Therapeutic explanations have dominated both sides of the Lindsay Clancy debate. But the most instructive and constructive explanation is ignored: the ideological.[1] Whatever mental illness or medications permitted Clancy to murder, the mass following she has generated among women is driven by a political ideology: feminism. And it is not credible to believe that her deed is disconnected from the empathy and celebration of it by hordes of outspoken women. What she did has touched a nerve and inspired many others who are, in their way, rebelling in solidarity with her.
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That is what ideologies do, after all. They express the desire to rebel, unite the rebels, articulate their grievances, identify their “oppressors,” and drive them to act.
It does not matter if they are not all doctrinaire feminists, mouthing the approved party line. Ideologies never result in the utopia promised by the ideologues. Nor do they remain long in pure form. Once the ideas trickle down to the masses, often vulgarized, they can go every which way, as the less educated pick and choose the bits they want to hear. This is why they invariably bring untended consequences. Still, the responsibility for unleashing the chaos lies with feminism.
Janice Fiamengo has stated this case with unexceptionable logic: “Decades of feminist grievance-mongering have produced this bitter fruit.”
If you tell a group of people that they are uniquely victimized, that they’re innocent victims, that they shouldn’t have to take responsibility for any of the things wrong in their lives, that they are right to feel aggrieved, you will create in them a victim mentality[.] … [P]eople who believe that their victimhood is the central fact of their identity … dwell on it. They see everything through the victimhood lens. … [And] those that they identify as part of the oppressor group … they feel justified in taking revenge on those people.[2]
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But feminism’s destruction extends beyond encouraging the victim mentality familiar from other identity politics. In fact, it may reach deeper than any other radical ideology in modern history. These women are in rebellion against the few lingering vestiges of sexual and reproductive law and order that still manage to limit the most precious thing feminism gave them: their exclusive and unchallenged control over sex and children — the two things that always confer power on women. They are in revolt against marriage, families, children (especially legitimate children), motherhood (at least married motherhood), and fatherhood above all — the essential prerequisites for civilization.
“The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.”
This explains their determination to turn the tables, not simply to exculpate Clancy and other murderesses, including potentially themselves. They must also ensure that the men are eliminated — at best neutered and preferably punished with removal to the only place for superfluous men: incarceration. “Even if Lindsay Clancy did it, she didn’t do it,” Fiamengo writes, quoting women on social media, “and even if Patrick Clancy didn’t do it, he did it.” The feminist denial of justice in this and numerous other courtrooms thus extends if necessary to defiance of reality, as ideology trumps all. “That to me sums up the feminist mentality to a T,” says Fiamengo. “Women are always the innocent victims of male oppression. And men are … always to be held responsible, even for things that women do.”
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Major features of this case mirror feminism’s other resentments, perversions of justice, and obsession with eliminating any regulation of their monopoly control over the society’s terms of reproduction.
Foremost is the refusal to acknowledge that women can inflict violence on their own children, though it has long been known that women commit the overwhelming preponderance of child abuse.
The corollary denial of justice is the readiness to shift blame onto the husband and father, even if it means fabricating a flagrantly false criminal accusation of which he is clearly innocent. This is already the reflex response not only in cases of child abuse (rarely committed by biological fathers), but also domestic violence (committed by men and women in roughly equal proportions) and an assortment of other “gender crimes” that have been framed or “redefined” to ensure that men (and only men) will be found guilty: rape, sexual assault, stalking, bullying, trafficking, and more.
Most violence against children is inflicted by single mothers — another destructive trend encouraged and even glorified by feminists. Such mothers have already joined in the feminists’ rebellion against sexual law and order and sharing reproductive decisions with men (“patriarchy”) by refusing to marry before sex and children, or by divorce. The violence against the children is just the next step of the rebellion, inspired by the feminists’ cardinal principle that everything pertaining to children and reproduction is their exclusive prerogative.
Thus the need to eliminate the father, the children’s natural protector, in order to create a free environment to exercise not just authority, but tyrannical supremacy over the children, even to the point of destroying them. Clancy removed the father ad hoc, by sending him on errands, to perpetrate her deed. But her modus operandi is institutionalized by a panoply of unconstitutional mechanisms for removing fathers permanently from their homes and families: involuntary and unilateral divorce, custody orders, “temporary” restraining orders, supervised visitation. This is the machinery of revolutionary feminism, providing mothers with the environment where they can act out their resentment on their children with impunity.
Some people have wondered why child protective services did not intervene to protect or remove the children from Clancy. But CPS is a major bastion of feminism. Cynics suggest that they delight in removing fathers, not only for ideological reasons, but because the likely result of abused children creates business for themselves.
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Another feature of the case that conforms to the standard feminist M.O. is the organized determination to smear the lone “holdout” juror, using unproven and clearly fabricated accusations of “domestic violence” and other innuendo from his private life against which he is helpless to defend himself. Anyone familiar with domestic violence law and practice knows that it is a travesty of justice and constitutional law. Such restraining orders are issued to legally innocent citizens without a shred of evidence that the recipient is in any way violent; they punish a man not for deeds he has committed, but for what someone says he might do in the future. The sole purpose is to remove law-abiding fathers from their homes in order to give women state-enforced monopoly control (“custody”) of children, which again often then leads to physical abuse. If this juror received one, it means nothing except that his former wife is also in rebellion and knows how to work a corrupt system. To exclude such men is to ensure that juries are cleansed of the vast number of ordinary, legally unimpeachable male citizens who have experienced, and might question, feminist injustice.
This man’s life and family have been threatened and turned upside-down by the smear campaign, which obviously amounts to a strategy of intimidation. What juror will dare to decide honestly and impartially when faced with a case that pits him against feminist orthodoxy, knowing now what will ensue? And that is precisely the point: to further pervert justice and institutionalize the perversion by ensuring that jurors conform to feminist demands to exculpate accused women and condemn men (accused or not).
This points to the larger problem that you never hear in the commentaries, dominated as they are by legal practitioners: The American judiciary is thoroughly crooked — not just “activist,” but crooked — and most of the corruption results from radical ideology, in which feminism forms by far the most powerful influence.
Another page from the feminist playbook is invoking psychotherapy to rationalize miscarriages of justice. Forensic psychotherapists and other “expert” witnesses play a major role in divorce/custody cases to rationalize violating the constitutional rights of legally innocent parents, usually fathers.
Perhaps most revealing of all is what connects the ideology with the judicial corruption it drives. The single-minded determination to exculpate the mother of any responsibility for her deeds — by the female jurors, by feminists, by psychotherapists, by organized activist groups of feminist-influenced women, even by some conservative pundits — fits eerily but neatly within the legal framework of “no-fault” justice that the feminists have already spent decades institutionalizing in family law and the family courts.
Enacted under feminist pressure, the very notion of “no-fault” justice is an oxymoron. The term itself constitutes an open admission that the intention is to erase the very principle of accountability for one’s actions from the justice system. Lacking any reference to legal justice, it is a certain formula for systematic in-justice and legal nihilism, which is precisely what has ensued. Now the reigning principle in marriage law, it serves the same dual purpose that we see illustrated by this case: to relieve women of any responsibility for their behavior and transform the courts into a forum for summoning and punishing legally innocent men — not for recognized legal infractions, but for how they conduct their private lives. In other words, the point is to punish men for intruding into the domain of home, family, childrearing, and the entire system of reproduction, which is now the exclusive domain of radicalized women.
These parallels show that these murders and the rationalizations for not just defending, but celebrating them are part of a pattern of women rebelling against any and all authorities that limit or regulate their absolute power over children and reproduction. (And I have omitted the obvious one: abortion.)
I am not a clinical psychiatrist or psychologist, but I do have enough professional familiarity with murderous ideologies to know that behaviors that some insist on attributing to mental illness can be eerily close to what results when masses of people absorb ideological rationalizations for killing. Foremost is the need for an outlet for resentment and the resultant craving for power.
I fear that the inevitable result of allowing therapeutics to govern our understanding of this case is that Clancy and others like her will escape accountability. Approaching murder therapeutically allows it to be reduced to the choice between two gut-level responses: “she is self-evidently guilty of this heinous deed because she did it, confessed to doing it, and shows no remorse for doing it” versus “she is self-evidently insane and therefore guiltless by the very heinousness of the deed.” The second seems likely to prevail.
Only by understanding the ascendancy of a murderous ideology that we have almost all shared or permitted over decades can we step outside the box and regain control over what we have unleashed, not for the first time: humanity’s most savage capabilities.
[1] This includes conservatives: It is evident from this sensible video‘s attempt to refute them, that conservative responses have been limited to demanding abolition of the insanity defense and questioning jury trials. In other words, conservatives’ chronic intimidation by feminists renders them more ready to abolish an institution as basic to Western freedom as the jury trial before they will risk angering feminists. I have addressed this cowardice in “The Tragedy of Conservatism: Why the Right Always Loses,” Observer and Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (2025).
[2] See her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself (World Encounter Institute/New English Review Press, 2026).
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