Who Killed the Clancy Children?

This article will appear in the November issue.

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After a Massachusetts jury failed to convict Lindsay Clancy of strangling her three small children to death with exercise bands, a friend texted me in disbelief. “This is like the OJ trial for women,” he quipped.

I understood what he meant. The jury comprised nine women and three men, many of whom sauntered from the courthouse to television studios where they explained that Clancy had to be acquitted simply because she was a woman and therefore inherently good and deserving of sisterly sympathies. 

One lone holdout thought differently. He explained that he was less interested in progressive platitudes and more concerned with facts. And the facts tell a simple story. Clancy was seen by mental health professionals frequently, including on the day before the murders; she was never diagnosed with psychosis. She sent her husband away on an errand she calculated would give her just enough time alone with the children to kill them without his interference. Then, she murdered each child in succession. 

The facts are difficult enough to hear. But it’s the trial’s larger context that makes it one of the most devastating—and important—stories of our time. Because, while Clancy killed her children on her own, she was boosted—after the deed and, arguably, before it, too—by a culture that spent the last forty years demonically degrading our shared sense of morality, mocking the good while portraying evil as virtuous and chic, and challenging our basic understanding of what it means to be human.

I’m not talking only about the thousands of hags who showed up, clad in pink, to donate lavishly to Clancy’s fundraising campaign and argue, without a shred of proof, that the real killer was Clancy’s husband, Patrick. I’m talking about millions of American women who cheered for, and benefited from, the noxious ideology that eventually reached its inevitable conclusion in the Clancy’s Massachusetts home. 

If you’ve paid any attention these last few decades, you know this toxic climate well: young women who decorate their college rooms with dainty little signs that read “The Future Is Female” or “Smash the Patriarchy”; an endless torrent of TV shows and movies in which the guys are bumbling buffoons and the females wise, loyal, and virtuous; besuited politicians bellowing out tautological slogans like “Women’s rights are human rights,” as if anyone in his right mind is arguing that females somehow belong to a different species; and finally, the heralding of abortion as the great moral crusade of our time, the one inalienable right women must unite, rally, and fight for above all else.

These ideas have become so prevalent and dominant that it’s sometimes hard even to see them as the ideological poison that they are. They’re simply the air we breathe if we attend college, stream a show, or interact with contemporary popular culture. And as we saw with ghoulish clarity during Clancy’s trial, these noxious ideas gave rise to two monstrous lies that, for too long, have been passed off as incontrovertible truths.

The first has to do with embodiment. There’s one thread tying together the greatest evils of the past decade—abortion, transgenderism, euthanasia. The unifying enterprise is a grim and grinding war on the biblical notion that humans are embodied beings who experience the world not only through their minds and their hearts but also through their bodies, fashioned for them by their maker. 

Radical progressives fear above all the noble reality of embodiment—and its proper demand for respect and protection—and they attack it with everything at their disposal. They claim that a baby in the womb is just a “medical condition” for the woman to manage, allowing her to terminate gestating life at will. They advance the argument that gender is fluid and may be selected and shifted for fun and profit. The same progressive ideological assault on embodiment preaches the notion that there’s dignity in choosing to end the sacred life that only God can give. These are different manifestations of the same lie, telling us that we must transcend our flesh and live instead as amorphous abstractions shaped by whichever identity we choose at the present moment. 

A systematic denial of our lives in the flesh amounts to a metaphysical and spiritual abomination, and our self-appointed betters have fashioned a perverse theory of justice to match it, which brings us to the second lie. The central notion is as simple as it is crooked: We should judge our fellow citizens not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin, their reproductive organs, and their sexual preferences. Women, this theory holds, are entitled to special considerations, even to the point of exemption from punishment for grave crimes, simply because they’re women—no further qualifications necessary. 

Think I’m being curmudgeonly or, to borrow a favorite feminist term, misogynistic? Let me put Lindsay Clancy aside. I give you the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for August 2026. That month, the American economy created 162,000 new jobs; of those, 158,000 jobs, or 98 percent, were filled by women. 

What explains this extraordinary outcome? Some might say that there’s a surge in service industry hiring, and those roles tend to be filled by women. True, perhaps, but 98 percent! I submit that a more nefarious cause is at work. Because corporate HR departments (staffed mainly by women) are informed by an ideology forged on college campuses (staffed mainly by women) and promoted by media outlets (staffed mainly by women), a prejudice holds that there’s something virtuous and empowering about employing humans with two X chromosomes. 

When young men complain about the blatant discrimination that’s often visible for all to see, they’re mocked as snowflakes and told to check their privilege. When they complain that their inability to find gainful employment makes them less attractive to their female peers—the number of single young men in America has skyrocketed by a mind-blowing 50 percent in the last twenty-five years—they’re called derogatory names like “incels.” You get the sense that men can’t catch a break while women can get away with murder. And this is no longer just a euphemism. 

I will admit that our culture’s captivity to an ideological feminism so entrenched that it now passes for common sense leaves me forlorn. I find myself recalling lines from the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil”: “I shouted out ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?’ / When after all, it was you and me.” Substitute “Who Killed the Clancy Children?” and the song echoes all too darkly.

Which leaves us with exactly two choices, neither of them particularly pretty. 

The first and more terrifying option is simply to do nothing. Continue with the parade of twaddle about social justice that excuses injustices. Continue to champion women, their qualifications be damned, and pardon them of crimes, no matter their guilt. Continue to pretend as if abortion isn’t a moral rot that has desensitized generations of women to the value of human life. Do that, and the backlash will come. It won’t be pleasant. The millions of young men currently being pushed around and falling behind women in every metric that matters, from college education to gainful employment, will find some terribly unjust way to vent their very just frustrations. None of us would enjoy what happens in that scenario. 

The second option is more difficult but much more merciful. It calls for women to examine, truthfully and thoroughly, all that the movement calling itself feminism has wrought. It requires a reckoning of what happens when women are educated to desire power, not pious, prosperous, and peaceful partnerships with men. It calls for repentance and an abandonment of ruinous ideas and behaviors millions of American women currently consider not only right but, worse, natural. 

Only women can lead this movement. Only women can stop and reflect on the wrongs committed in their name for decades now. If they don’t, I have the dreadful notion that the horrors we’ve seen unfurl in the Clancy house are only the beginning.