How Leftist Women Hollowed Out The Goodness Of Patrick Clancy

Crickets. That’s what we’re hearing from the pro-Clancy party of girl power.

The social media sleuths, peevish personalities, and malcontent mothers who spent the summer deriding, denouncing, and dragging a grieving father don’t know what to do with themselves now, at the release of the “60 Minutes” episode between Patrick Clancy, the man whose wife murdered their three children with exercise bands, and Ross Douthat.

These female freedom fighters spent the entire summer tearing apart a man whose only crime was leaving the house on that fateful, frigid January day in 2023. Now they’re having to reckon with reality. Lindsay Clancy is seemingly soulless. Patrick is heartbroken, a hollowed-out man, and yet he forgives her.

The most telling moment came when Douthat asked whether Patrick’s ex-wife had ever asked for forgiveness, after she violently strangled each of their children to death, holding on for at least four minutes each time. Patrick sat with the question a moment, his eyes drifting off, something like incredulity flickering across his face, as though he hadn’t yet considered that, while he forgave her, she had never once acted contrite or sought his pardon. He shook his head with a gallows-worn weariness and breathed out: “No. But I gave it to her.”

Lindsay, when confronted by the husband she robbed of three innocent souls, never showed remorse. She never said she was sorry for shattering his solar system. Yet he forgave her anyway. He won’t condone the names she’s called online. He defends her legacy as a woman who was incredibly mentally ill, not a “killer mom.” Raised Catholic, allergic to hostility, he seems, by every available account, simply good.

Certainly not the villain, as our illiberal intelligentsia made him out to be. Though with Mars aligning against his moon sign or whatever, some considered the case closed.

In the four days following the attack and the mother’s suicide attempt, the youngest child, eight-month-old Callan, was still alive and fighting for his life. Patrick held out hope for the survival of his only remaining child: “Just give me one. I would give him the best life I possibly could.” He held Callan, lay beside him, and told him he was sorry. The boy died in his arms. On May 26, 2023, Callan would have turned one. Patrick marked the day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, where he lit a candle, told his “buddy” he loved him, and walked out onto Fifth Avenue and cried.

Lindsay knew Callan was alive during those four days too. She never once asked to see him. Instead, she asked if her legs were straight and if she could have an attorney.

Three years later, she’s been granted a mistrial: not enough jurors voted to convict. Patrick, meanwhile, is learning to live without his children. He keeps the baby sloth Cora carried everywhere, a photo of Callan swallowed by a too-big bow tie, and Dawson’s cherished toy helicopter. He dreams of his babies constantly. In one dream, Cora walks into the kitchen; he asks where she’s been, and she wraps him in a hug. He wishes the online frenzy around their deaths would quiet, not for his own sake, but because it steals attention from his children’s legacy and from the real crisis at the heart of their family’s collapse: perinatal mental health.

This is the man the internet told you to hate. This is the man who had to be put in an ambulance during his own testimony, after a massive panic attack seized him before the 911 call was played and forced him to relive the worst day of his life. This is the man they called the true murderer.

Set aside, for a moment, Lindsay’s obvious indifference to her children and their well-being in the days following her “mental break” — an indifference that doesn’t help paint the defense’s portrait of a woman in acute psychosis who otherwise was just the sweetest, kindest, most nurturing mother imaginable.

The real takeaway here is that our current media environment has a habit of taking tragedies that are human, delicate, and deeply personal, and warping them until they somehow mold onto our own lives. Everyone is perpetually, personally offended. Every story becomes everyone else’s story. Nothing is allowed to remain an individual experience, simply too heinous and too hard to comprehend. We feel compelled to label everything, to sort it into one of our tidy little boxes, and to assign blame. “Same, Lindsay” became a rallying cry not because hundreds of thousands of women have suffered postpartum psychosis, but because women found an online community that makes them feel seen in a dangerously intimate way. It manufactures a false sense of togetherness, one that breeds herd mentality, groupthink, and a sheepish brainwashing that leaves us dumber, more violent, and strangely more forgiving of sin. “Patrick did it” caught fire online because that same mob assumes most men are evil, that children are a burden, and that none of us will ever answer for our sins in any afterlife.

We lost religion. We lost respect for one another. Now we’re losing our minds.

Maybe this interview will remind a few people that the subjects of the week on social media aren’t fiction. They’re human. They have very real lives, as we all do, and their tragedy doesn’t need to become your trend.

Maybe this all traces back to a lesson most of our mothers tried to teach us (or so I thought): mean girls tear others down to feel better about themselves. Stop tearing Patrick down. It won’t help you, anyone, or anything.