I have a long-form video covering the intellectual and moral confusion around the Lindsay Clancy case. You can watch it on my YouTube.
IQ scores are dropping for the first time in over a century.
Gen Z is the first generation ever with recorded IQ scores lower than the previous generation.
Attention spans are collapsing.
Anxiety and depression diagnoses are at record highs.
The Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023.
We are more confused, less cognitively equipped, and more emotionally dysregulated than we have ever been.
This is not happening to some other group of people.
It is happening to all of us. It is happening to me.
Every one of us is being dulled by the same feeds, the same algorithms, the same thirty-second units of information.
Nobody opts out of this by being smart. It requires constant, deliberate effort to resist, and most days most of us lose.
So when I describe a failure of thinking in this piece, I am not describing something I am above.
I am describing something I have to fight in myself every time I sit down to write.
We have an abundance of information and a dearth of discernment.
It’s against that backdrop that I’m writing this piece.
What this is and isn’t about
In my last piece I wrote about the moral dimensions of the Lindsay Clancy case. Here I want to focus on the failures in reasoning.
This is not an attack on women. It’s not an attack on feminists.
It’s also not about the people who acknowledge Lindsay killed her children but believe she should be found not criminally responsible - which means a psychiatric facility instead of prison.
I’ve made my position clear. I think she should go to prison.
But there’s a reasonable disagreement to be had there.
Those people - most of them probably women - accept the core facts. We just disagree on what the consequences of those facts should be.
I’m talking about a smaller group.
The people, also mostly women, who say Lindsay didn’t kill her children at all. That Patrick did.
Their failure to reason is a particularly florid example of what happens when attention and discernment get whittled away by technology.
You get identity politics, confirmation bias, tribalism, and conspiracism - wearing the costume of independent research.
This group is not uniquely susceptible to cognitive confusion and bias.
Every group is. Men, women, left, right.
I’ve spoken about the same failure among people insisting the 2020 election was stolen, or that the Spencer Pratt mayoral race was stolen, based on incomplete reasoning.
I’ve written at length about how these failures of reasoning are hidden under mounds of “receipts” in the Candace Owens Charlie Kirk investigation camp.
So read this less as commentary on the Clancy case, and more as commentary on the state of critical thinking.
Let me show you
In 2014, Timothy Ray Jones Jr. killed his five children. He said voices told him they’d be better off in Heaven. His lawyers pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Timothy Ray Jones Jr. in court, above the five children he killed.
Nobody printed a shirt. Nobody stood outside the courthouse. Nobody suggested his wife did it.
Matthew Coleman killed his two children in 2021, aged two and ten months. He told the FBI his wife had passed “serpent DNA” to them. A prison physician found he met the criteria for a psychotic disorder.
His delusion was literally about his wife. Nobody blamed her.
Chad Doerman killed his three sons in 2023. His lawyers pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and said he was in a state of psychosis.
Nobody blamed his wife either.
Now here’s Lindsay Clancy.
Some say she never actually confessed. Technically true. She never took the stand and said “I killed my kids.”
In fact, she never took the stand at all - likely because her lawyers wanted to avoid it as part of their legal strategy.
But her own lawyer said, in court, she killed her children.
And in April her defense filed a motion offering to stipulate formally, in writing, to her involvement in all three deaths - so the trial could be about her mental state instead. The judge denied the request it was attached to, so nothing got signed.
Then there’s the record.
At 4:13 that afternoon, Lindsay used Apple Maps to check how long it takes to drive to the restaurant.
At 4:48, she called CVS to ask whether they stocked the medicine. The manager testified she sounded completely normal.
At 5:15, she sent Patrick out.
At 5:32, a CVS camera two miles away shows him walking in.
At 5:54, a restaurant camera shows him walking in there.
At 6:11, he called 911.
And in three and a half years, Lindsay has never accused him of anything.
Neither have her lawyers - who had every piece of evidence in the case, who were defending three counts of first-degree murder, and who would have given anything for another suspect.
Despite the overabundance of facts confirming that Lindsay killed her kids, and the dearth of facts confirming that Patrick did it instead, this subset of Lindsay Clancy’s supporters insists that Patrick did it.
From here, you’ll learn:
What happens when a celebrity’s therapy session becomes a public verdict
Why free speech is an answer to a different question than the one being asked
The shield people reach for when they’ve watched more than you have
Why finding a gap in a story isn’t the same as having a better one
What the evidence explains in one move, and what the alternative theory has to do instead
