Inside the Plymouth courtroom, there’s agreement: Lindsay Clancy killed her three children. What’s at issue isn’t the basic fact of what Clancy did and didn’t do. She’s admitted to killing Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months.

Lindsay Clancy doesn’t dispute that on the evening of January 24, 2023, after she asked her husband, Patrick, to fetch takeout food and some medication from the local pharmacy, she strangled the children in the basement of the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, using a set of exercise bands, then attempted to commit suicide by slitting her wrists and jumping from a second-story window. When her husband returned, he found her outside, still alive, called 911, and then discovered the children downstairs.

The call is so harrowing that the judge refused to release the audio to the general public.

What’s at issue, rather, is a second-order moral question: Was Lindsay Clancy responsible for the killings? Was it murder—deliberate, premeditated—as the prosecution alleges, or did Lindsay suffer from severe postpartum psychosis, auditory command hallucinations—voices in her head telling her to kill—and massive overmedication of prescription drugs, as the defense claims in mitigation?

There’s compelling evidence on both sides. This is a genuine moral conundrum, one that admits no easy answers. There’s clear evidence of premeditation. Before the killings, Clancy made repeated internet searches asking questions like “how to slit throat to die?” “Where is the carotid artery?” “How to turn airbags off on Kia Sorento?” and “Can you treat a sociopath?” Other digital evidence, including Apple Watch and phone data, suggests she acted rationally: She created an opportunity to have her husband out of the house so she could kill the children. But it’s also hard, if not impossible, to dispute that Clancy was not of sound mind in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the tragedy. She also Googled “hallucinations,” “intrusive”—meaning “intrusive thoughts”—“psychosis,” and “postpartum depression,” and she tried to find out information about the various drugs she had been prescribed, which included anti-anxiety drugs, SSRI antidepressants, and a powerful antipsychotic called Seroquel with a worrying array of side effects. Clancy’s personal journals describe deepening anxiety, panic attacks, emotional numbness, murderous thoughts, and suicidal ideation after starting Seroquel. She had repeatedly sought psychiatric help and even been hospitalized weeks before the killings. She and her husband—now ex-husband—have both filed malpractice and wrongful-death lawsuits against her medical providers, alleging she was improperly diagnosed and prescribed drugs that made her condition worse.

Here isn’t the place to go over all the evidence for Lindsay Clancy’s guilt or to consider the complex issues involved in attributing blame, especially to those under the influence of powerful drugs and with a history of serious mental illness. I have my opinions, of course, about a woman who would strangle her own children to death and whether such a crime could ever be mitigated by circumstance. My interest here is in the public reaction to events and what it says about the American public today and American women in particular.

The trial has generated a social media circus. While the basic facts of the Clancy case are agreed upon by both prosecution and defense inside the courtroom, outside everything is up for grabs. Wild theories are circulating, calling the trial a sham and a cover-up. Despite admitting her guilt, Lindsay Clancy did not, in fact, kill her children. She was framed. Her husband pushed her out of the window after strangling the children himself. He was the voice she heard in her head, telling her to kill; only he was whispering in her ear. He did it so he could start over with his new wife, a fertility doctor in New York. I know a narcissist when I see one.

These claims aren’t fringe claims. They’re each garnering tens and hundreds of thousands of views, likes, and shares—millions, cumulatively. Patrick Clancy and his new wife have been attacked directly, with leaks of personal information and death threats. For the most part, though, the theories have simply done the rounds online, as such theories do, and they’ve created a thick fog of suspicion over a man who has never been suspected of wrongdoing, at least not from prosecutors anyway.

A relative of Patrick’s spoke to The Daily Mail anonymously.

“The things that are going around right now are heinous,” the relative said.

“Pat has always been the nicest, most supportive person ever. He loved his family, he loved his wife, and he did everything he could to support her, and this is just a really sad story.”

Some of this, a large part, is obviously just social media. We all know how social media works. We know the role outrage and attention-grabbing claims play. Scroll first, ask questions later. It’s an “attention economy,” as they say.

Take one of the more bizarre conspiracy theories circulating online: Brigitte Macron has a dick!

We also hardly need reminding that the paranoid style is back in American politics in a big way. When Richard Hofstadter wrote his famous essay, in 1964, he was taking aim at his contemporaries Barry Goldwater and Senator Joe McCarthy—communists under the bed, imagine that!—but he also believed the “paranoid” mindset of his day was a “persistent psychic phenomenon” in American life, one that could be seen in the populist movement of William Jennings Bryan and even further back, in the anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic outbursts of the turn of the 19^th century. Hofstadter believed the mindset arose when contradictions could not be resolved by “the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.” As the workings of power became opaque, Hofstadter continued, the tendency to seek sinister explanations only grew. “The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery.”

I think Hofstadter’s essay retains great diagnostic power. It speaks to our time even more, if anything. But there’s a paradoxical edge. Because instead of being shut out of power, the American right—Hofstadter’s main target—is now in power, and the President is pursuing the most radically right-wing agenda since at least the Second World War. The right has the levers of power at hand. And yet the paranoid style has gone into overdrive. Why is that? Maybe we’re all just hopelessly retarded now.

It would be easy, of course, just to say that people are stupid and social media amplifies that stupidity and allows it to rebound and reverberate further and louder than ever before. People have always said and believed stupid shit. There have always been village gossips and people accusing others of fanciful crimes like witchcraft—flying vast distances through the air at night, kissing the devil on his hindquarters and eating stews made of chopped-up babies. But I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going on here. If we’re not talking about the sinister machinations of power, we are, nevertheless, talking about something that’s at the very fringes of our conception: a mother killing her own children. The myth of Medea may be one of the founding stories of Western civilization, but 2000 years have hardly blunted the story’s shocking force.

An expert who spoke to the Boston Globe gets closer to the truth, I think. “We cannot always fully understand why someone would do something terrible. And that’s part of why we can’t look away… a conspiracy theory is an attempt to make the world make sense when it doesn’t.”

How we rationalize the unrationalizable can be very revealing, though. If a mother could never, ever do something as heinous as kill her children in cold blood, of course it would make perfect sense for a father to do so. It’s so easy to believe; it doesn’t even need any evidence to back it up.

I don’t want to turn this last part of this essay into a whinefest about how badly men are treated in America in 2026, or even to try and suggest Patrick Clancy is the real victim here. The children are the real victims here, obviously. But if these rationalizations are anything to go by, man-hatred among large numbers of American women is now absolutely out of control.

While some Lindsay-truthers have fixated on the evidence presented during the case, and especially small irrelevant details like the husband’s footwear when he left the house, others have simply asserted that Lindsay Clancy’s husband must be the killer.

In short, it’s vibes. Don’t ask me; I just know.

Take this series of comments, for example.

“Leo’s don’t kill. Geminis do.”

“Leo’s don’t kill their cubs. Nope. Not buying it.”

“If he’s a Gemini and she’s a Leo, it was toxic between them. That’s all I need to know.”

Or this comment, posted alongside a photo of Patrick Clancy.

“The[re] are thousands of WOMAN [sic] triggered. The reason? Because those are the eyes of a covert narcissist, and we’ve all looked into those before.”

Could it not be equally plausible that a hobo, an illegal alien, a family friend, or a bear killed the Clancy children and attempted to kill the mother too? Apparently not. It has to be the father, there has to be an elaborate cover-up, because this is what happens to women in America—especially loving, hard-working mothers who do absolutely everything right but make the dreadful mistake of marrying a covert narcissist who’s a Gemini and doesn’t take her postpartum depression seriously. Ladies, this could be any of us.

Honestly, looking at Instagram and TikTok, or the comments from the 25,000 women who have raised close to a million dollars for Lindsay Clancy on GoFundMe, I get a horrible sinking feeling. It’s like flipping over a rock and expecting to find a perfect little newt or a frog, but instead you get a huge hairy spider with only seven legs and even worse some amorphous blob of jelly that may or may not be alive but still somehow appears to be moving, very slowly, towards you. Really, though, I shouldn’t be surprised. Back in April, I wrote an essay for American Greatness about the “Angry Young Women” and the “precipitous leftward drift of young women and the major effects it’s having on British society.”

“Whether it’s Israel’s war in Gaza, the ‘Climate Crisis,’ the Patriarchy, racism, or the prospect of a Reform government forcing them out of the workforce and back into the home, there to be tethered to the stove and the marital bed for the rest of their days, Britain’s Angry Young Women are ‘teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack’ at any moment,” I wrote.

“They talk about how their ‘bones ache’ at the thought of all the suffering in the world. They use portentous, largely meaningless phrases like ‘the viscerality of the feminine wound’ to describe the pain and ‘trauma’ of being a woman today, which includes, prominently, dealing with men who value them only as sex objects and have repellent views about immigrants, carbon emissions, and the rights of transgender people. The Angry Young Women say they want ‘revolution’: ‘systematic change.’ Racked by chronic fatigue and endometriosis, they find satisfaction in protest, nonbinary comedy evenings, and pursuing ‘moral missions.’ But even then, that satisfaction is fleeting. ‘You’ve got to be pessimistic,’ one young woman says. The point isn’t to be happy; it’s about being angry and engaged.”

Except it’s not just Britain. The Angry Young Women are in America too, and on the evidence of the Lindsay Clancy case, there are lots of them. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. The witch’s pot they’re stirring contains a foul brew of entitlement and victimization fantasies, seasoned liberally with a thirst for revenge. It’s bubbling over. God help us.