Staff Reports
The loudest notes of the Lindsay Clancy trial have not come from the courtroom but from a social‑media chorus singing “We are all Lindsay.” Miranda Devine’s recent column called out that movement, and she’s right to worry. When rallies, pink outfits and viral videos drown out the facts, the victims — three children and a grieving father — get shoved to the margins. This isn’t compassion. It’s performance.
Social‑media fandom and the pink rallies
Across town, hundreds of people wearing pink gathered outside the courthouse, holding signs and chanting solidarity slogans. Videos of women cradling babies and saying “Same, Lindsay” have flooded feeds. Organizers say they want to highlight maternal mental‑health failures. Fine — hard problems deserve attention. But when a movement raises nearly a million dollars for the defendant’s parents and becomes a hashtag, it stops being help and starts feeling like a campaign.
What the trial is actually about: psychosis or intent?
Let’s keep the legal point clear: the defense does not deny the killings. They argue Lindsay Clancy was in a psychotic state — postpartum psychosis and medication issues — and lacked criminal responsibility. The Commonwealth answers with a blunt claim: prosecutors say she “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal — to kill.” That is the frame the jurors must weigh, not the trending posts on someone’s social feed.
Why public sympathy can be dangerous
There is a real risk when social trends make villains into victims. The rallies and viral posts have helped shift sympathy away from Cora, Dawson and baby Callan and toward a narrative that centers the killer. That inversion smells wrong. It also risks tainting jurors and turning a court of law into a reality show. If solidarity means parading slogans instead of respecting testimony and evidence, we’re choosing emotion over justice — and that never ends well.
What should come first: victims, truth and the rule of law
Yes, America needs better maternal‑mental‑health care. But sympathy for ill mothers cannot erase accountability for violence. The real compassion is for the dead children and their father, and for a legal process that decides guilt or responsibility based on facts, not followers. Miranda Devine’s critique is blunt because this moment calls for bluntness: don’t glamorize a crime or turn it into a social‑media cause. Let the jury do its job, help the vulnerable quietly and stop normalizing horror for clicks and clout.
