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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.

The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.

Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.

The burden to prove that she was not insane has been on the prosecution, so the legal argument here might be sound. It seems like a weird way to trial murders though. Why doesn't every murderer in Massachusetts just go for the insanity defense? Such an assertion seems impossible to conclusively disprove in most cases.

If Lindsay Clancy has actually started to say stuff like "I killed my kids, please kill me, I deserve the death sentence", I think it will be easy to say "yeah she's got mental problems".

This seems like something a murderer would say in order to sound insane.

Seems like the kind of gamble a Sicillian would make when death is on the line