My Informed Nuanced Unapologetic Takes Everyday

-THE TAKE-

I'm writing this as a father first. Before we get into any of the cultural analysis, before we dig into the "why," I need you to sit with this fact for a second: three innocent children — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — were killed by their own mother. That is the floor of this conversation. Everything I say below sits on top of that floor, and by the time you finish reading, I want you to land back on it too.

Here's what's actually trending right now, in September of 2026, as the Lindsay Clancy case grinds through the courts: a growing number of women are publicly standing in solidarity with her. Not just sympathizing. Standing with her. And look — it's not lost on me why that's happening, even as I think it's one of the more disturbing cultural signals we've seen in a while.

So let's dig into the why, because understanding it is more useful than just being outraged by it.

Postpartum depression has gotten real, deserved attention over the last decade. It's common, it's serious, and for a long time women suffered through it silently while being told to "snap out of it." That attention was overdue and mostly good.

But what Clancy was reportedly dealing with wasn't postpartum depression. It was postpartum psychosis — a far rarer, far more severe break from reality. And I want to be precise here because precision matters: psychosis can explain a loss of touch with reality. It cannot justify murder. It doesn't warrant support, and it certainly doesn't warrant the almost celebratory "justification" energy some of these women are bringing to it — where the underlying condition becomes the whole story and the dead children become a footnote.

We don't do this anywhere else in life. We don't excuse a man who kills because he was in the grip of some other diagnosable break. We investigate the mental state, sure — that's what trials are for — but we don't rally around him. Something has shifted when the rallying is the first instinct instead of the last.

Here's what I want to do, because outrage alone doesn't get us anywhere — I want to trace this response back to the indoctrination and social engineering underneath it. This is informal, so I'm going to lay it out as a list.

1. The idea that parenting is an insurmountable task we've collectively decided we can't handle anymore. Liberal women in particular are eating this narrative up — the idea that motherhood is so "oppressive," demands so much sacrifice, that the whole institution needs to be re-litigated. As if centuries of human beings understanding that parenthood is hard and worth it just evaporated from our collective memory in the last twenty years. Sacrifice used to be the point. Now it's treated as the injustice.

2. The perpetuation of immaturity, dressed up as advocacy. This shows up everywhere in how women are talked about now — always the victim, always the one carrying the "emotional labor," always the one doing the house work, handling everything, running on empty. It's become the default narrative regardless of the actual facts of someone's life. And that's what makes the Clancy case so telling: by most accounts, she had about as comfortable a life as anyone could ask for. This is "first world problems" logic taken to its endpoint — things are so good that we manufacture crises to have something real to overcome.

3. Our culture's relationship with abortion has laid the groundwork for this. I want to be intellectually honest here, because I hate when people aren't: I don't think most of these women are saying "what she did was good." What they're saying is "I understand how she got there, and I want that understanding centered." I get the distinction. But I think it's insufficient, and I think it's downstream of something real — a culture that has spent decades widening the definitions and softening the semantics around when a child's life can be weighed against a mother's circumstances. Once you've normalized that trade-off in one context, it becomes a lot easier to extend sympathy for it in another. In a culture that still valued growth and maturity as the goal, people would be ashamed to place what a woman might go through around childbirth — and not every woman does — above the actual lives of the children she already had.

4. This one might surprise you: occultism among women is a much bigger, much more normalized phenomenon than most people realize — and it's not a fringe curiosity, it's a documented cultural current. Spellwork, rituals, tarot, "manifesting," astrology, witchcraft — dressed up in wellness language, sold in the same aisle as candles and self-care, and spreading fast. Survey data on American religious identity has repeatedly found more self-identified witches and pagans in this country than there are Presbyterians — and Wicca and paganism have been tracked as one of the fastest-growing religious identities in the West for over a decade now. That's not a niche TikTok trend. That's a real, measurable shift in what a large number of women — disproportionately the same demographic standing in solidarity with Clancy — are turning to for meaning, ritual, and a sense of control.

And I don't think this is separate from the politics. I think it's fused with it. Look at where a lot of the modern activist left actually draws its energy from. Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, has said outright and on the record that BLM is "a spiritual movement" — she and other organizers have spoken openly in interviews about invoking ancestors, ancestral worship, and spiritual practice as part of the movement's actual organizing framework, not as a side note. This is public record, not a conspiracy theory. When you have movement founders describing their activism in explicitly spiritual and ritual terms, it stops being a stretch to notice that the language around that activism has taken on ritual shape too.

Which brings me to something that's my own read, and I'll own it as exactly that — an observation, not a proven thesis: chants like "say her name" or "say his name" function, structurally, an awful lot like an invocation. You're not just remembering a person. You're repeating a name, in unison, as a group, with rhythm, to summon a presence and a feeling into a room. That's the basic mechanics of a chant or an incantation going back thousands of years, dressed in modern, secular language. I'm not saying every person doing it knows that's what they're doing. I'm saying the form is borrowed from somewhere very old, and it's landing in a culture where a large number of the people participating are also the ones lighting candles, pulling tarot cards, casting spells, and doing rituals. That overlap isn't a coincidence. It's the same spiritual hunger, wearing two different outfits — one is political, one is occultic — and I think it's a real, underexamined piece of why so many women feel a pull toward Clancy that goes beyond ordinary sympathy.

5. The psychology-and-medication paradigm might be the biggest piece of this, and it's the one getting the least sustained attention. People mention it and move on fast. I think that's a mistake. We've been conditioned to treat psychology as settled truth rather than a genuinely contested field. "Affirm people's feelings" quietly became "people's feelings are always correct." "Medication can help" quietly became "medication is the answer to nearly everything." I've always understood psychological struggle as, more often than not, a spiritual issue — frequently tied to a lack of structure, discipline, and correction earlier in life. That's a sensitive claim and I know it's not universal, but broadly, people raised with real structure don't present with the same volume of issues we're seeing now. And prescriptions especially can set someone up for dependency rather than resolution — it seems clear something serious was happening with Clancy's medication regimen. What I'd also point out is that a lot of the women expressing solidarity with her are themselves deep in that same system — therapy, prescriptions, the whole apparatus — and at a certain point it stops looking like healing and starts looking like escapism. The thing that's supposed to produce clarity becomes the thing people hide behind instead.

If people need help, they should get it. Full stop. But I don't believe all help is equal, and I don't believe psychology and medication outrank spiritual clarity. In my case, that clarity comes from Christianity — that's not a hedge, that's just where I stand.

I also think we've mislabeled the whole category. We call it "mental health," but what we're usually describing is damaged mental health — a state where the mind is not just struggling but actively producing harmful actions, or worse, losing the ability to even recognize harmful actions as harmful. That's a different, more serious thing than the term "mental health" implies, and calling it what it IS- matters.

What happened to just saying "this is a bad situation, all around"? We don't have to pick a side here. We don't have to rally around the woman who did this — we should be correcting her, and correcting anyone who's finding themselves relating to her a little too easily. Once lives have been taken, protecting the next life has to be the paramount principle. Everything else is secondary to that. And once we actually get to the root of these behaviors, hopefully we can start preventing them to begin with —BUT, it has to be done properly, through an understanding of ORDER, natural law, and maturity rather that affirmation and “tolerance.” That’s a whole topic by itself though.

This case has cracked open a lot more than a news cycle. We'll be talking about it for a while — and we should be. But let's not lose the floor we started on: three children are dead. That’s not OK. That's the fact that outranks every narrative built on top of it.

-THE SHELF-

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-WATCH-

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-THE CLOSE-

That's the minute. You paused, you looked closer — that's the whole point. If this made you think, do two things: forward it to one person who needs to slow down too, and if somebody sent you here, get on the list so you don't miss the next one. See clearly. Think deeply. Respond wisely. — WAYTAMINUTE