In the good old days, before the Great Feminization, social media tribalism, and the instant fame of TikTok, most people felt disgust and horror at the thought of a mother killing her kids, let alone methodically leading each one down in the basement, then strangling them with an exercise band.
This is the stuff of nightmares. Imagine your mother, the person you trust most in the world, telling you to “go to God, baby” as you felt your throat close and your life wither away. We’ve seen their faces, and we know their names.
Everyone should be horrified, and yet, three years after the murders, Lindsay Clancy is not seen as a monster by hundreds of thousands of women all over the world but rather as their hero and a martyr for the agony and pain of motherhood.
We are Lindsay! We stand with you, Lindsay!
A triple homicide suspect whose fate was upended by one juror who withstood the pressure of 11 others to insist she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt has become, for women, another Me Too moment. Me too, Lindsay. Me Too.
Why are so many women losing their minds over this case, insisting Lindsay isn’t guilty because either she was afflicted with postpartum psychosis and had no control over these acts or Patrick did it because Patrick “said it” and he wanted out of the marriage to go have an affair with the woman he’s now married to.
I wish it wasn’t mostly women who are vulnerable to this level of group psychosis. But it is. Women are communal. They tend to form groups or tribes, out of necessity and human evolution.
Every time I scroll TikTok, I see them. There they are, staring back at me, those crazy, crazy women, performing for total strangers, united only by one singular idea: Lindsay Clancy is not guilty.
Welcome to Rock Bottom
Lindsay Clancy has been cast as a typical heroine in a Lifetime movie, or the protagonist in one of the psychological thrillers so popular on Audible. I know this world all too well. I watch these movies as a guilty pleasure, and I consume so many of these books that I forget which ones I’ve already read.
It looks something like this:
This might explain why the less camera-ready child killers like Andrea Yates or Susan Smith never became a worldwide sensation.
The plots play out almost the exact same way. The ambitious, successful, beautiful woman has a seemingly ordinary life until it is disrupted by a dark force. Almost always, this is an abusive, manipulative, lying, cheating man. But not always. Sometimes it’s a woman. Whatever it is, the protag is never to be rescued. She must always rescue herself. Men who are “good” are allowed to admire them from afar and serve them but never save them.
Lindsay Clancy has fit neatly into this role, especially if you are one of the truly insane women who believe she didn’t do it, and there are a lot of those. How perfect for a Lifetime movie or a psychological thriller if we found out in the last act that Patrick really did do it and Lindsay emerges as the true victim.
Their theory is that Lindsay only thinks she killed the kids when, in reality, Patrick did it. It’s just that Lindsay did do it. She admitted it. She told the Chaplain first. Then, she told her husband and a psychologist that a voice told her to do it. The voice never appeared before or since because the voice was actually the mother who wanted to kill her kids.
If Patrick Clancy is guilty of anything, it’s being too kind and trusting of his wife. Their text message exchange the day of the murders:
And a recent appearance at his church.
Patrick Clancy and their entire family have forgiven Lindsay and believe this was the result of postpartum psychosis, which is why Patrick and Lindsay are both suing the healthcare providers who treated her. And it also explains why they stonewalled, testified for the defense, and refused to give any insight into what else might have driven Lindsay to murder that day.
These are not the cries of someone who lost her children but the cries of a woman who remembers that moment she caused them so much fear, so much pain, and their deaths. If a voice ordered her to do it, why didn’t she just say no? Why didn’t she scream for her babies when she snapped out of it?
Believe Women
I always thought it would be funny to put out a bumper sticker amid the Me Too movement that said: “Believe Children, Salem, 1692.” I’m not sure anyone would have gotten the joke. There aren’t many people out there like me who have read every book, listened to every podcast, and know everything there is to know about the Salem Witch Trials.
One thing I know for sure, however, is that it wasn’t about “burning witches” nor was it about the patriarchy punishing women. These are lies that have never been corrected. The truth is that it was adolescent girls, not men, who had the power to decide who could live and who would die.
So many people were convicted and hanged in Salem because of “spectral evidence,” what you could not see but could only imagine. There is a reason so much power was handed to those adolescent girls. Spectral evidence is why it’s so hard for so many to see the Lindsay Clancy case clearly.
It was postpartum psychosis! It was bad therapy! It was the drugs! It couldn’t have been Lindsay. How else to explain how a seemingly normal “perfect” mother, high-achieving student, biology major, competitive cheerleader, could have killed her kids and then tried to kill herself?
And for those girls in Salem, no one would have ever believed they could lie like that for so long. What Cotton Mather would call the Wonders of the Invisible World is the stormy darkness of the female mind.
We can see from the Clancy case that so many are unwilling to see it for what it is: a mother who wanted to murder her children and took meds to stop those thoughts from coming, but they came anyway. All she wanted was for the problem to go away.
But it’s that mysterious world men don’t dare even try to understand and usually avoid the endless emotional needs of women, which is why women need other women and why so many are now wrapping their arms around Lindsay Clancy. Me too, Lindsay.
But what about the kids? Why isn’t there a bigger movement for them? Why is everything and everyone else blamed for their deaths except the woman who planned it? Thought it through. Knew exactly where the bands were and how to kill her children one by one. Spectral evidence is that no one dares question a woman who claims she was in postpartum psychosis and gets away with murder.
Lizzie Borden got away with murder, it’s been theorized, because she hid the murder weapon and the bloody clothes in her menstrual pail, and none of the male detectives or any of the lawyers wanted to get anywhere near that subject.
How does any society survive when this kind of murder is not only glossed over but excused because it’s the woman who matters, not the kids? Why not the kids?
And why are things so much different now from when the case first broke in 2023? It’s easy if you know your Salem history. If Donald Trump was an existential threat to our utopia like the Devil was to Salem, then his second win in 2024 kicked into motion a Me Too on steroids. Now, it isn’t just about who assaulted, harassed, or raped women. It's about all men.
Lindsay Clancy became their avatar because she tried to do everything right. She was the best woman, wife, and mother she could be, and it still wasn’t enough. Not even her Beach Body, Attachment Parenting, water parks, or birthday parties were enough. The same woman who left the hospital before she was ready so as not to miss her daughter’s birthday is the same woman who, a short time later, killed her daughter.
That mirrors the psychology of what happened to so many women who thought they had enough power to win the presidency with Hillary and then with Kamala. Their collective rage projected onto Lindsay Clancy has exploded in a way it probably never would have otherwise.
Trump’s second win, along with a hungry social media churn that wants more stories that will ignite our culture wars, turned a grotesque triple murder into a spectacle of narcissism and look-at-me trauma porn.
“Me Too Lindsay”
I spent so much of my adult life serving myself, chasing my own happiness because that was the blank check written for me as the first generation to come of age after Rose v. Wade and the Feminist movement. I couldn’t just have kids and get married. My life had to amount to more than that.
Women became successful homeowners and business owners, and were elevated to positions of power thanks to a concerted effort to reorder our society and achieve gender parity across all industries and spheres of power. But chasing our happiness would eventually lead us back to where it started. How could we have everything and still not be enough?
The world was changing. Now, it wouldn’t just be white men in charge. We would teach the young about the oppressors and the oppressed, and they would grow up to seek social justice, to fight against the colonizing white supremacist empire America had become.
We just had no idea what we were building, what kind of madness we would unleash, and how it would all go so wrong for us that we’d end up abandoning women athletes, vulnerable women in prisons - we’d even accept that a transgender woman winning at Chess or Jeopardy was a win for women. We did it! Except that we didn’t.
Little by little, the rights of the mostly white feminist women who dominated the Left were eroded. They just weren’t oppressed enough. It was “white feminism” - it was “TERFS.” Women were expected to take two steps back, to de-center themselves if they weren’t “of color” or “trans.” Abortion was all they had left. This baby is not yet human.
And should we be that surprised that we’ve arrived here? If a baby is already disposable and if abortions have become almost an act of empowerment, why wouldn’t the killing of children be the next thing women force themselves not to care about?
Mass hysteria gripped Salem Village for one long dark winter. But how long will ours last? How far will all of this go? If rock bottom isn’t turning a mother who murdered her children into an internet sensation, I don’t know what is.
I am suddenly afraid for babies and children in this country and the mothers who see them as their oppressors. I am afraid of what those mothers might do, and I am even more afraid of a society of women that doesn’t even seem to care.
