Séamas O'Reilly: Conor McGregor is a 12-year-old’s idea of a cool 14-year-old

'If [Elon] Musk is the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, [Conor] McGregor might be said to be a 12-year-old’s idea of a cool 14-year-old'

Conor McGregor: featherweight success and quick fists in the MMA cage may have brought him to prominence - but the Irish political arena requires heavyweight heft and a solid ground game, reckons Séamas O'Reilly

It would seem Conor McGregor has thrown his ring into the hat for the next Presidential election.

“Potential competition if I run” he tweeted this week, before outlining his likely challengers. 

"Gerry [Adams] 78. Bertie [Ahern]. 75. Enda [Kenny], 74. Each with unbreakable ties to their individual parties [sic] politics… Or me, 35. Young, active, passionate, fresh skin in the game. I listen. I support. I adapt. I have no affiliation/bias/favouritism toward any party. They would genuinely be held to account regarding the current sway of public feeling. I’d even put it all to vote. There’d be votes every week to make sure. I can fund. It would not be me in power as President, people of Ireland. It would be me and you.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. 

We should start with the fact that McGregor seems to imagine the role of the President of Ireland as some sort of god-king who runs the country and not the more honourary head of State position to which the role is constrained. 

Of course, even if it were within the powers of the President to implement the total democracy he describes — and it is not — it would not merely be logistically impossible, but a politically insane proposition. 

When one tallies all the myriad failures and idiocy of Irish politics, a lack of weekly referenda does not rank high. 

We may presume from his recent incendiary comments that it’s immigration he means when he refers to “the current sway of public feeling”. 

He may then be dismayed to discover that this “current sway” is still some way short of a national consensus and that people’s attitudes to migrants, and most other things, change from month to month.

McGregor’s idea of public opinion is likely informed by his hordes of Twitter acolytes, not least the man who runs the platform, Elon Musk. 

“I think you could take them all single-handed. Not even fair,” said the tech billionaire, before adding the crying-laughing emoji beloved by all people who have long since lost any capacity for true joy. 

It is the fifth or sixth interaction between the two in the past few weeks, which shouldn’t be surprising since the two men are, to borrow a phrase, very much two cheeks of the one arse. 

If Musk is the stupid person’s idea of a smart person, McGregor might be said to be a 12-year-old’s idea of a cool 14-year-old.

Both are people whose success in other avenues has emboldened them to take on the dreaded mantle of thought leader, and both have a frothing army of weird followers whose constant replies alternate between fawning praise and inscrutable, clout-chasing spam. 

Both owe a lot of their success to the fact they embody a sort of masculine obviousness; poorly sketched power fantasies for men untroubled by imagination. 

McGregor, the avatar of physical dominance, a silhouette of machismo for those who wish for it in its most literal form. 

Musk personifying power, wealth, and global influence, whose Bond villain air of industrial genius elides the fact he seems quite dim on every subject barring “the buying of companies between 1999 and 2006”.

Elon Musk: a skilled acquirer of companies, but not the genius hype would suggest, says Séamas O'Reilly. Pic: Britta Pedersen-Pool/Getty Images

Now, I don’t think there’s zero skill in Musk having, in that time, acquired several companies which have made him a lot of money. 

A careful reader might observe that I did not do this myself, and that Musk is now worth $200bn and I am not. 

But even in the rarefied corridor of “buying and running tech companies”, Musk has not had a flawless recent record. Tesla’s latest crash tests show that a 35mph collision would turn its rear passengers into a thick fluid.  SpaceX needn’t bother with crash tests at all, since its reliably combustive launches serve that function already. 

And let’s not forget, his most recent notable purchase was Twitter; an insult factory bought by the world’s most humourlessly thin-skinned man for $44bn he will never see again, and whose few remaining advertisers he last week told “go fuck yourself”.

Of course, all the above is irrelevant, since being good at buying and running companies, or becoming a skilled martial artist, does not make you better placed to pontificate on immigration, global politics, or anything outside of your own lane.

Those who do transfer from one skill set to another are judged anew, and to judge either man on their steps outside their comfort zone is to meet thinkers operating vastly outside of their abilities. 

Musk spent much of the pandemic saying covid panic was “dumb”, and predicting it would all go away. He only ended up buying Twitter because he said he would in a fit of pique — a great quality in a thought leader — and the courts demanded he accede to this when he tried to back out of so doing. 

He has spent his time at the helm dismantling its use and crashing ad revenue by 89%, all while personally amplifying racist and antisemitic posts through his own account. 

And, just this week, he began spreading propaganda related to Pizzagate, the discredited belief that high-ranking American political figures engaged in satanic child sacrifice at a family pizzeria in Washington, DC.

Following the Musk template has gotten McGregor to the point that he feels emboldened to share and amplify our own conspiracy theorists on the Irish far right, and those from outside Ireland wishing to game the system in their favour. (A study this week by LogicallyFact concluded that the majority of those using the hashtags #IrelandIsFull and #IrishLivesMatter were from abroad.)

But worse, he has parlayed this into a Musk-like Messianic fervour, which now sees him aiming to run for a political office he has invented in his own head. 

The most striking aspect of both men’s condition is the degree to which they have themselves become trapped within their own illusions, captured by the money, acclaim and affirmation their self-promotion has generated.

Their machine of hype and myth has long since caught them in its tumbling gears. The wheel still spins, but the hamster is dead. 

It’s a circus, yes, but the ringmasters have made marks of themselves.