Comment of the Day: “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’”

/ Jack Marshall

I’m getting this Comment of the Day by Tim LeVier up about a week late. Fortunately, I was reminded of the topic because essays and articles about the weird outpouring of support for a child-killer keep coming. Here’s the beginning of one I read today in The Free Press:

“Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder. This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage.”

Tim’s analysis is as useful as I found it to be last week. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’”….[Oh…I know it’s foolish and biased to judge people by countenance, but boy, if I were casting Medea—or Lizzie Borden—that face would be irresistible.]

***

I have to break down any comment by the groups involved:

1. L. Clancy – She’s on trial. She did the deed. By her plea, I would say that’s an admission of being the one to have done the deed, her defense is not that she didn’t do it, her defense is that there’s disagreement to the severity of the charge due to her mental health.
That is a proper question and should be settled by the courts / justice system.

2. The Parents and their Fundraisers – As I had heard it, money was being raised to support her parents through this and provide them with a place to stay because 3 years of motel rooms adds up.

It is a noble enough goal for the parents to attend the trial and confront the facts and reality of what is determined regarding your child. The people legitimately raising funds and supporting only this goal are probably showing some kind of exemplary ethics in being able to overlook the “Ick Factor” of the case and demonstrating a duty to care. How much easier would it be for the parents to not confront reality and wipe their hands of their daughter?

3. The Grifters – Ostensibly, there must be online grifters that have their own interests in play. They find hot button issues to sell some t-shirts and signs and whatever else will turn them a profit. They’ll lie about donating money and they’ll fan the flames to market and sell their wares.

These people are scum and not real people. They likely use AI generated video characters to fan these flames and profess their own special kind of virtue.

4. The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone they have no prior connection.

These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.

4 thoughts on “Comment of the Day: “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’””

  1. I’ve been watching talking heads today, much of it about the Clancy trial. The protesters are not necessarily all ghouls. At least some are sympathetic to the exhaustion and stresses of a career and care of three little ones. Others are whack jobs or morons. I had four children and a demanding career and understand the fatigue and stress. (Just to be clear, I never even fantasized about killing any of us …)

    I haven’t watched any of the trial, only commentary, so I’ve picked up a few points and a couple of questions.

    • While she was prescribed over a dozen meds, she was only taking two at the time of the murders.
    • At least one psychiatrist testified that even a psychotic person doesn’t hear voices just one time.
    • None of the mental health professionals she was seeing diagnosed postpartum psychosis. Months later she was diagnosed sever depression without psychoses.
    • She saw one of her therapists the day before the murders and denied having suicidal or homicidal thoughts.
    • She carefully planned the murders, using GPS to calculate how long her husband would be gone with errands she asked him to run.

    Lindsay and her husband Patrick earned at least $350,000, maybe as much as half a million. If she was so distressed, why did they not hire a full-time nanny, perhaps even a live-in, until her anxieties were resolved?

    Patrick took twelve weeks of paternity leave, and when he returned to work it was from his basement. If Lindsay was so stressed as to murder her children, why not ask him to intervene?

    If she was actually so psychotic she was going to commit triple homicide and suicide that day, wouldn’t her husband have noticed something?

    While it is possible I’ve been listening to biased talking heads, Lindsay Clancy should be glad I am not a juror at her trial. That so many are sympathetic to her and not to her tiny victims – well, it doesn’t bode well for our society.

    Reply

    • They did have a nanny. The nanny testified that Lindsay Clancy was a wonderful mother and there was no indication of this coming. The nanny only saw a loving mother concerned about the wellbeing of her children. The nanny was not retained because Lindsay had decided not to go back to work. So, there is a good chance that Lindsay Clancy is manipulative and able to lie convincingly. She was definitely cold and calculating, using GPS to set up a series of errands for her husband to run that would give her enough time to kill the children.

      She could just be a psychopath. Treatment for male psychopaths focuses on what they have done to harm others. Treatment for female psychopaths is to focus on how the woman feels and how they can make her feel better. In today’s therapy, female psychopaths are often called ’empaths’.

      Reply

  2. This post from a statistician put the Lindsay Clancy “support movement” along with a lot of other outrage-inducing fads, into perspective:

    https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/i-had-the-effing-denominator

    Pew’s 2025 nationally representative survey found that 21% of U.S. adults use Twitter.

    267,000,000 × .21 = 56,100,000 American adults on Twitter.

    How many are women?

    Twitter’s late-2025 advertising data — which I regard as trustworthy only because lying to advertisers about the product you’re selling them has consequences — says that 34.3% of its U.S. adult audience is female.

    56,100,000 × .343 = 19,242,300 American women on Twitter.

    Now: who is actually producing what we see?

    Pew found that 92% of tweets are produced by the 10% most active users.

    If women are represented proportionally among those hyperactive users:

    19,242,300 × .10 = 1,924,230 women.

    Call it 1.9 million.

    That is our first important number. Under a deliberately simple assumption, the female share of the cohort producing 92% of Twitter amounts to about 1.9 million American women.

    So how many of those 1.9 million women are mothers?

    The Census Bureau’s 2024 fertility data tell us how many American women through age 50 have ever had a child. For women older than 50, where that dataset stops, I used the motherhood rate for women ages 45–50: 85.1%.

    Doing that calculation across the adult female population gives us approximately 95.5 million American mothers, out of roughly 136.2 million adult American women.

    95,500,000 ÷ 136,200,000 = 70.1%.

    So if mothers are represented among Twitter’s hyperactive women at roughly the same rate as they are among American women generally:

    1,924,230 × .701 = 1,348,885 mothers.

    Call it 1.35 million American mothers.

    Now look at how ridiculously generous I am being to the conclusion that frightened me.

    I am assuming every one of those 1.35 million accounts represents a different, real, adult American mother.

    No bots.

    No sock puppets.

    No woman running three accounts.

    No misclassified foreigners.

    No organizational accounts classified as women.

    No errors in Twitter’s demographic classifications.

    I am also pretending Twitter users are representative of American women generally, which they plainly are not. Twitter, like all social media, selects for people willing to spend a meaningful portion of their one and only life online yelling at strangers — which means it selects for narcissism, emotional excess, and unresolved trauma, among other pathologies. In other words, the emotionally mature people with a sense of priorities and a correct understanding of how short life is are too busy actually living life — raising kids, making art, reading books, cooking healthy foods, etc. — to be on Twitter.

    In a nutshell, while the viral social media posts showing a little too much uncritical sympathy for Clancy is arguably cause for concern, it’s hardly the majority of women or even the majority of mothers.

    Also, the same author does a deep-dive into the Clancy case here, which I think is worth a read:
    https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/the-axioms-of-motherhood

    Reply

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