Donald Trump killed the Clancy children!
There, I have solved the case. Massachusetts can dismiss the jury, send the lawyers home and save the taxpayers a fortune. There is no need to concern ourselves with exercise bands, psychiatric evidence, medication histories, telephone records, internet searches, expert witnesses or such patriarchal relics as evidence and individual responsibility. The answer was sitting in front of us all along. At least, according to rad feminist "logic."
Trump did it.
Not literally, obviously. Donald Trump was nowhere near the Clancy home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. But literal causation is an embarrassingly narrow concept once we enter the strange intellectual feminist universe surrounding parts of the Lindsay Clancy trial on social media.
The actual criminal case is terrible enough without embellishment. Lindsay Clancy does not deny killing her three young children. The disputed question is criminal responsibility. Her defence maintains that severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis, rendered her not criminally responsible, while prosecutors argue that she understood what she was doing and deliberately arranged the opportunity to kill the children. That is the question the jury must decide.
Patrick Clancy, her former husband and the children's father, is not being prosecuted for their deaths. Indeed, his recorded 911 call captured him returning home, discovering his injured wife, asking where the children were and then finding them in the basement. Lindsay's own defence is not that Patrick committed the killings. It is that Lindsay committed them while mentally incapable of criminal responsibility.
None of this has stopped the internet crazies from smearing an innocent man.
An extraordinary alternative prosecution has developed across TikTok, Reddit and other platforms in which Patrick has effectively been placed on trial. Every movement, expression, recollection and subsequent event in his life can be fed into the machine. Many feminist commentators have gone all the way and suggested that Patrick himself killed the children, as incredible as that sounds.
There is no evidentiary basis established by the authorities for this accusation. Patrick has been defamed by these social media feminist vultures, and hopefully he will seek justice. No concern by them for the feelings and mental health of this man whose suffering is hard to comprehend.
But perhaps these internet feminist detectives are thinking too small. If responsibility can migrate indefinitely away from the person who performed an act, why should the crazed feminists stop at Patrick? What other innocent men can be attacked?
Follow the feminist "logic." Men participate in masculinity. Masculinity is embedded in patriarchy. Patriarchy produces unequal emotional labour. Unequal emotional labour places pressure upon mothers. Pressure upon mothers contributes to psychological distress. Psychological distress may contribute to violence. Therefore, masculinity killed the Clancy children. That is the feminist argument.
But masculinity itself must have causes. Who, in recent American politics, has represented an especially aggressive, unapologetic and supposedly "toxic" form of masculinity?
Donald J. Trump.
The case practically solves itself, for the Left.
Trump radiated toxic masculinity across the continental United States. Those masculine particles presumably travelled from Mar-a-Lago to Massachusetts, penetrated the Clancy household and increased the ambient patriarchal pressure until catastrophe occurred. Trump therefore killed the children.
This is ridiculous, of course. That is the point.
A reductio ad absurdum tests a principle by following it farther than its advocates normally wish to travel. If Patrick can be transformed from a bereaved father into the morally responsible party without evidence, merely because some broader theory of male responsibility requires somebody male to carry the blame, there is no logical reason to stop with Patrick. The causal net can be expanded indefinitely. To all men, even old dudes like me.
Blame Patrick. Blame husbands. Blame fathers. Blame patriarchy. Blame toxic masculinity. Blame Trump. Blame Western civilisation. Eventually every male from Aristotle becomes an unindicted co-conspirator.
What disappears in this process is precisely what criminal justice was invented to preserve: the distinction between explanation and responsibility.
There may be many things worth explaining in the Clancy tragedy. The adequacy of Lindsay's psychiatric treatment is plainly one. The nature and severity of her mental illness is another. The defence has presented extensive evidence that she was desperately unwell and argues that she was psychotic. The prosecution accepts that she had mental-health problems but argues that she nevertheless understood right from wrong and intentionally killed the children.
Those are serious questions because they bear directly upon criminal responsibility.
The internet's disgusting prosecution of Patrick is something different. It often resembles a desperate hunt for a morally satisfactory male culprit when the central facts produce a psychologically uncomfortable result.
This is where an interesting asymmetry appears.
When a man kills his children, we do not ordinarily begin with the proposition that his wife must somehow have driven him to it. Imagine a father strangling three children and then attempting suicide. Imagine thousands of male YouTubers poring over his wife's behaviour, announcing that she worked too much, did not support him emotionally, sent him to the supermarket too often and eventually forced the poor man beyond endurance. Imagine them examining photographs of the grieving mother for insufficient sadness and suggesting that perhaps she secretly murdered the children herself.
The reaction would be volcanic, and rightly so.
We would be told that this was misogyny, victim blaming and an attempt to deny male agency.
Precisely.
Agency cannot be a one-way street. Equality worth having includes equality of moral agency. Women are not merely acted upon by men, institutions, hormones and social structures. They are human beings capable of decisions and therefore, subject to the ordinary qualifications concerning mental incapacity, capable of responsibility for those decisions.
That qualification matters enormously in Lindsay Clancy's case. A person genuinely psychotic may lack the capacity upon which criminal responsibility depends. The jury therefore faces a difficult task. Recognising that possibility is not feminism, anti-feminism or an attack upon motherhood. It is an ancient principle of criminal law: culpability depends not merely upon what somebody physically did but upon the state of mind accompanying the act. The evidence before the jury will decide it, not internet warriors.
One can even understand some of the psychological attraction of the Lindsay Clancy reflex. Many women have experienced exhausting pregnancies, postpartum depression, inadequate medical treatment, unsympathetic partners and overwhelming responsibility for children. They see fragments of their own experiences in Lindsay's story. Sympathy becomes identification. Identification then becomes projection. Once Lindsay becomes "one of us," somebody else must become "them."
This is how feminist ideology can corrupt ordinary reasoning without anyone consciously deciding to abandon evidence. Start with a morally loaded narrative and facts become infinitely malleable. Evidence supporting the narrative is significant; evidence contradicting it becomes evidence of how cleverly the conspiracy has been concealed.
That mechanism is hardly confined to feminists. Political tribes of every description do it. Conspiracy cultures do it. Partisan Republicans and Democrats do it. Leftist ideologues do it all the time. Once collective identity becomes more important than individual evidence, inconvenient individuals cease to be individuals at all. They become representatives of categories.
And category guilt is limitless.
If husbands are guilty because they instantiate patriarchy, men generally participate in the guilt. If masculine culture is responsible, its most visible political representatives are responsible too. That is the feminist case.
Hence Trump. Perhaps the indictment should read: three counts of first-degree dissemination of toxic masculinity.
The joke exposes the problem. Modern ideological explanations frequently confuse increasingly remote causal conditions with moral responsibility. It may be true that a person's upbringing influenced him, that poverty affected her, that culture shaped him, that mental illness impaired her, that a spouse behaved badly, that doctors made mistakes or that society could have done more. Human actions always have causal histories.
But if finding some contributing cause outside the actor transfers responsibility to that cause, individual responsibility eventually disappears altogether.
Every murderer had parents. Every criminal lived in a society. Every violent person inhabited a culture. Every action occurred under a government. Follow the causal chain far enough and the President becomes responsible for every shoplifting offence in Nebraska.
Civilisation cannot operate that way. The Clancy trial ultimately presents a much harder and sadder question than social-media ideology permits. A mother killed her three children. Was she sufficiently mentally ill that the law should regard her as not criminally responsible, or did she understand what she was doing and choose to do it anyway?
That question belongs to the evidence and the jury. The temptation to replace it with "Which man can we blame?" tells us considerably more about contemporary culture than it tells us about the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan.
And if we insist upon travelling down that road, we might as well go all the way.
Donald Trump did it. He radiated toxic masculinity. Case closed. It is where the feminist argument leads. Absurdity and the collapse of the rule of law.