TikTok has banned a video — citing a “violation of Community Guidelines” — that challenges the narrative suggesting that Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children.
Very few people appear to have mixed feelings about the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy: most either believe that she’s guilty and knew exactly what she was doing, or that she was out of her mind due to postpartum psychosis and did not fully comprehend her own actions. But it’s the ones who have declared their support for Clancy — even taking to social media to claim that her husband was the guilty one — who were the target of the video in question.
Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt laid out the case in a video posted across multiple platforms on Sunday, arguing that the wave of people defending Clancy were suffering from “mass psychosis” — and he traced its origins to well before the Clancy trial, tracing the origins instead to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rules that must be obeyed but never questioned.
We’ve lost our damn minds.
The Lindsay Clancy mass psychosis proves that a lot of people need to have their Wifi taken away. But this psychosis started many years before TikTok… pic.twitter.com/WhT1iXJ9Pj— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) August 24, 2026
“Our institutions completely eviscerated their own reputation and dignity,” Pratt said, adding, “If you went paddleboarding, alone in the middle of the ocean, you needed to be arrested for killing Grandma. But of course, if you riot with 500,000 people, that’s totally fine, because viruses take a timeout when it comes to social justice.”
The constant bombardment of narratives that objectively did not make sense, Pratt said, did more than breed mistrust: they rewired the way people processed information — and even reality. Every tragedy started to look like a conspiracy — and people who fed on conspiracy quickly capitalized on that for profit.
He pointed to the “fans” who’d emerged when Luigi Mangione gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood — and then pivoted to address Clancy. In her case, he said, it was a mass hijacking of maternal instinct and unconditional love “reallocated towards whatever group the algorithm has designated as the vulnerable class.”
Instead of feeling empathy for the three small children who were strangled to death by their own mother — or for the father who came home with takeout for dinner and discovered his babies unresponsive and near death — the empathy was being directed solely toward the woman whose actions had been the source of that pain.
Popular movies and television shows had primed the population for the redirection of empathy, taking objectively awful characters — like a chemistry teacher who became a drug kingpin and destroyed his own family — and making them sympathetic.
Disney’s “Maleficent” held up a character who embodied evil for the sake of evil in the original “Sleeping Beauty” and portrayed her as the betrayed lover who only took the wrong path because she was in pain. “Wicked” turned the good-vs-evil narrative on its head. “Dexter” made a wide audience identify with a sociopathic serial killer. And those are just a few examples among thousands, all designed to qualify — and thus minimize — objective evil, making it more difficult to identify.
While that trend is certainly problematic, it’s also protected as free speech and free expression. The real problem arises when challenges to the narrative are censored — or, in the case of COVID, targeted as “misinformation.”
TikTok moved to do just that when the platform banned Pratt’s video — which also should have been protected as free speech and expression.
“Child-murderer supporters on TikTok are mass-reporting my video on the Clancy insanity. It’s wild to see the allergic reaction people have to truth. It’s like when a demon gets sprayed with holy water,” Pratt responded on Tuesday.
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