"I Am Lindsay Clancy" — What the Women in Pink Actually Believe
Hundreds gathered outside a courthouse for a mother who strangled her three children. The slogan on their shirts explains more than the trial does.
On August 20th, hundreds of women stood outside a Massachusetts courthouse in pink shirts and prayed for a mother who strangled her three children. Countless more showed their support online. What follows is my attempt to work out what a person has to already believe before they can absolve a murderous mother of moral culpability.
"Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups it is the rule."
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The Crowd That Chose the Killer
What happens when a society’s institutions adopt an ideology that portrays one sex as inherently flawed and “toxic,” while casting the other as unquestionably virtuous?
The reaction to Lindsay Clancy’s trial for the murder of her three children gives us some disturbing insights.
At first, feminist TikTok questioned her guilt, hypothesizing that the husband was the real killer — based on “forensic astrology,” one reading of which “basically states that he did it… & drugged her.” Nearly two thousand readers gave the comment a thumbs up. The hypothesis being that “Leo’s don’t kill. Geminis do.” Thousands more found this to be compelling. Another argues this is evident beyond doubt: “oh he’s a GEMINI? jail for him, that’s all i need to know.”
An entire movement grew out of these TikTok and Facebook posts. Users live-streamed the trial and dissected testimony — through their rigorous process of baseless speculation — posting about "Justice for Lindsay Clancy," how they "Stand With Lindsay," and even identifying with the murderous mother by stating "I Am Lindsay Clancy." This led to a trend of mothers posting videos with their children captioned "Same, Lindsay."
While you’d be justified in chalking these responses up to astrology induced retardation, I think there is a more plausible explanation. If you have accepted the presupposition that women and virtue are inextricably linked — which so much of our political and academic class has — then all arguments downstream have to fortify that belief. Information that reinforces the belief is accepted without questioning, while anything that contradicts it is ignored or viciously attacked.
Although, there's just one problem: these delusional hypotheses have hit a brick wall, considering Clancy admits to the killings. So while the astrological readings must be dispensed with, the underlying belief that created them remains. Hence why the movement now focuses on bolstering Clancy's legal argument that she experienced a psychotic break induced by postpartum psychiatric disease aggravated by overmedication. Perhaps true, but as we can tell by the appeal to astrology, truth isn't what is being selected for. Instead, the selection mechanism is whether the argument absolves Clancy of moral culpability.
The mob psychology around this case became visible on August 20th when hundreds of supporters, many in pink, gathered outside the courthouse. Shirts read “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Supporters made heart shaped hands, prayed, and claimed it could have been any one of them.
The sympathy and support is not merely emotional. Tens of thousands of people have resonated with Clancy deeply enough to send over $1 million to her parents — nearly 31,000 donations in roughly a week. The campaign explicitly disclaims any position on the criminal case, stating its purpose is to help her parents rebuild the financial stability they sacrificed over the past three years. It was created by a TikTok mother with her father’s permission.
I — like those practicing “forensic astrology” — have little interest in the granular details of the trial. The reaction and debates that have followed the case are what I find far more important.
One (female) X user claimed that “after watching the trial play out, not only am I convinced we should repeal the 19th Amendment, but we should also limit women’s interactions online.” To which another woman replied, “imagine applying this logic to men. Every time a man commits an act of violence, should we reconsider men’s voting rights? Restrict their internet access? Of course not because we understand that one individual’s actions do not justify stripping civil liberties from an entire sex.”
Except there are many problems with this counter-reasoning. First, not all acts of violence are equal in nature. If a man kills a home intruder threatening his family, he’s rightfully declared a hero. If a man kills his family, he’s rightfully declared a monster. Second, the act of violence committed by Clancy may have been individual, but the support is collective. The mass sympathy for the individual’s monstrous actions cannot be ignored.
Let’s reframe the scenario. Imagine an ex-NFL player suffering from CTE brutally murdered his three children. One could understand his legal team leaning on the violence inducing brain trauma as a defence. Except it’s inconceivable that hundreds of men would show up in person, backed by thousands — if not millions — online, to paint him as the primary victim to be empathized with.
Even if one was to empathize with the CTE sufferer, it’d likely come in a similar manner to Of Mice and Men. Lennie Small is an enormous, physically powerful man with the mind and emotional understanding of a young child. He starts stroking the hair of Curley’s wife, who then panics and screams, causing Lennie to become frightened. This oversized man-child responds by shaking her too forcefully and accidentally breaking her neck. George — Lennie’s closest companion — realizes that Lennie cannot understand or control his own strength and that similar tragedies will keep happening. He also knows that an angry mob led by Curley will seek revenge for the dead woman in a brutal fashion. To spare him from torture or capture, George comforts him by describing their dream farm, especially the rabbits Lennie hopes to tend to, and while imagining that happy future, George shoots him in the back of the head.
That is about all the sympathy I have for someone who murders the innocent and defenceless — much less children who look to you as their primary source of love and protection. As the book depicts, the collective response to such a murder — even if the murderer is truly mentally incapable of understanding such actions — is likely to be death or confinement until death. If Of Mice and Men instead depicted a mob declaring “We’re just like Lennie” or “Stand With Lennie,” the reader would not only question whether the townspeople went randomly insane but whether they should face the same fate as Lennie.
This is not even a men vs. women issue. Rather, it is yet another litmus test for sane vs. insane. A society which affords more sympathy to murderers than their victims — even gifting their family a million dollars — is undeniably morally corrupt.
When the unthinkable becomes debatable — whether it be the Lindsay Clancy support, the celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, or downplaying the institutional failures behind Iryna Zarutska’s murder — a civilization’s immune system is surely suppressed to a deadly degree.
The Women in Pink
The online and in-person support of Lindsay Clancy is best viewed as a mob — or what Gustave Le Bon would call a crowd. What defines a mob is not its physical assembly but a shared psychological state. The women supporting the child murderer say themselves that this stems from identification with Clancy. They do not see a woman separate from themselves but a reflection — “I Am Lindsay Clancy.”
What can explain such a horrid statement? The current feminist explanation is that mothers commonly face intrusive thoughts in the postpartum period. This may be true, and frequent, but whether someone experiences intrusive thoughts does not absolve them of the moral responsibility for acting on them.
A classic Bill Burr bit illustrates this perfectly: “I have a lot of f**ked up thoughts. You ever drive down the street and see thirty people and you just think [to run them over]?” The crowd erupts in laughter and applause, signalling they too have had similar intrusive thoughts. Burr continues: “You don’t do it, you just think it. That’s what separates the psychos from the functioning psychos.”
Every single person who is being honest with themselves will admit they've had unconscionable intrusive thoughts. Yet am I now expected to extend sympathy to someone who acts on the thought of mowing down a sidewalk full of people with their car? Of course not. Deciding whether to act on those thoughts is the defining difference between a monster and everyone else. We are only expected to elicit sympathy because Clancy is a woman. Not one of these feminists would return the moral leeway if it were a man.
Now I want you to consider the possibility of a feedback loop being created in the fallout of this issue. Social status is very important to humans. It is one of our fundamental drives. We first want to fit into a group and then to be held in high regard by that group. What do you think happens when the price of admission to a group is admitting to or vocalizing your intrusive thoughts? Even further, what happens when that group awards attention and status to those who have the worst thoughts — up to and including murdering their children? Do you think this will lead to fewer or more people within that group having those thoughts? Do you think this will increase or decrease the likelihood of someone acting on those thoughts? Now consider those in the group seeing a seemingly endless supply of emotional and financial support flowing to those who do act.
This is not to say we are going to see COVID-level mass hysteria of otherwise normal mothers now murdering their children, but I would argue that this creates a social environment where the small share of demented mothers now see an opportunity to remove their mask of sanity and get rewarded for it.
It’s truly terrifying that we’ve reached a state where this needs to be said, but if we cannot make clear moral distinctions between the universal experience of having intrusive thoughts and the very particular experience of acting on those thoughts then we are doomed.
Feminist Doublethink
The proclivity for TikTok feminists to argue that Lindsay Clancy cannot be held criminally responsible because her postpartum intrusive thoughts amounted to psychosis not only directly undercuts their entire movement but is also an example of doublethink. Orwell defines doublethink as the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs as true, signalling the erosion of critical thought.
The same movement that insisted the husband was the real killer and Lindsay could not have done this because of her astrology chart, pivoted to insisting she cannot be held responsible for having done it. The belief that women are inherently innocent remains, the argument required to protect it is what changes.
Let’s consider the following propositions:
Women are just as rational, competent, and emotionally stable as men. Therefore, they deserve equal social and political representation.
What Clancy experienced is a normal and relatable part of motherhood — "Same, Lindsay," "I Am Lindsay Clancy" — and that experience is sufficient to remove her legal responsibility for killing her three children.
These two beliefs cannot coexist. I’m not here to tell you whether one or neither of these beliefs is true, but to point out that they can’t both be true.
Note that the second proposition also contradicts the defence it claims to support. Clancy’s lawyers argue particularity by alleging this happened to a single woman, with a rare disorder, and a cascade of medication issues. The movement argues universality, claiming it could have been any one of them. The crowd is taking the the argument of a rare-disease in a specific case to make a claim about all women.
Schrödinger’s feminist is a term popularized by meme culture, but it maps onto the Lindsay Clancy story quite well. The movement portrays women as simultaneously empowered and victimized, choosing whichever state best suits their immediate advantage or argument.
Vying for political power or career opportunities? Women are strong, independent, and capable. Giving in to intrusive thoughts and murdering your children? Women are victims of postpartum depression and cannot be held morally liable for their actions.
AOC recently referred to Woke 1.0 as “crazy.” Well, if this is Woke 2.0, it’s genuinely psychotic, and it will continue to get worse unless we muster the courage to stop giving in to the emotional blackmail.
If women want equality of representation, then they need to exhibit equality of responsibility. If society is to return to sanity it must accept that men and women have both success and failure modes, and stop pretending one sex is toxic by default while the other innocent by nature.
