Nine years ago I was assigned to write a story about Donald Trump and the 25th Amendment. I was given the numbers of mental health professionals ready to say Trump was crazy. It was not to be quickie commentary; I was sent on the road to follow the president. As he was during the campaign, Trump was bombastic, paranoid, unpredictable, and occasionally even seemed to see or hear things that weren’t there. However, before filing, I spoke with lawyers, including a Fordham professor who’d help draft the original 25th Amendment bill. A president could only be removed, he said, for “inability,” not for “policy and political differences, unpopularity, poor judgment, incompetence, laziness or impeachable conduct.”
Weeks later, in an MSNBC green room, a Democratic aide complained about the article. I asked: if he were a juror judging Trump in a gas station robbery, would he vote not guilty by reason of insanity? “That’s different,” he said. This was at a time when it was widely expected that Trump would eventually be impeached for Russiagate. I told the man he couldn’t have it both ways, that Trump couldn’t be both criminally responsible and crazy. His answer: “If anyone can do it, it’s Trump.”
After the declaration of a mistrial in the horrifying Massachusetts murder case involving Lindsay Clancy, what is there to say, except to note how wildly inconsistent we’ve become in measuring concepts like “capacity” and “responsibility.” We’re a culture that doesn’t forgive, but quickly excuses. I don’t know what it means, nor do I understand how this case became a such a rallying cry for — something? What, exactly? How can “mental defect” have a lobby? What’s happening to people?
Everyone I have seen or heard that is coming down on Clancy’s side either got their “evidence” from TikTok or spends a ridiculous amount of time on it. I don’t know what the answer is but it feels like we should treat TikTok like the national security threat it is. It’s a weapon designed to destroy (or at least confuse) the core morals and principles of western civilization. Were I king for a day I would nuke every TikTok server from space and salt the fields. TikTok delenda est.
I'm gonna be writing something deeper on this but think of these points.
1. never before in modern American history has a woman who murdered her children become a martyr and a hero for so many women - mostly liberal but not all.
2. Not Susan Smith, not Andrea Yates. What changed? The Great Feminization where women were put in power and group dynamics have changed everything, from Hollywood to "woke" to this trial.
3. Mass hysteria + Me Too = women as eternal victims both empowered and in need of rescuing.
4. She's pretty and maybe that doesn't matter but none of the other famous moms were like protagonists in a Lifetime movie. They don't just love her. They see themselves in her. Project themselves onto her.
5. She systematically executed her three children in the same state that just ruled a woman can have an abortion even in the later part of the pregnancy.
6. Why do they see the kids as oppressors? Because men are the oppressors and they shot their wad into them, oppressing them.
These are SCARY SCARY times.