The Outsider Perspective Issue 501 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to John Mazzei, who is 57 years old and teaches ballroom dance in Lindenhurst. The New York Post reports he has now run six marathons without shoes. Four of them went straight through New York City. He did one of them in 3 hours and 48 minutes for his uncle Thomas Stone, who had ALS. He is skipping this year’s New York race because he is trying to qualify for Boston, barefoot, at 57.

So he started running at 43 and his knees hurt every time, so he quit for years, read Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run,” and took the shoes off. “I haven’t had any issues” since. Gravel is “the hardest thing to run on.” A hot track once gave him blood blisters that “laid me up for a month or so.” Queens gave him potholes filled in jagged, and his verdict on Queens was that he was “not feeling anything adverse on my feet,” which is a sentence only a man with feet like a cast-iron skillet gets to say.

But two details make this. Strangers yell “You forgot your shoes!” at him constantly, and he has a line ready: “I just forgot to tie them and ran right out of them.” And the police once pulled him over mid-training because a man sprinting down a Long Island street with no shoes on looked to them like a man leaving a robbery. Meb Keflezighi, who won New York in 2009, signed Mazzei’s foot. He wrote “Run to win.”

As equally crazy this week, I’m writing about the four hundred people who stood outside a Massachusetts courthouse in pink for Lindsay Clancy, and what it says about a country that keeps falling in love with murderers.

Quick Hits:

Eric Swalwell finally has to answer for Fang Fang. On Monday the White House Government Transparency Task Force released FBI records that President Trump declassified, covering the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into Christine Fang, the suspected Chinese intelligence operative who spent years working California politicians. Axios reported the existence of that investigation back in December 2020. What is new is what Swalwell told the FBI himself, at the Oakland field office in May 2015 and March 2016. He admitted “physical relations” with Fang on a “handful of occasions,” while insisting he “never dated her or had a romantic relationship.” Of one encounter, the files say he “barely remembers the event because he had taken Ambien.” The bureau found she had used “conduits to conceal herself as a prohibited foreign-national source,” steering money into campaigns at least twice in 2013 and twice more in 2014. The FBI pulled him aside for a defensive briefing in late April 2015, and he claims to have cut ties with Fang after that. We’ll get to learn the truth now…

Where you can find me this week

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The Left Never Banned Dangerous Guns – It Banned The Ones It Could Get – Conservative Institute

Lindsay Clancy’s Online Defenders And The True Crime Double Standard – Conservative Institute

The DSA Says It Wants To Overthrow The Constitution. Believe Them. – Conservative Institute

Lindsay Clancy Is No Victim

Four hundred people stood outside a Massachusetts courthouse in pink for a mother who strangled a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old. Nobody disputes she did it. They are asking the country to say it does not count.

They started arriving at seven in the morning on Thursday, August 20, and by the time court opened there were hundreds of them outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, about forty miles south of Boston. The Associated Press counted about three hundred, and the Boston Globe put it at more than four hundred. Almost all of them were women, and all of them wore pink.

They carried no signs. NBC10 Boston reported that they stood in silence, which was the plan. Their shirts did the talking, and the shirts said Believe, She Needed Help, and Peace For Lindsay. They held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer together. Some raised their arms and made hearts with their hands, and a few carried the flags of other countries to show the support had come from overseas. When Kevin Reddington arrived, the defense lawyer for the woman on trial inside, they broke into applause.

Renee Kimball, forty, had driven down from Maine. She posted the idea on TikTok at one in the morning and it went further than she expected. By Thursday it had spawned sympathy events in more than eighteen states, and in Britain, South Africa and the Netherlands.

Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their names were said once all morning, by Kimball, in her closing remarks. “It should not take the lives of Cora and Callan and Dawson and nearly Lindsay,” she said, “for psychiatric doctors to hear their patients.” Three murdered children and the woman charged with murdering them, counted off in one breath as four casualties of the same misfortune. Their father’s name was not said at all.

And the jurors had to walk through it. They filed past the women in pink to reach the courthouse door. Once they were inside, the judge called each of them up to the bench, one at a time, and asked what they had just seen.

Patrick Clancy forgave her. The law is not his to forgive.

Lindsay Clancy’s own lawyer says she did it. So does the prosecution. Daniel Medwed, who teaches criminal law at Northeastern University in Boston, described the case in one line: “It’s not a ‘whodunnit?’ case, right?”

On the evening of January 24, 2023, in the family’s home in Duxbury, a coastal town south of Boston, Clancy sent her husband out on an errand. Prosecutors say she used the time. She strangled all three children in the basement, and then she went out a second-story window in what her lawyers call a suicide attempt. She survived it, paralyzed from the waist down. She was thirty-two, and she worked as a labor and delivery nurse. She had spent her career helping other women have babies.

She is charged with three counts of first-degree murder, the most serious homicide charge Massachusetts has, and she has pleaded not guilty. The trial began in late July and the defense is expected to rest today. The jury has one question. It is whether she was criminally responsible when she did it, which in Massachusetts means whether mental illness left her unable to understand that what she was doing was wrong, or unable to stop herself. If the jury says she was not responsible, she is not convicted of anything at all.

And four days after his children died, their father wrote about them. Patrick Clancy posted a statement on the family’s GoFundMe page and took each of them in turn. Cora had an infectious laugh. Dawson was kind. The baby, Callan, could settle his father down when nothing else would. Patrick Clancy wrote that four days after she killed him. “They gave me purpose and I never took it for granted,” he wrote. “There is now a massive void where that purpose once was.”

Then he wrote this: “I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have.”

He meant it.

He is entitled to that. It is his to give and nobody else’s, and he paid a price for it that no one in that parking lot has paid or ever will.

But a man’s decision to survive his own grief is not a jury instruction. Private mercy is not a public verdict. What one father carries is not what the law owes three dead children.

The one person on earth with standing to ask the country for mercy asked for it in public, in writing, three years ago. On Thursday, four hundred people assembled in the name of mercy and never mentioned him.

Toxic empathy built that crowd. Toxic femininity is what it became.

The first half has a name, and a conservative gave it. Allie Beth Stuckey, the Christian commentator who hosts the podcast Relatable, named it in her 2024 book Toxic Empathy. She defines it as “the use of empathy as a kind of a mallet of manipulation,” a tool for telling people that in order to be a good person, this is the stance you must take. Your feeling for someone becomes an obligation to approve of what they did.

The mechanics underneath it come from the other side of the aisle. Paul Bloom spent two decades teaching psychology at Yale, and in 2016 he published Against Empathy, which argues that empathy makes moral judgment worse rather than better. “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now,” he wrote. “This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.” Empathy, he added, “is innumerate, favoring the one over the many.”

But a spotlight has to be pointed at something. The Clancy trial is streamed live on Court TV and half a dozen other outlets, and Lindsay Clancy is on camera in her wheelchair for the length of it. She has a lawyer, an organizer, a hashtag, and four hundred people in a parking lot. Cora, Dawson and Callan have three first names and three ages. Nobody has ever interviewed a dead child. The crowd is looking at the only person in this story who is still available to be looked at.

The other half is the one nobody will name. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, gave toxic masculinity its academic definition in the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2005. It is “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” He drew a careful limit around it, and the limit is the useful part. There is nothing “especially toxic,” he wrote, in “a man’s pride in his ability to win at sports, to maintain solidarity with a friend, to succeed at work, or to provide for his family.”

Kupers is doing two things there. He names a cluster of traits that are destructive at any dose, and then he fences off the ordinary virtues so nobody mistakes his argument for an attack on men as such. Not every man. Not masculinity itself. A specific constellation, named and bounded.

So the same test runs on the other sex, and it works exactly as well. Compassion, nurture, solidarity with a woman who is hurting, identification strong enough that another woman’s pain registers as your own. Every one of those is a virtue, and most of the good in the world runs on them. Past the limit they produce a different constellation: mercy handed out on the basis of sex rather than conduct, identification with whichever woman is visible, and the disappearance of anyone who cannot be identified with.

That is toxic femininity.

Four hundred people stood in Plymouth on Thursday for a woman whose lawyer concedes she strangled three children. Renee Kimball put it into a microphone: “I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us.” That is identification doing the work a verdict is supposed to do. They applauded her attorney. They named her children once. They never named their father. The women in pink are reflecting every ounce of toxicity in this case. It is bewildering to watch them do that while also holding children. Praising a child killer while raising their own babies.

Twenty-nine thousand strangers funded the wrong family

I wrote about the fundraising in my column on Wednesday, and the numbers have moved since.

The Musgrove Family Fund takes its name from Mike and Paula Musgrove, Lindsay Clancy’s parents. Brandee Mulligan opened it on GoFundMe on August 11. She lives in Wisconsin and had never met any of them. As of Friday morning it had collected $971,597 from 29,700 donations in ten days. It exists to rebuild the savings her parents spent on three years of travel, lodging and living costs while standing by her. The Duxbury Clipper, the weekly paper in the family’s hometown, reports they are also paying for her defense, and have depleted nearly everything they have doing it.

And the same public did something else in 2023. In the weeks after the killings, a GoFundMe raised for Patrick Clancy passed a million dollars, and not a dollar of it went to his wife’s defense. Three years later the public gave her parents nearly a million more. Same website. Same country. The sympathy did not shrink. It changed sides.

Two other sets of grandparents buried more children than that this summer. On July 24, in Grand Haven Township, Michigan, Kristopher Karolkiewicz shot his wife Mandy and their six children, two of them adopted, set the house on fire, and killed himself. There were four boys, aged fifteen, twelve, eleven and five, and two girls, both eleven, and Becky and Steve Lawwill lost their daughter and all six grandchildren in one morning. A GoFundMe for them has collected $43,981 from 487 donations in a month. The sheriff’s office never released the children’s names, and the public never learned them, because nobody built a campaign to make them famous.

And in April, Shamar Elkins shot eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, seven of them his own. Three local funds raised roughly thirty-seven thousand dollars between them. More than twelve thousand of it went back to the donors, because the charity holding it could not lawfully hand it to the families.

Both of the big funds go to grandparents of murdered children, and one set of grandparents also raised the killer. That set has received twenty-two times more money. Luigi Mangione, who shot the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in the back on a Manhattan sidewalk, has a legal defense fund that passed a million dollars too. That is what a spotlight does to a country’s arithmetic.

She cleared the house first, and psychosis does not plan

The women outside are talking about postpartum depression. That is the exhaustion and despair that follows childbirth for roughly one in eight American mothers. It is common, and many of them have had it, which is what makes the story feel as though it could happen to anyone.

The defense is arguing something else. Postpartum psychosis is a rarer and far more serious break in which a woman loses contact with reality, and it strikes an estimated one to two women in every thousand births. Depression is a condition that makes coping impossible. Psychosis is the basis for a claim that she did not know what she was doing was wrong. The rally is running on the first one. The verdict turns on the second.

The prosecution says she made room for the killings. She sent her husband out to pick up takeout and stop at the pharmacy, which is how she came to have the house to herself. She used the time that errand bought her. She killed one child, then the second, then the third.

But a woman in the grip of a psychotic break does not send her husband out for takeout to clear the house. Planning is the thing psychosis is supposed to have taken from her, and the planning is the most documented fact in the case. That is the whole legal question, and it is the one question the women in pink outside that courthouse have never had to answer.

A father who snaps gets twenty years. She is asking for zero.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is what the state calls itself in court, settled this a long time ago. It has a rule for a person who loses control.

If something happens that would push a reasonable person past the point of self-restraint, and it actually pushed this person past it, the killing stops being murder. The state’s instructions to juries describe a state of “passion, anger, fear, fright, or nervous excitement” that would “overwhelm his capacity for reflection or restraint.” The charge becomes voluntary manslaughter, which in Massachusetts carries up to twenty years. He goes to prison anyway. He is still a man who killed someone and he is still guilty of it. That is the entire mercy, and it stops there.

The classic version is a man who comes home and finds his wife with another man. Overwhelmed capacity, in the plainest form American law recognizes, and he is convicted of manslaughter and serves every day of the sentence.

And the rule has a condition attached. The provocation has to come from the person who died. The man who walked in on his wife has an actual act, committed by the person he then killed, and he still goes away for it. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old and could not sit up unassisted. They did not provoke anyone and they were not capable of it. So the rule that demands a real wrong, done by the person who died, still puts a man in prison for twenty years. The defense being argued in Plymouth demands nothing of the sort, and costs nothing at all.

Canada wrote the sex difference straight into its criminal code. Infanticide there is an offense only “a female person” can commit, and it carries a maximum of five years. Murder in Canada carries life. Britain’s Infanticide Act of 1938 is the template and roughly two dozen countries copied it. No American state has an infanticide offense, and Illinois alone lets a mother’s postpartum illness cut her sentence. The rest of the country never needed a statute, because juries do it without being asked.

The research says what the statutes say. Finnish investigators reviewed every child killing in that country across twenty-five years and looked at the cases where a parent survived to be examined and tried. Of thirty-eight mothers, 76 percent were found not criminally responsible. Of twenty fathers and stepfathers, 18 percent were.

Heather Stangle made this argument in 2008, in a note for the William & Mary Law Review, and she made it from feminist legal theory. The science under these laws is not there: “no link to postpartum hormones and female violence has been firmly established.” The mercy insults the women receiving it, because a sex-specific defense “presupposes that women are weak and ruled by their hormones.” And when the legal system caters to old ideas about femininity, she wrote, “it overlooks the value of the infants and children women kill.”

Susan Hatters Friedman is a professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University who has spent her career studying mothers who kill their children. Three weeks ago, in the middle of this trial, she told the Boston Globe what nobody in that parking lot will say. “Men can get depressed due to other factors, can get depressed if there’s a new baby,” she said. “Is it going down the right road to create different laws for women than men?”

A father who kills his children while depressed goes to prison. A mother who kills her children while depressed goes to a hospital and gets a fundraiser. Nobody has explained why, because explaining it out loud would mean saying that women are different in a way that changes what a killing is worth. There is a loud argument running in American politics about whether anyone can even define the word woman. That argument goes quiet in a courtroom. When a mother kills her children, being a woman becomes the most legally consequential fact about her, and everyone in the room proceeds as though they know exactly what the word means.

The defense bought the man who wrote the rules

The final witness for the defense is scheduled to testify today by video link. His name is Phillip Resnick, and he is a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Resnick supplied the vocabulary this trial is conducted in. He wrote the founding papers on parents who kill their own children, work American courts have leaned on for half a century. In 2015 he and Susan Hatters Friedman published a summary in Psychiatric Times of what happens to those parents afterward. Two sentences from it:

“Mothers who kill their children are much more likely than fathers to pursue an insanity defense successfully.”

“After a filicide, fathers are more often incarcerated than mothers, while mothers are more frequently hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.”

Filicide is the killing of one’s own child. Resnick wrote down the pattern in 2015. Today he is being paid to produce it.

He has been in this chair before. The Duxbury Clipper lists two of his prior cases, Susan Smith and Casey Anthony. It leaves out the one that matters most here. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston in 2001, and Resnick testified for her defense. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and she went to a hospital.

So that is the machinery. Twelve ordinary people are asked to weigh a diagnosis they have no way to check, delivered by the man who defined the diagnosis and retained by the woman who needs it.

The defense’s evidence for the psychosis is thinner than the crowd outside believes. On Thursday a board-certified chaplain named Sheila Cavanaugh testified about the months she spent with Clancy after the killings, across three hospitals, more than two hundred visits in all. She told the jury Clancy had described a voice, and that the voice said if she did not obey it, neither she nor her children would be safe. On cross-examination prosecutors established something about the chaplain’s notes. Cavanaugh had written down other things Clancy said, word for word, across those visits. The voice is not in the notes. It arrives in the retelling, years later, on the witness stand.

And the defense went looking for a witness on TikTok. Reddington tried to add a creator to the witness list to describe conditions at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric facility outside Boston where Clancy was treated weeks before the killings. Judge William Sullivan shut it down from the bench: “If it’s a five-star and she may say it’s a two-star, you know, this is not TripAdvisor. I wouldn’t allow that.” Reddington, arguing for her, told the court: “I hardly know what TikTok is.”

That is what the defense has. A voice that surfaces years afterward rather than in the record, and a witness it found on a video app. Then the man who wrote the literature, appearing by video to confirm what his own literature predicts. The crowd outside is not deferring to science. It reached its verdict in a parking lot, and the defense is shopping for something to hand the twelve people who have not reached theirs yet.

Mercy here is a reward for performing grief correctly

The mercy the crowd is demanding for Lindsay Clancy is real and it is available, and it comes with a condition. It goes to women who perform grief correctly in public.

Susan Smith drowned her two sons in a South Carolina lake in 1994. Michael was three and Alex was fourteen months. She strapped them into their car seats and rolled the car into the water. Then she told police a Black man had carjacked her and driven off with her children. The country searched for nine days. When the truth came out, the sympathy did not soften into a psychiatric argument. She was sentenced to life in 1995, became eligible for parole after thirty years, and was denied in 2024.

Casey Anthony was acquitted. Her two-year-old daughter Caylee disappeared in Florida in 2008 and turned up dead in a wooded lot nearly six months later. Anthony went thirty-one days without reporting the child missing, and spent them out partying. A jury found her not guilty of murder in 2011. That should have ended it. A CBS News report on an E-Poll survey that month found that among Americans who knew who she was, 94 percent disliked her, more than disliked O.J. Simpson.

And Anthony had the camera. Hers was the most televised trial of its era, and she was a mother on screen every day for six weeks. The spotlight found her and the sympathy never came. So the spotlight is not what does this. The spotlight plus the script is what does it, and Lindsay Clancy has both.

Elizabeth Rapaport, a law professor at the University of New Mexico, named the mechanism twenty years ago in the Fordham Urban Law Journal. The outcome in these cases, she found, “hinges on whether the jury sees her as a good mother,” rather than on whether prosecutors proved what they charged.

The women in pink believe they are fighting for compassion toward mentally ill women. What they are defending is a reward for a performance, handed out by strangers and revoked the moment the performance slips. And no father has ever been offered the script at all. There is nothing Kristopher Karolkiewicz’s family could have worn or said or posted that would have put four hundred people in a parking lot in Michigan.

Massachusetts cannot promise she serves a single day

Massachusetts struck down its death penalty in 1984, when the state’s highest court found the law unconstitutional, and every attempt to replace it since has failed. There is no capital statute in Massachusetts. For strangling a five-year-old, a three-year-old and an eight-month-old, the worst the state can do to Lindsay Clancy is keep her in prison until she dies.

If the insanity defense works, it cannot even do that. She is not sentenced, because she is not convicted of anything. She is committed to a state psychiatric hospital, and she stays there as long as her doctors and a judge agree she should stay, and not one day longer.

Andrea Yates went to a state hospital in Texas instead of a prison. Her attorney, George Parnham, was asked years later about the possibility of her eventual release and gave the honest answer. “That is always on the horizon.”

That is what the women in pink are asking for. Nobody opposes better psychiatric care, and no verdict in Plymouth will deliver any to anyone. What a verdict can deliver is a finding that she is not guilty of anything.

She deserves the fullest punishment the law can impose. She sent her husband out of the house. She had the time and she used it. She killed one child, and then she killed the second, and then she killed the third. That the fullest punishment available in that state is as thin as it is tells you something about Massachusetts and nothing about her. A state that will not execute a woman who did that, and cannot promise she will serve a single day, has lost the ability to name evil when it is sitting in the room. Four hundred people came to applaud her lawyer on the courthouse steps.

What stood outside that courthouse was toxic femininity

Toxic masculinity is not a fringe idea and it is not going anywhere. The phrase has been in the American press since 1990. It survived a multi-year fight over the American Psychological Association’s 2018 practice guidelines for treating men and boys, and any man who reads anything knows it.

It gets applied to men who kill their families, by name, in print. The novelist Ani Katz, writing in the crime magazine CrimeReads about fathers who murder everyone in the house, put the blame on the culture that raised them: “The real villains are the forces that tell men they must be providers and protectors, and that if they fail they may as well not be men at all.” The Cornell philosopher Kate Manne has placed the same men “on the most extreme end of a spectrum of toxic masculinity.”

Nobody has written the matching sentence about a mother, so here it is. Lindsay Clancy cleared the house, strangled a five-year-old, then a three-year-old, then an infant, and her defense is that being a mother did it to her. If Katz and Manne are right that fatherhood’s demands built the men who kill their families, then motherhood’s demands built her, and she belongs on the same spectrum they put those men on. Nobody will write that sentence, and it is no less true than theirs.

When a woman kills her children the explanation offered is her illness, which is a fact about her alone, and mercy usually follows it. When a man kills his children the explanation reaches for his sex, which is a fact about every man alive, and indictment follows it. Both of those explanations excuse the individual. Only one of them convicts a category.

What assembled outside Plymouth Superior Court on Thursday morning was toxic femininity. Not four hundred bad women, any more than toxic masculinity means four hundred bad men. A constellation of rewarded female traits, carried past the point where they do any good. Compassion for a woman who strangled a five-year-old crowded out the five-year-old, and a crowd that came to talk about mercy could not manage her children’s names more than once.

And it was not harmless. Twelve jurors had to walk through it to reach the door, and the judge thought the risk serious enough to call every one of them to the bench and ask what they had just seen. That is the cost of a virtue past its limit. Four hundred women made a sitting jury walk a gauntlet in a triple child murder, and every one of them believed she was being kind.

They will never call it that, and the refusal is the whole reason Thursday will happen again.

Four hundred people came for the mother and forgot the children

This entire trial has exposed a deep sickness, particularly among a certain set of true crime fan women. Lindsay Clancy is a murderer. She planned everything, and then tried to kill herself. Nothing in that process required killing the children. She could have started at the end, throwing herself out the window. She chose first degree murder instead.

The women in pink are pretending Clancy is the real victim. That’s gross, obscene, and spits on the graves of the children. It also shows an innate devaluation of human children. Had Lindsay Clancy murdered kittens or puppies, not one of those women would protest for her. The protestors are supporting the targeted killing by a psychopathic woman.

Our justice system exists to say that this person did that to those children, and will answer for it. She shouldn’t get a free pass for claiming some mental issues. She planned it. She chose everything.

The protestors are not honoring the dead. They are building an idol to a murderer of children. That’s how toxic empathy and femininity are showing up in this trial. There’s no defense for what Clancy did, or these protestors in pink. And the trial reveals a deep moral rot.