politics. I pointed out the obvious problem with that argument — that they were hyping themselves up by thinking about Trump. The account did not respond to this. The script had no branch for it.
I do not point this out to mock them. I point it out because it illustrates the mechanism precisely. Football was never the point. The chant was never the point. The World Cup was never the point. The point — the only point, for a significant number of people in that thread — was the opportunity to perform a position. My observation provided the occasion. It could have been anything. It happened to be football.
The Geography of Obsession
The international dimension of the thread is worth noting separately, because it is, in its own way, remarkable.
The replies came from Britain. From Australia. From Scotland. From Turkey. From accounts with no obvious American connection, no apparent stake in American elections, no reason — beyond the internet’s ambient political atmosphere — to have strong feelings about the specific cast of characters being referenced. And yet there they were, confidently deploying the full vocabulary of American political grievance. Epstein. Carroll. Jan 6. The same talking points, word for word, that appear in American political discourse, now fully exported and reproduced by people for whom these events are, at most, foreign news.
A Scottish account — avatar bearing a civil rights emblem, apparently quite serious about the whole thing — informed me that my publication’s stated commitment to accountability was fraudulent. A man in Turkey showed up to explain American political corruption. An account from the north of England announced, with some gravity, that the whole world knows.
This is not an argument about whether their positions are correct. It is an observation about what is occupying mental real estate. These people had absorbed not just American politics but American political anxiety, in its most activated form, and were now performing it back — fluently, confidently, and completely detached from the football match that had nominally started the conversation.
The Australians Who Actually Answered
Here is where it gets interesting.
Among the replies were a handful of people who appeared to actually be Australian — accounts with Australian vernacular, Australian football references, the casual cadence of someone who does not find this particularly consequential. Their responses were different in kind from everything else in the thread.
Note what is absent from these responses: accusations, manifestos, Epstein, war crimes, and demands that I change my bio. The people who actually knew what they were talking about — the people from the country whose supporters were chanting — treated the whole thing as a shrug. Football crowds take the piss. This is what they do. It worked. Move on.
The fury, the political dossiers, the multi-hour engagement with American scandal archives — that came entirely from people who were not Australian, were not at the match, and had no firsthand knowledge of what was actually happening. The experts were relaxed. The uninvolved were incandescent.
I noted this at the time, in a reply that seemed to land: I had learned two things that evening. First, that Australians were chanting about Trump at the World Cup. Second, that Australians say “sook.” Both, I said, had been educational.
When Everything Becomes the Same Conversation
A few days earlier, I had made an observation about a comedian. The details are less important than the outcome: the replies moved, within a few exchanges, away from the subject entirely and into the same ideological territory. Different topic. Same script. Same names. Same accusations. Same detachment from the subject at hand.
This is the pattern worth documenting: it is not that people disagree about football, or comedy, or any specific thing. It is that football and comedy have ceased to function as their own subjects. They are now merely delivery mechanisms — triggers that activate a pre-loaded response, a set of positions and accusations that exist independently of any particular conversation and attach themselves to whatever happens to be in front of them.
The topic changes. The conversation does not. The subject becomes a minor subplot in a discussion that was never really about the subject.
There is a social cost to this that goes beyond the annoyance of any individual thread. Societies depend on the ability to examine specific things specifically — to look at a football crowd and ask what it says about football crowds, to look at a comedian and ask whether the jokes are funny. When every observation immediately routes through the same ideological switchboard, nothing can be examined on its own terms. Everything arrives pre-interpreted. The receipt is already written before the transaction occurs.
The chant, incidentally, trended. By the time the thread had consumed several hours of my evening and the better part of a continent’s political outrage, #ChantsUp was circulating on its own. The ten-second moment had become a media event, which only deepened the irony: the chant outlived the match, spread further than the stadium, and generated more commentary than the scoreline. Everyone was talking about Trump at a football tournament. Almost no one was talking about football.
The Revealing Non-Answer
I want to return to the original question, because it was never actually addressed, and the non-answer is more interesting than any answer would have been.
Why were Australian supporters chanting about Trump at a football tournament?
There are several reasonable answers to this question. Crowds chant about everything. Trump is internationally famous, and internationally polarizing, and that makes him good chant material. Football supporters are not always there primarily to watch football — they are there for the full social spectacle, and political commentary has always found its way into the terraces. Australia plays the United States next; pre-match needle is entirely normal. These are all defensible observations. They engage the actual question. They would have made for a reasonable discussion.
The Australians in the thread offered versions of exactly these answers. Calm, brief, unbothered.
Nobody else did. The question was treated not as a question but as a provocation — which tells you something important about how political identity now processes incoming information. A genuine inquiry about crowd behavior at a sporting event was categorized, instantly, as an attack. Not because of anything in the question. Because of the name it contained.
That is the tell. When a question cannot be answered on its own terms — when the mere presence of a particular word is sufficient to bypass all normal conversational processing and trigger a scripted response — you are no longer watching a debate. You are watching a reflex. And reflexes, by definition, do not require understanding. They only require a stimulus.
I went to sleep after a question about a football chant. I woke up accused of protecting pedophiles and enabling fascism, by people in four countries who had not explained the chant. The Australians, for their part, were already somewhere else — probably watching football.
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