Free Barabbas

Lindsay Clancy and late-stage feminism

Barabbas, staged at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 1956. Photo: Roger Pic / Bibliothèque nationale de France (public domain).

On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband, Patrick, out of the house, then she murdered the three small children who trusted her more completely than anyone in the world — Cora, age 5, Dawson, age 3, and Callan, just eight months old — by choking the life out of them with exercise bands twisted so tightly around their throats that when her husband got home, he was unable to remove the bands. It takes four to five minutes to kill someone by strangulation. That’s a long time when your own child is squirming and gasping in fear and confusion. Clancy then slit her wrists, slit her throat, and jumped out of an upstairs window. She is now paralyzed from the waist down, and her legal team recently argued in court that her postpartum psychosis made her incapable of being held criminally responsible. The case ended in a mistrial last week due to a hung jury, after one holdout juror refused to budge while the other 11 jurors intended to acquit Clancy, believing there was still a shred of doubt. The judge had to privately remind each juror that proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond all possible doubt, but to no avail.

I am less interested in the true crime aspect of this story than in the cultural insight this case provides. The murders of the Clancy children prompted grief in the local town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, where people held vigils and left flowers and stuffed animals near the family’s home. Police who responded to the call were given time off to process the mental anguish of what they saw in that basement, and the public sent food, cards, and gifts to the police department to show their support. Patrick, who described the children as “the essence of my life,” also said, “I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have. The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone — me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients. The very fibers of her soul are loving. All I wish for her now is that she can somehow find peace.”

These reactions are healthy and normal. It’s encouraging to see the small town of Duxbury come together to offer some small measure of comfort to the grieving, to law enforcement, and to each other in what must have been a dispiriting series of months. Patrick later sold their home, divorced his wife, and moved to New York City where he has since remarried. Then the case entered the national conversation. Digital detectives convinced themselves they had figured it out, and that Patrick had actually killed the kids. Some said the evidence for this was his astrological sign. Soon, Clancy had two types of supporters in her corner. There are the women who believe her husband set her up, and there are the women who say that even if she did it, her postpartum psychosis excuses her in one fashion or another. The first group is presumably just factually mistaken, meaning they have the wrong set of facts or are looking at them in the wrong way, but their basic faculties of reasoning appear to be intact. The second group, however, is more disturbing to me. These women seem to be practicing the kind of morally depraved tribalism that we recently got to witness with the Karmelo Anthony case. As I wrote then, “A disturbingly large segment of black America seems to think that not letting blacks kill people is a form of oppression.”

The moral rot in black America

Is this fifth-wave feminism, where we go from respecting whatever kind of identity whatever kind of “woman” tells us they are, to withholding judgment on whatever women do, even including slaughtering their own children, because women are sometimes too hormonal to be held responsible for their own actions, and men just don’t understand? And isn’t that, the idea that women cannot be held responsible because they’re too hormonal, oddly reminiscent of the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from a Victorian-era sexist? In these recent weeks, I have seen numerous videos of women sharing videos of themselves on Instagram, in which they abuse their own children, often by throwing cold water in their own infant’s face, to show solidarity with Clancy, a woman who killed her kids. But even if you believe that she was too far gone mentally to be held criminally liable, why does that therefore translate into support? I can understand the psychological process whereby a boy, brutally molested by a priest, might grow up to become a child rapist. But I am not therefore going to support child rapists, and I am certainly not going to molest a child on camera and then upload it for the world to see that I support such a person. Another thing I noticed in doomscrolling such videos is that all the women appear to be liberal white ladies. As Joe Rogan commented:

If those ladies could see the crime scene and see those dead kids with their fucking vacant eyes staring up because their mother took their life, the last fucking thing that they saw was their mother standing over them … I think everybody that is saying free Lindsay … People are out of their fucking mind … The world is out of its fucking mind. It’s like more of these things come up where you’re like, This can’t be real. This can’t be real. And it is real.

I witnessed my wife go through the miracle of childbirth. I cannot conceive of hurting a child, much less my own. I also possess a masculine desire to hurt people who bring suffering upon women or children. I suspect I would take pleasure in visiting pain upon such people. But I also witnessed the pangs of nine months of pregnancy, the agony of giving birth itself, the disorientation that comes after, the feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, and yes, even despair. Having kids is a beautiful, crazy thing, and it has the power to make women incredibly beautiful, and incredibly crazy. So I have a good deal more sensitivity to this issue, I think, than I see in the commentary by a lot of the male influencers speaking on this. They are quick to say that Clancy should be executed, that she is evil, that she did a horrific thing and that our attention and sympathy should be with her children, not their murderer. I do not disagree, but then, I do not have to disagree in order to understand the madness of motherhood and the reason so many women who have gone through it might see somewhere in Clancy’s tragedy a glimmer of themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I do not go to the other extreme where I can no longer tell that Medea is the villain of the play.

Loaded for Bear

But just as these women, these frenzied Maenads in their sparagmic feminism, seem incapable of seeing past their hysterical empathy, so too do the men seem incapable of making eye contact with the face in the gallows. There is a real rot of over-emotional, moral confusion on the left, where you see various minority groups defend the evil behavior of their own tribe, but there is also an under-emotional, almost psychotic lack of feeling on the right when it comes to rightfully condemning evil on the other side, because I think as with the absurd bear v. man question, the surface of it all is palpably stupid, but if you gaze into the abyss, you begin to sense a desperation gazing back. That is to say, I think when women talk about choosing the bear or understanding Lindsay Clancy, they are also, if not mainly, trying to communicate something about the threats they face that go unacknowledged, and clinging to symbolic cases like these is just one sloppy way of trying to get that attention. Anger is, after all, often the expression of an ignored idea that instrumentalizes rage as a way of getting attention, or getting something done, when you feel you are being unfairly treated, or simply ignored. Sometimes, madness works like anger. But anger is no excuse, not even when it drives you mad. Except as a legal defense…

Dark Satanic Mills

Glasgow entered the 19th century as a city of smoke and money, wrapped in hunger and insecurity. The tobacco lords who had built its stately Georgian squares a generation before now faded away as a new breed of manufacturer emerged, and the Clyde, still narrow enough in some places to ford, was being dredged and deepened into a great commercial artery that would become as wide as the bubbly, backwards Chicago River, shoveling an ominous black tide from the low hills and mill towns of coal country out to the wide world, while those same waters carried home the pale ghost of American cotton and the bone-bleached heaps of West Indian sugar, packed on little brown brigs like ossuaries at sea, all the blood and labor of so many black slaves, including children, slurped up through the straw of respectable Scottish fashion. The whole thing was demonic, but the ladies wore pretty dresses.

Those white Scottish Presbyterians, who were so obsessed with status despite their religious austerity, had tried to turn their commercial wealth into social rank by aping the aristocracy with scarlet cloaks and ebony canes, making a fortune by extending predatory credit to honest Virginia and Maryland planters, then buying their crop at dropped rates, and trapping them in debt. Thomas Jefferson hated them for it, calling their system “the most delusive of all snares.” But times were changing. Britain was still at war with Napoleon, whose defeat at Waterloo was two years away, and the first Industrial Revolution was beginning to raise steam. The days of the theatrical tobacco lords were reaching their end, replaced by the kings of cotton and sugar.

It was, of course, the African slave of the American South who helped create the cotton boom that fed Glasgow’s stiflingly humid and deafeningly loud mills, where women and children endured 12-hour shifts under dim lights, bare feet turned black from the oily floors, breathing airborne cotton fibers that gave them “brown lung,” literally dying to produce fancy dresses. So you had black slaves in America and mill hands in Glasgow and Paisley, all killing themselves to produce yards of neoclassical “empire line” gowns, which became all the rage during Jane Austen’s era (thanks to scandalous portraits of Marie Antoinette). Is it any wonder, then, that it was a cotton factory that inspired William Blake to describe the “dark Satanic Mills” of the Industrial Revolution? But I digress.

This was the Glasgow into which Daniel M’Naghten was born, the illegitimate son of a woodturner. His father owned a workshop on Stockwell Street, in the old heart of the city near the Trongate. M’Naghten grew up to the rasping sound of a lathe, proved to be a good study of the craft, and became an exacting workman. But he wanted his own name on the sign outside, and when his father declined to make him a partner, he walked away, trying his hand at the stage for a time, traveling with the show. But it all came to nothing and by 1835, he was back in Glasgow, and back to woodwork. But he was an intellectually curious man, much more than his fellow craftsmen, who spent their evenings in the local public house. M’Naghten, by contrast, attended the Mechanics’ Institute, that great Victorian engine of self-improvement where clerks and artisans crowded lecture halls to hear about chemistry and political economy. He joined the local debating society too. He taught himself French, not for trade, but so that he might read La Rochefoucauld’s maxims in the original. But along the way, he became convinced that the Tory party was conspiring against him, spying on him, and hatching to destroy his reputation as a woodturner in Glasgow. When his business finally did fail, he not only blamed the Tories, he traveled to London, staked out Whitehall, and shot Prime Minister Robert Peel in the back in 1843.

Only it wasn’t Peel he shot. It was Peel’s private secretary, a man named Edward Drummond, who died days later. M’Naghten was found not guilty by reason of insanity, establishing the M’Naghten rule, which says that if you are too insane to understand your own actions, then you cannot be held criminally responsible. When deciding the case, the House of Lords asked a panel of judges, headed by the lawyer Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, what to do about insane people who commit crimes. It was Tindal, a Tory member of parliament, who coined the phrase “not guilty by reason of insanity,” saying that you cannot really blame someone if they suffer from a “disease of the mind.”

But here’s the rub. Historians Joel Peter Eigen and Roger Smith have since argued that this rule was politically motivated. They claim that because M’Naghten had believed he was being persecuted by the Tories, execution would have made him a martyr and given the public reason to believe his delusion. So, although it infuriated Queen Victoria, who had survived an assassination attempt herself, they enacted “the M’Naghten rule” so that the state could manage politically dangerous people without martyring them. Rather than punish him for dangerous political dissent, and thus inadvertently highlight the content of his message, they instead locked him away for the rest of his life because, they said, he was stark raving mad. That not only neutralized the physical threat, leaving such people to rot away in horrific asylums like Broadmoor or Bethlem, but it labeled the underlying belief ludicrous.

Non compos mentis

New York adopted the M’Naghten rule a few years later. After John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act, tightening the standard and shifting the burden of proof onto the defendant. But this rule was never based on a psychological evaluation or moral analysis. It began as an instrument for silencing dissent. And if you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense otherwise. That is, even if we put aside its troubling origin story, we have to ask ourselves whether it makes sense to go easier on the criminally insane, rather than harder. After all, if a person confesses that they are so crazy that they cannot stop themselves from killing other people, isn’t this a good reason to put them away for a longer period of time rather than a shorter one? A person who chooses to kill can learn to make different choices, but a person who was not in the mental driver’s seat when such a decision was made can never truly reform because no matter how “reformed” they become, it’s not them we’re worried about. It’s the dark passenger who takes the wheel when the person in front of us checks out.

And besides, even if we could get through to that inner self, this doesn’t answer the question of justice. Just because I am able to reform you, or because you finally fully realize the error of your ways and are genuinely remorseful, that doesn’t necessarily mean you do not deserve to be punished. For some, punishment is just a correctional measure to improve the behavior of the sinner. So if you can cure the criminal with therapy or Clockwork Orange indoctrination, there’s no longer any need to punish them for what they’ve done. But another school of thought is that even if you no longer pose a threat, you still owe a debt to the victims. If you murder a young child, you don’t get to reform and live your happily ever after. Your life is forfeit.

The movement around Clancy represents the terminal mutation of an otherwise necessary insight. Women were once disbelieved about rape, domestic violence, medical pain, and coercion. Correcting that injustice was right. But in its most radical form, “believe women” has mutated from a presumptive willingness to listen into an instruction to suspend judgment. Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” was not a triumphant atheist slogan but a civilizational diagnosis. Nietzsche understood that European society was losing confidence in the metaphysical structure supporting its own values while continuing to spend their inherited moral capital. What he feared, but could not adequately name, was that something would eventually occupy the abandoned altar. That something has become smaller and smaller, and more about the individual, and in its narrowing capacity it did not become liberating, though individualism has given us liberating access to rights when formulated within that scope, rather it has simply become increasingly selfish, petty, narcissistic.

We have subsequently found ourselves dropped off on the doorstep of civilizational psychosis. As Nietzsche foretold, we have sacralized weakness and victimhood, and we have done it so thoroughly that we now exalt brutal oppressors and evil individuals merely because they belong to a victim class. We have quite simply begun to lose our sense of what is required to sustain a moral civilization.

Bitter to the Burned Mouth

The intellectual genealogy of today’s identity politics is complicated, but a recognizable line runs through it. Classical Marxism organized society around economic class. When the Western proletariat failed to become revolutionary, thinkers associated with the Frankfurt Institute and the New Left looked elsewhere for agents of transformation. Herbert Marcuse located revolutionary potential among students, racial minorities, social outsiders, and liberation movements abroad. In “Repressive Tolerance,” published in 1965, he went further, arguing that tolerance can preserve domination and that liberation requires intolerance. Critical race theorists took this ball and ran with it, but shifted the focus from explicit racism to systems, structures, narratives, abstract “whiteness,” and other ways of describing reality that allow one to treat racism as a permanent feature of American life and therefore maintain a permanent revolution, no matter how fair our society is. DEI simply translated these racist academic theories into institutional practices now commonly deployed in corporate and academic settings across the West.

And now we arrive at a moment in our history of genuine moral inversion, where we can regularly witness the sentimentalization of killers, the racialization of criminal guilt, and the romanticization of terrorism. You don’t have to be Christian to recognize this perversion as truly satanic. The solution, I believe, is one that any decent parent will recognize. The solution is setting boundaries and being consistent and firm, but without losing our sense of compassion. This is also known as “tough love.” We need to have honest, difficult, and even at times ugly, conversations about a whole host of topics that we have long avoided for fear of offending. We need to embrace Realism (or simply Truth) as a star in the constellation of Western values, no less bright in our esteem than Liberty or Justice. Until we do, these people are going to continue their collective tantrum. That’s how tantrums work.