The pink hats once signalled a simple demand: listen to women. In the years after 2017 they became the visual shorthand for a politics that treated female testimony as presumptively true and male accounts as presumptively suspect. #BelieveAllWomen was never a careful evidentiary rule. It was a tribal slogan. Its logical end point is visible now in the online and offline defence of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who, by her own defence's admission, strangled her three young children with exercise bands before attempting to kill herself. What began as solidarity with a woman in crisis has hardened into something closer to collective denial of the facts and of the rule of law itself.
The legal case is not mysterious. Prosecutors allege premeditation; the defence accepts that Clancy performed the acts but argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore not criminally responsible. That is a defence the justice system is equipped to test with evidence, expert testimony, and a jury. What the justice system is not equipped to do is accommodate a parallel popular verdict that simply rewrites the event. On TikTok and in pink-clad gatherings outside the courthouse, a different story has taken hold: the husband must have done it, or framed her, or driven her to it by neglect. The children become secondary. The woman's suffering, real or imagined, becomes the sole moral centre. Evidence that contradicts the preferred narrative is dismissed as patriarchal gaslighting. The result is not compassion. It is the substitution of identity for adjudication.
This is female tribalism in its pure form. The same cultural current that once insisted every accusation of sexual misconduct must be believed "come what may" now insists that a mother's violent acts against her own children must be reframed, minimised, or transferred onto a man. The mechanism is identical: the group's emotional and political solidarity takes precedence over the individual case's facts. Rule of law requires the opposite. It demands that the same standards of evidence, intent, and responsibility apply regardless of the defendant's sex or maternal status. When large numbers of women organise around the premise that one of their own cannot be fully accountable because she is one of their own, the principle collapses.
Postpartum mental illness is real and can be catastrophic. That reality does not license a cultural exemption from ordinary moral and legal categories. Societies that treat maternal violence as either unthinkable or automatically exculpatory do not protect children; they abandon them. The dead have no voice on TikTok. Their interests are represented only by the formal system of charges, evidence, and judgment. When that system is treated as illegitimate the moment it threatens a favoured identity, the "moms of TikTok" are not expanding empathy. They are contracting the zone of equal protection under law.
The pink-hat politics of the late 2010s helped create the conditions for this. It trained a generation to view institutional processes with suspicion whenever those processes produced outcomes that felt insufficiently protective of women as a class. It elevated belief over proof and solidarity over scrutiny. Once that habit of mind is established, it does not remain confined to campus tribunals or workplace investigations. It migrates to criminal courtrooms and true-crime feeds. The same reflex that once demanded uncritical acceptance of every allegation now demands uncritical acceptance of every maternal explanation, no matter how extreme the underlying acts.
A free society can afford neither the old presumption that women never lie nor the new presumption that women cannot be fully responsible. Both are forms of exceptionalism. The rule of law is the refusal of exceptionalism. It is the insistence that the same rules bind the powerful and the popular, the sympathetic and the unsympathetic, the mother and the stranger. When a segment of the culture decides that one identity group is exempt from that insistence, the rest of the culture eventually notices. Trust erodes. Cynicism spreads. And the next time a genuine victim needs the protection of neutral process, that process will already have been hollowed out by the prior decision that process itself is optional when the tribe is on the line.
The children are dead. The trial will produce a verdict according to the evidence. Whether the online and offline chorus accepts that verdict will tell us how far the logic of "trust all women, come what may" has travelled from protest slogan to operating philosophy. The distance, so far, is not reassuring.
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-moms-tiktok-insane-manosphere-momosphere-children-lindsey-clancy