THE LINDSAY CLANCY CASE EXPOSES AMERICA’S ACCOUNTABILITY CRISIS

MAGA Viral opinion graphic for George P. Brooks’s article on the Lindsay Clancy case, accountability, mental illness, justice, and the three child victims.

You can believe mental illness is real, demand better treatment for mothers, and still ask why three dead children keep becoming secondary characters in their own story.

Let me start where I think everybody should start with the Lindsay Clancy case: Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Three children are dead, and somehow the national conversation keeps finding its way back to everybody except them. We talk about postpartum psychosis, medications, doctors, psychiatric hospitals, expert witnesses, whether the system failed Lindsay Clancy and whether America adequately supports mothers after childbirth. Fine. Those are legitimate conversations, and some of them are conversations we desperately need to have. But before we turn this into another seminar on everything society did wrong, can we spend a damn minute remembering the three children who didn’t get to grow up?

That is what bothers me about this case, and it reaches far beyond Lindsay Clancy. America has developed this strange allergy to accountability. Whenever somebody does something horrific, we immediately begin working backward through their life searching for the thing that allows us to explain it. Find the trauma. Find the diagnosis. Find the medication. Find the poverty. Find the bad childhood. Find the institution that screwed up. Find somebody, somewhere, somehow who can absorb a little more of the responsibility. Sometimes those things absolutely matter. I’m not stupid enough to pretend environment, illness and trauma don’t affect human behavior. But if you keep moving responsibility backward long enough, eventually nobody is responsible for a damn thing.

That’s not compassion. That’s societal paralysis.

And this is where I think MAGA has something important to say that goes much deeper than Donald Trump, elections or red hats. At its core, Making America Great Again has to mean restoring some standards we’ve spent decades talking ourselves out of. Your choices matter. Your obligations matter. Being a mother or father means something. Protecting children means something. The law means something. Personal responsibility still has to exist somewhere in the American vocabulary, because you cannot build a functioning civilization entirely around explanations for why people shouldn’t be held accountable.

Now let me say something else because I already know how the internet works. Postpartum psychosis is real. Severe mental illness is real. A person can become so psychiatrically impaired that ordinary assumptions about intent and responsibility no longer apply. That’s why the law recognizes lack of criminal responsibility in the first damn place. Clancy’s attorneys acknowledge that she killed her children but argue that severe postpartum psychiatric illness rendered her not criminally responsible. Prosecutors have argued that despite her psychiatric problems, her behavior surrounding the killings demonstrates planning, awareness and deliberate action. That’s the actual legal dispute, and a jury—not me, not MAGA Twitter, not some Facebook psychiatrist who watched three TikToks about postpartum depression—has to decide it.

What I reject is the idea that acknowledging mental illness requires everybody else to shut the hell up about accountability. Those two concepts are not mutually exclusive. We ought to be able to ask whether a woman was genuinely psychotic, whether her doctors recognized what was happening, whether medications played a role, whether her husband or family had enough information, whether the mental-health system failed and whether she nevertheless possessed enough understanding to be legally responsible for what happened. Adults used to be capable of holding several complicated thoughts in their heads at the same time.

That’s particularly important here because the facts are horrific regardless of what verdict ultimately comes back. Three children depended completely upon adults to keep them safe, and all three are dead. Yet watch how quickly victims disappear once America becomes fascinated with the person accused of killing them. We learn the defendant’s history, fears, medications, diagnosis, childhood, marriage and state of mind. The accused becomes a fully developed human being with context and complexity, while the dead become a body count at the beginning of the article.

I refuse to do that with these kids.

Cora wasn’t “one of three victims.” She was a five-year-old girl. Dawson wasn’t a statistic. He was three. Callan had been on this earth for eight months. They should have gotten birthdays, school pictures, stupid teenage arguments with their parents, graduations, jobs, marriages, mistakes, successes and whatever else their lives might have become. We don’t know who they would have been because somebody took that opportunity away from them. That’s the part of this case that shouldn’t become an afterthought simply because the circumstances surrounding their mother’s mental condition are complicated.

This is also where conservatives need to be smarter than the caricature our opponents like to draw of us. Being pro-accountability doesn’t require becoming anti-mental-health treatment. Quite the opposite. If we give a damn about families, then maternal mental health ought to matter enormously to us. If postpartum psychosis can become this dangerous, women and their families need to know the warning signs. Doctors need to take those warning signs seriously. Husbands need somewhere to call. Families need intervention before a psychiatric emergency becomes a funeral. If there were medical failures in the Clancy case, find them, expose them and learn from them. Preventing the next tragedy is considerably more useful than screaming ideological talking points at one another after children are already dead.

But here’s where my conservatism kicks in: understanding why something happened does not automatically tell us who is responsible for it. That’s what evidence is for. That’s what courts are for. That’s why we have standards for criminal responsibility instead of simply asking whether somebody had a psychiatric diagnosis. Millions of Americans live with serious mental illness without murdering anybody. Conversely, there are circumstances where psychosis becomes so severe that a person genuinely loses contact with reality. Both facts are true. The difficult job is determining which legal standard applies to the human being actually sitting in the courtroom.

That isn’t cruelty. That’s justice.

MAGA should be comfortable saying that because one of the things this movement is supposed to represent is a return to basic social order. Not authoritarianism. Not throwing everybody in prison. Order. A society where rights come with responsibilities, parents have obligations to their children, government has obligations to its citizens, doctors have obligations to their patients, and courts have an obligation to follow evidence instead of whatever emotional narrative happens to be trending online that week.

Frankly, I think this is one reason so many Americans have gravitated toward MAGA in the first place. They’re exhausted with being told that expecting standards makes them mean. Expecting people to obey immigration law is supposedly xenophobic. Expecting criminals to be prosecuted is heartless. Expecting schools to educate instead of indoctrinate is extremist. Expecting parents to actually parent is judgmental. Somewhere along the way, basic expectations became controversial, and then everybody acted surprised when ordinary people finally said enough.

The Clancy case sits at an especially painful intersection because mercy really does belong here. If this woman was profoundly psychotic, I have compassion for that. If doctors failed her, I want to know how. If warning signs were missed, I want the system fixed. If another mother can be saved because America learns something from this nightmare, then learn every damn thing we can.

But my compassion doesn’t have a limited supply. I don’t have to take it away from three dead children in order to give some to their mother.

That’s the cultural mistake I keep seeing. People act as though sympathy is a seesaw: either you care about Lindsay Clancy’s mental condition or you care about Cora, Dawson and Callan. Bullshit. A morally serious person can care about all four while still understanding that only three of them had absolutely no agency whatsoever in what happened.

Those are the people I am putting first.

The jury can determine Lindsay Clancy’s criminal responsibility. Let them hear the psychiatrists, examine the records, consider the prosecution’s evidence, listen to the defense and apply Massachusetts law. If she met the legal standard for lack of criminal responsibility, then follow the law. If she didn’t, follow the law then too. I don’t need a predetermined verdict to make the larger point.

America needs to relearn how to distinguish an explanation from an excuse.

We can acknowledge trauma without making trauma sovereign. We can recognize mental illness without pretending diagnosis automatically erases agency. We can demand better treatment without making doctors responsible for every action a patient subsequently takes. Most importantly, we can stop treating victims like inconvenient scenery once the person accused of harming them has a compelling enough backstory.

If MAGA is serious about restoring America, this is part of the restoration too. Elections matter, borders matter and the economy matters, but culture sits underneath all of them. Families have to mean something. Children have to be protected. Responsibility has to exist. Mercy has to coexist with justice instead of replacing it.

So yes, investigate what happened to Lindsay Clancy. Understand postpartum psychosis. Examine her treatment. Ask whether somebody could have intervened. Ask every uncomfortable question that might prevent another family from living through this hell.

Just don’t forget why we’re asking them.

Cora was five.

Dawson was three.

Callan was eight months old.

Whatever else America ultimately decides about Lindsay Clancy, those three children deserved better from the adults and institutions around them.

I don’t think saying that makes us cruel.

I think forgetting it would.

What do you think? Have we reached a point where America is better at explaining terrible behavior than holding anybody accountable for it?

Stay blessed.