Lindsay Clancy

Friday

Pedro L. Gonzalez

The right has a woman problem

From our US edition

The right has its own unwritten rules of political correctness. There are forbidden words, and while they might not be met with censorship, they do elicit eye rolls. One proscribed term is “misogyny.” It also happens to be the most accurate description of the right’s mood and trajectory these days. The right’s response to this trend has been to downplay it, or even deny that it is happening at all. But ignoring it will not make it go away. Political discourse often operates like a ratchet: the intensity around a given topic is constantly turned up, but the mechanism is not designed to dial back.

right women

Wednesday

Lionel Shriver

Don’t sympathise with Lindsay Clancy

The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonises over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalised. Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was ‘maternal ambivalence’. The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticised terms.

Saturday

Geoffrey Cain

Lindsay Clancy and the inversion of feminism

From our US edition

In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in her basement and then tried to kill herself. On August 20 this year, several hundred women dressed in pink lined the street outside Plymouth Superior Court, where she was being tried for murder. Some called out “I love you,” as her lawyer went past. One of them shouted, “Team Lindsay.” Many mothers have frightening thoughts; very few become killers like Clancy The gathering had been organized by Renee Kimball, who had never met Clancy and had driven down from Maine. She had been following the trial via a livestream. She told Court TV it was neither a protest nor a rally, and that the point was “to show Lindsay support; to show her peace, to show her calm.

lindsay clancy

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

In America, murder has become mainstream

From our US edition

September has become a murderous month. This year it marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And as this month began, the trial of Lindsay Clancy was under way in Massachusetts, a trial notable not only for the appalling character of the crime – Clancy strangled each of her three children – but for the appalling degree of sympathy some women have expressed for the defendant. When Kirk was murdered while speaking on a college campus last year, many left-wing Americans rejoiced – and his killing is still a cause for levity at Hasan Piker rallies today. The leftist podcaster enjoys leading crowds in an off-key, mocking rendition of an AI-written song called “We Are Charlie Kirk.

Saturday

Charles Cornish-Dale

The ‘paranoid style’ is back in American politics

From our US edition

Scarcely had the last warmth drained from Charlie Kirk’s body than the theories began to take shape. It wasn’t a leftist killing, as common sense and all the recent evidence would tell us: it was something else entirely. In the 11 months since, an entire Charlie Kirk-truth industry has sprung up; a whole ecosystem of podcasters, armchair theorists, exaggerators, suspicious and conspiratorial fantasists, all trading in tendentious, half-baked, outlandish fairy tales about how and why the most important young conservative in America was murdered in cold blood. With freedom and the march of progress, anger and resentment don’t diminish.

paranoia

Thursday

Monica Sobchak

The insanity of the Lindsay Clancy sympathizers

From our US edition

In 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her three children to death with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, an act that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her murder trial opened in Plymouth Superior Court in July and is expected to run for six to eight weeks.  Both sides agree Clancy killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. What is contested is whether she should be held responsible.

lindsay clancy