Tag: lindsay-clancy

In my column last week about land acknowledgments, I mentioned that there are some depressing stories in the news lately. 

I wrote one sentence with two examples, referring to a recently signed law in Massachusetts legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth, and the Lindsay Clancy murder trial: “A frightening percentage of American women have apparently lost their minds, and are celebrating and bragging about legislation that allows abortion right up until the baby’s head crowns, and – on a related note – are hailing as a heroine a disturbed woman who meticulously planned and carried out the strangulation of her three small children.”

A good friend of mine who is a well-intentioned lefty emailed me to say that he thought those lines were rage-baiting, and a caricature that unfairly portrayed leftists as monsters.  Because I know that he is a good man, I’m writing a personal response to him to clarify my thoughts.  But as I was doing that, I realized that there may be some value in sharing what I was getting at with you, faithful reader. 

So first, to get an obligatory disclaimer out of the way: I understand “rage baiting” to mean posting something provocative that you don’t really believe, with the intention of getting people angry and upset, in order to generate clicks and (ultimately) money.  If I’ve got that definition right, I’ve never posted rage bait in my life. 

I believe everything that I write here – allowing for some exaggeration and hyperbole for comic effect – and I write to discuss issues I find engaging and important, to get some catharsis from mocking dimwits and bad-faith actors in our politics and media, and also to provide some entertainment and (hopefully) some laughs.  Other than a few folks who occasionally hit my tip jar, I don’t make money from this page.  Fortunately for me, I don’t need to. 

So, when it comes to whether I think all lefties or Dems are morally monstrous, of course I don’t.  I know too many good-hearted lefties – friends, family members, colleagues from my university teaching career – to believe that.

But I do see a lot of disturbing behavior on the left lately – especially in the elite Left in politics and media, as well as in the most energized base of the Democrat party – and in ways that I don’t think were common in lefties from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.  Worst of all, I think that a lot of it is not coming from the far extreme fringes of the left, but from the mainstream.  Which is WAY more troubling to me, and I think should be to all decent people, whatever their politics.

I had three main trends in mind when I came across the Clancy killings story.  First, the ghoulish glee and celebrations over Charlie Kirk’s murder (wounds that have been freshly re-opened, as a lot of evil people geared up to celebrate the anniversary of his assassination, in a quasi-holiday they’ve dubbed “the Kirk-aversary).  Second, the mainstream left’s transformed view of abortion from a troubling but necessary option into a positive good.  Third, the widespread and socially sanctioned justification of and satisfaction over Luigi Mangione’s murder of a health care CEO.  

All of those examples are even more disturbing because of what they share. They all fall under the umbrella of the mainstream left increasingly approving of violence to advance their political goals.  There is a lot of polling documenting this trend, and also a consistent political gap on this issue; leftists are much more likely than conservatives to agree that political violence is acceptable in varying circumstances (i.e. rarely, sometimes, or often). 

The Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione examples seem much more morally black-and-white than abortion (which encompasses many ethically fraught complications in which competing interests must be balanced).  Because decent people aren’t supposed to celebrate and lionize the murder of non-violent people for their political opinions with which you disagree!  

I know: assassinations and attempts have always happened on the far fringes.  Oswald killed JFK, Hinckley shot Reagan, that nutjob killed John Lennon, three leftists (and counting) have tried to murder Trump, etc.  Those a-holes often became infamous, but they didn’t become celebrities, lauded by both mainstream politicians and seemingly normal everyday people, like the literally tens of thousands of seemingly normie leftists who celebrated the assassination of Charlie, and mourned the failure of Trump’s would-be assassins. 

And yes, there have always been at least a few deranged women who became groupies of famous murderers like Manson, Bundy, etc. some even marrying or getting impregnated by deranged murderers while they were on death row.  But look at the Mangioni cult!  He shot a father and husband in the back like a coward, for the terrible sin of being an executive in a field that the left disapproves of.  And tons of high-profile leftist celebrities and politicians openly praised him and his actions, not to mention the many thousands of sick women publicly fantasizing about banging him, because he’s a cute murderer with the proper leftist politics.

Even on abortion, the mainstream left has gone so far to the extreme that old-school Dems would be horrified.  I didn’t love the traditional mainstream leftist take on abortion – it should be “safe, legal, and rare” – but I recognize that that was better than what the left is supporting now.  (That “rare” was an acknowledgment that a moral tradeoff was being made, the implication being that abortion was the lesser of two evils, rather than a positive good.)

Today mainstream lefties argue that formerly taboo late-term abortions are something to be normalized and even celebrated, as embodied through the “Shout your Abortion” movement, lefty pols and celebrities crediting their abortions for being crucial to their success in life, and etc.

Thus the August signing of an abortion bill getting rid of all restrictions right up through the ninth month, by Massachusetts governor Maura Healy.  The tone was celebratory, and she was surrounded by smiling, applauding women when she signed it.  If you watched it with the sound off, you’d have thought it was a bill to build a new hospital or school.  The only things missing were the party hats and noisemakers.

And yes, that strikes me as deeply creepy, and morally troubling.  Especially because I am old enough to remember when everybody knew that men and women were different, and that their primary differences were hard-wired, either by God (spoiler alert: Yep!) or by evolutionary biology (that too, IMHO).   Men’s prime directive (among their other goals) was to be aggressive in the protection and defense of women and children, and women’s prime directive (among their other goals) was to be nurturing and empathetic, in consonance with their maternal instincts.  

I know.  That all sounds so archaic and absurd! If only it had the common sense, logic and primo results of today’s enlightened geniuses who don’t know what a woman is: 42 genders, and 84 pronouns, and slicing up your natural, functional genitalia to produce sterility, hostility and raging bouts of suicidal ideation.  We should definitely give them more control over our lives!

Anyway, the traditional, normative picture – whether religious or secular – is of men putting themselves in the front lines of danger.  If their village is under attack from a neighboring tribe, they send the women and children to the safest building in the middle of the village, and then they fight the invaders to the death.  If all of the men are killed or gravely wounded, the women push their babies back behind them, and face the enemy at the door, doing everything they can to save their kids, or die trying. 

Similarly, if the Titanic is sinking, the men sacrifice themselves, so that “women and children first” get into the lifeboats.  If a woman and her children are trapped in a burning building, the mothers will always try to shelter their babies with their own bodies, so that when the firefighters arrive, if any survivors are found, they are the babies.

Isn’t that the moral scenario that you picture?  And wouldn’t you have instinctive contempt for a man who elbowed a few women or children out of a lifeboat to save himself, or for a mother who tossed her infant to a tiger so that she could escape?

That’s how I felt when I saw the crowds of people with the “Free Luigi” signs, and the hordes of women eager to sexually service that slimy, murderous little coward.  And that’s how I felt when I saw the thousands of unhinged videos celebrating Charlie’s murder.  Most of those were made by women.  Even worse, among those whose profession was disclosed, the traditional “helping” professions – teachers, nurses, social workers – were disproportionally over-represented! 

And that’s how I felt when I saw the social media posts and the protests by the women wearing pink, and supporting Lindsay Clancy.  These are mothers, relating to the Clancy story AS mothers. And yet they expressed no maternal instincts, barely even mentioning the dead children, and directing much of their scorn at Clancy’s husband, who many accused of being the real murderer. They also poured vitriol on the (male) doctors, and health insurers, and drug companies, all of whom were much MUCH worse and more culpable than poor, angelic Lindsay!

Having said all that, I still have a lot of empathy for Lindsay Clancy, because whether she was insane or just deeply distressed, she is truly a tragic figure either way.  She was obviously despairing, and even if she is able to avoid legal responsibility for the killings, she has to live the rest of her life paralyzed, and knowing that she killed her three beautiful kids.  And no legal punishment can be worse than that.

But these women – along with their counterparts smiling in Maura Healy’s office, and in the Tyler Robinson fan club, and in the Luigi Mangioni fan club – are frightening. Many of them talked as if they had been in Lindsay’s exact same position and could totally empathize.  (Again, not with the three dead children, or the grieving husband who lost them.)  But of course that’s not true, because none of them murdered their own children.  Doing so is vanishingly rare.  It should shock the conscience of all mothers to contemplate it – and it does, for millions – rather than evoking vicarious excitement and solidarity, and a kind of empathy that almost seemed to shade into admiration.

As I was thinking about all of this, a short video popped up in my feed.  It showed a young female comedian in a comedy club, doing an edgy, dark-humor routine.  This lady received the question, “Why do you think the women in this generation are doomed?”  Her answer: “When a man harms a child, even prison inmates make him a target; even violent criminals know there’s a line you don’t cross.  But when a woman harms a child, she gets a fan club and a million dollars.”

Okay, not exactly a family-friendly joke.  And in this sad context, none of us feels like laughing.  But that joke works because it has one essential thing: a grain of truth, which the audience recognizes. 

I can’t see into the hearts of the women championing Lindsay Clancy, and that’s God’s job anyway, so I wouldn’t presume to do it.

But I saw how they acted and what they did, and I heard what they said.  Instead of empathizing with Lindsay but still condemning her actions, they acted out the punch line of that sad, dark joke: they formed a fan club for her, and donated more than a million dollars to her.

For the sake of our nation and of our souls, the Left – and the rest of us – needs to do, and to be, better.

Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!

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