The pandemic launched a generation of conspiracy theorists who were often proven right relative to the disease.
But the continuation of looking for hidden truths behind every tree gets in the way of real truth and now could lead to a serious miscarriage of justice, a conservative podcaster said on American Family Radio Wednesday.
Lindsay Clancy’s fate remains unknown as jury deliberations continue for the Massachusetts mother who has admitted to killing her three children: Cora (5), Dawson (3) and Callan (8 months).
Answering the question really shouldn’t take this long, Isabel Brown, host of the Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown Show, told AFR’s Jenna Ellis.
The case represents a major turning point in society’s inability to think critically about objective truth, Brown said.
“Since COVID, you've seen people assume automatically that every single major story in the news cycle probably has some deeper level of a conspiracy or a cover up associated with it. Often that’s been true the last several years, but I think this has been happening so often in our society that now we refuse to accept facts, evidence, objective truth when it is laid out right before our eyes,” she said.
So many Americans have allowed emotion to override truth and impact the court of public opinion that now a court law stands the real chance of delivering a “serious miscarriage of justice.”
Weeks of videos on Instagram or TikTok, weeks of X posts with zero evidence suggesting that Lindsay’s ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, is guilty may be coming home to roost.
“Many, many women, I think, have lost the plot on this the last couple of weeks, and it’s important for us to tell the truth about this case,” Brown said.
Clancy's defense team asserts that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and other serious mental illness and therefore lacked criminal responsibility. Under Massachusetts law, Clancy can be found “not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility” if, because of a mental disease or defect at the time of the offense, she lacked substantial capacity to comprehend the criminality/wrongfulness of her actions or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.
Clancy’s defense says postpartum psychosis had caused her to lose touch with reality, including hearing a voice directing her to kill the children. Prosecutors argue that, despite her mental-health problems, she understood what she was doing and deliberately carried it out.
The prosecution argues that Clancy deliberately created an opportunity to kill the children but sending her husband to run errands. It also says the methodic nature of the killings demonstrates purposeful behavior rather than an inability to understand what was happening.
“We have let emotions take over so, so much of not just our news cycle but now even allowing the court of public opinion to take over a court of law,” Brown said.
If the jury finds Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, she doesn't simply become a free person. Massachusetts has procedures for psychiatric evaluation and potential commitment to a mental-health facility.
The embrace of mental illness as an acceptable defense for Clancy is far different than public opinion for high-profile murders in decades past, Brown said.
“Both Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer attempted at some point in their legal defense to claim not guilty by reason of insanity as their plea. Of course, no sane person ever in American history would ever suggest that someone like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy should be sent to a fluffy mental hospital instead of life in prison or for the death penalty on the table.”
How did we get here? It’s not a hard question to answer. It’s feminism, Brown says.
“What you are seeing here is truly a result of the conversation related to feminism that we've seen become unbelievably toxic throughout our lifetime in the United States of America. Women by the droves feel the need to automatically identify with a woman who happens to be on the defense for a gruesome violent murder case, simply because she is a woman.”
