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The latest controversy to rock the Internet is a legitimately terrifying one: a mother slew all of her children in what appears to be a premeditated, carefully calculated manner, meticulously planned to concoct an insanity plea; and tens of thousands of women, if not more, are applauding her as some kind of hero for mental health advocacy.
It’s a horrifying example of how evil becomes so mundane, we risk celebrating it as some kind of positive good. It’s also an indication of how easily manipulable women are when a viewpoint—even an objectively evil and lethal one—gains enough consensus to be “popular.” Women are actively identifying with a woman who committed cold-blooded infanticide because “raising kids is hard.”
The bandwagoning of a certain group of women in favor of Lindsay Clancy got me thinking about the Casey Anthony case from over a decade ago. I remember the outcry in response to that case of infanticide was completely different. Most women abhorred Casey Anthony. I still remember when the verdict was announced. I was in the office, one of two men in what was otherwise an overwhelmingly white female office. Every single one of them lost it when Anthony was found “not guilty” of the core charges (but found guilty of some lesser chargers involving misleading the police). “How could she be found ‘not guilty’! She so clearly killed her child!” was the paraphrased howl of outrage.
At the time, I reasoned that women were so fascinated with the Casey Anthony case because it made them feel good about their mothering abilities. The thought process that simmered just below the surface seemed to be, “well, I may have made some mistakes, but I didn’t kill my kid, so I’m a Really Good Mom.” That the jury determined the prosecution could not prove Anthony’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seemed not to matter at all—these ladies knew Anthony was guilty, evidence be damned. It was one of my first real glimpses into the hive mind of a certain segment of the female population.
Now we find women having a completely opposite reaction to Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to slaying her children. Whereas the prosecution in the Anthony case relied on all manner of dubious forensic “evidence” to pursue a conviction (which, it seems, is why it ultimately failed), all of the grizzly facts are confirmed in the Clancy case. It’s not a question of whether she did kill her three young children—she did, and she admits it—it’s a question of her sanity at the time.
That’s one key difference between the cases. What intrigues me, though, is that women were so willing to send Anthony to the chair, but are celebrating Clancy. The former might have killed her child, but the State of Florida couldn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and women were furious. The latter did kill her children, and women are lauding her as a feminist icon. Have things changed so much after a decade-plus of wokery that women love infanticide?
Well, leaving abortion aside—perhaps the most devilish evidence of the self-destructive nature of modern women—I would propose another theory, one I have not seen discussed elsewhere: women hated Anthony because she was poor white trash; they defend Clancy because she’s an upper-middle class white professional. It’s a matter of class identity for them. It felt good for those same upwardly mobile women to dunk on the trailer park girl from Orlando—“she’s not one of us!”
But Clancy is one of them. She represents the apex of the “AWFL,” the Affluence White Female Liberal: a nurse living an affluent lifestyle with extensive medical and psychiatric support, as well as a doctor husband, who still wasn’t content. Indeed, she was so discontent, she murdered her own children—and, somehow, it’s her husband’s fault.
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