Why was Conor McGregor’s sinister cult of content lauded and rewarded for so long? | Jonathan Liew

SFinally some good news for Conor McGregor. There’s probably a way to label it as bad news, and that’s what the scum of the mainstream media will do. But in the wake of his defeat in a civil case in Dublin against a woman who accused him of raping her, as brands and fans rush to disown him, as murals are hastily painted across the island, you must statements of support you can find them. Step forward: Andrew Tate.

“Rubbish ruling against Conor McGregor,” Tate wrote from Romania, where he is facing his own legal troubles, including allegations of human trafficking and rape. “Women sleep with rich men and if that man doesn’t finance their lives afterwards, they lie and sue. Their brutal narcissism can’t stand the L for unwanted. We have set a dangerous precedent. It is literally impossible to be a man in the Western world.”

Despite the fact that many men in the Western world occasionally manage to make ends meet – where is our podcast empire and our internet university? – all of this has a certain plaintive quality. The hypersensitivity, the victim card, the persecution complex: isn’t this completely… woke? On the other hand, it might take an intellect on the cutting-edge level of Tate to find any common ground with McGregor at this point and willfully ignore the fact that a jury ruled that Nikita Hand had told the truth when she claimed she was attacked by him .

Of course, at this point, kicking McGregor – whether in print or in the pocket – is the easy part. We know this because even the brands, those famous arbiters of ethical taste, have now parted ways. Tesco and Costcutter are among the supermarkets to no longer stock its whiskey brand. All McGregor content and likenesses have been removed from the Hitman video games. “We take this matter very seriously,” said a spokesperson for IO Interactive.

At this point, it’s worth thinking about all the previous cases that McGregor’s many commercial allies have had over the years not considered worth taking very seriously. Not seriously: the time he was convicted of punching a man in a Dublin pub or taking and destroying a fan’s mobile phone. Not seriously: the time he made racist comments about Floyd Mayweather and his entourage. Not seriously: the time he called rival Khabib Nurmagomedov – a practicing Muslim – a “retarded bastard” for refusing to drink whisky. Or called Nurmagomedov’s manager “a terrorist” and his wife “a towel,” or threw a metal dolly at his bus.

The Nurmagomedov fight – its chaotic build-up, violent aftermath and toxic fallout – is often seen as the beginning of McGregor’s decline. Perhaps this is true in a strictly athletic sense. But the broader McGregor universe – the sinister cult of substance and hype and commercial justification and parasocial sycophancy that he built around his talents – persisted for years after those talents deserted him. From the very beginning, McGregor told and showed us who he was. And despite this, perhaps even because of it, he was praised, applauded and richly rewarded.

McGregor’s damaging appeal was never simply about what he could do with a quick left counter or a bloody elbow. From the start, he was glorified as something more: a working-class hero, a patriotic icon, an aspirational figure, a model for a certain kind of masculinity, perhaps even a (naked capitalist) paradigm of what success looked and felt like in the 21st century. Where crime and controversy, racism and sexism, ableism and homophobia are simply part of the irresistible lore, a convenient way to sell tickets and pay-per-view packages.

Occasionally, in certain polite circles, it was necessary to undermine McGregor’s admiration for the reality of his actions. ‘Divisive’ was often the euphemism par excellence. “Love him or hate him” was another, as if this were a matter of personal taste, like putting jam or cream on a scone first. Instead of a moral judgment, a very special way of seeing the world and the people in it.

And what was this worldview? A world where the only value is earned through fame, wealth and physical strength: the raunchy triangle of the male fantasy. Where all our problems can be solved with violence. Where you never have to apologize, show vulnerability, tell the truth. Where, as he once so memorably put it, “the double champion does what he wants.”

From here it’s just a small step to the idea that you are simply entitled to your own version of reality, that whatever you say is true simply because it comes out of your mouth. In this he was gladly helped by the sport, by the fighting community, which was less concerned about curbing his unacceptable views and indiscriminate violence than about cashing its checks. As recently as August this year, Eddie Hearn was still defending him as “a great guy and a hilarious character”, promising him a nice payday if he ever decided to return to boxing.

Where does this lead? Perhaps to a Dublin courtroom in November 2024, where a jury heard harrowing testimony from Hand for two weeks before finding McGregor liable for assault and awarding damages of more than £200,000. (McGregor plans to appeal the decision.) Perhaps because of the unseemly rush of brands and celebrities now distancing themselves from a man they once wholeheartedly supported. Perhaps due to the race riots in Dublin in late 2023, in which McGregor’s ‘declaration of war’ was seized upon by far-right Telegram channels, often consisting of the very same disaffected young men he built an empire on.

It was around this time that McGregor revealed his plans to run for the presidency of Ireland, promising to root out corruption, dissolve the Dail and fight for the people against the traitors and elites. This dream is probably dead for now. Even McGregor’s most disturbed supporters will probably now disown him: pragmatism, profit, PR and principles, finally on the same page. I mean, imagine a nation electing as president a man found guilty of sexual assault. Oh. Wait a minute.

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