The Insane Lindsay Clancy Moms Cult. Turley: Hasan Piker Is Pied Piper of Hate. Is Iran’s Supreme Leader ‘Scared Strait’? Crazy Rich Commies: The Young and The Reckless. AOC Hasn’t Abandoned Her Nutty Economic Theories. More
The trial of Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children and then injured herself, may move into its final phase with summations this week. Outside the courtroom, women in pink display their support for Clancy.
“Lindsay Clancy killed her kids. Why are women defending her?” asks the headline over Nicole Russell’s USA TODAY column. Russell writes:
Lindsay Clancy’s trial has gripped women and mothers across the country, but not for the reasons I expected, especially as a mother myself. …
Outside the courthouse Aug. 20, hundreds of Lindsay Clancy supporters, mostly women, rallied for her. Some wore pink emblazoned with slogans like “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Attendees told reporters that Clancy’s story resonated with them and exposes the need for mental health help.
Online, Clancy support seems ubiquitous. One woman wrote a Substack that simply claims, “I could have been Lindsay Clancy.” A GoFundMe for Clancy’s parents, to help cover trial costs, features a drawing on its front page: a wheelchair-bound Clancy, head in her hands, surrounded by rings of women holding hands in solidarity. It’s reached more than half its $2 million goal.
Russell recognizes that Lindsay Clancy’s anguish is real and doesn’t give an opinion of whether Clancy, whose lawyers argue that she is not guilty because of insanity, should be convicted. The focus is on the outpouring of sympathy for Clancy and her Medea-like acts.
The same is true of New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, whose headline posits that Clancy’s “sick fans are just normalizing the horror of a mother killing her three children”:
The bizarre fandom around Lindsay Clancy is the latest example of a moral rot infecting a small cohort of conspiracy-minded, self-engrossed women. …
“We are all Lindsay” is their sick message.
One woman sobbed on camera that Lindsay can’t hug her children’s stuffed toys because her cruel husband supposedly threw them away. But what about the children who can’t hug their toys? The father who can’t hug his children?
It’s the same inversion behind the Luigi Mangione fangirls, the London mob who valorized Cambridge hoaxer Jason Arday and the demonization of Erika Kirk.
The Free Press headline on the Clancy cult is “The Moms of TikTok Have Gone Insane.” The chilling subtitle on Kara Kennedy’s piece:
We’ve been telling women for decades that motherhood is one of the worst things that can happen to them. So is it any surprise that so many moms now see child-killing mom Lindsay Clancy as a martyr?
Of the Lindsay Clancy phe-mom-enon, Kennedy adds:
This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage.
We aren’t sure what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. says that oil is pouring through the Strait, but industry firms that track ships have not verified this. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent becomes the official to watch (more on Bessent) as the U.S. prepares to launch the “greatest financial offensive” against Iran, threatening ship seizures. Cash is tight in Iran, and the U.A.E. has broken off diplomatic relations. An editorial published Sunday by the New York Post counsels: “Trump is winning the Iran war— stay the course.” New York Post cover: “Scared Strait” with a picture of the Supreme Leader.
Radical streamer Hasan Piker isn’t just the leading Mao fan and a popular campaign surrogate on the Democratic left. He can sing too. Unfortunately, Piker thinks it’s cute to sing about the death of Charlie Kirk. More on this. Jonathan Turley writes that Piker’s “evil” attack on Kirk shows that Piker is the “hateful Left’s Pied Piper”:
We have seen protesters on the left around the country mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk, even reenacting his murder. Hate traffickers like Jennifer Welch have even justified his assassination. It is all shocking and depressing, but none reached the level of Hasan Piker leading a huge crowd in mocking Kirk and his faith. Before he was murdered, Kirk debated Piker and called him a “socialist hypocrite.”
What is shocking is not the utter depravity and cruelty of Piker, but the ecstasy of the crowd in relishing the death of someone with opposing views. It is part of the conditioning in what I have previously called an “age of rage.”
The Washington Examiner hails New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose campaign introduced us to the talented Mr. Piker, the “Democratic Party’s shadow presidential nominee.” In “Mao Meets Manhattan,” Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn last week wondered if “dunce caps,” the fashion accessory of the Cultural Revolution, await New York landlords. Meanwhile, Michigan Senate hopeful and Piker protégé Abdul El-Sayed attacks Second Lady Usha Vance, referencing her heritage, and calling her “a racist.”
It’s AOC, of course, rather than Mamdani, who is most commonly bruited about as the possible Democratic nominee. The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley takes note of AOC’s fiscal thinking in “AOC’s Craaazy Economic Theory Lives On.” Finley observes:
Remember modern monetary theory? This was the craaaazy economic view that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped popularize during Woke 1. It held that the U.S. needn’t worry about deficits because the government could print money. Politicians could spend with abandon, and if inflation rose, Congress could subdue it by raising taxes.
Stephanie Kelton, an economist who provided the intellectual imprimatur for modern monetary theory, thanked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for bringing this radical idea into the mainstream: “People immediately probably started googling ‘modern monetary theory’ to find out what she was referring to.” …
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is tiptoeing back from some of her earlier radical social positions, like defunding the police. But she and other progressives continue to promote the woke economic idea that raiding the rich can pay for their wildest spending dreams. What will it take for them to wake up?
Crazy Rich Commies. Sweet that DSA socialist boss Gustavo Gordillo has been able to afford $1.5 million to refurbish the house his parents bought him. Unherd spotlights champagne socialists such as Gordillo. But Unherd admits:
It’s no surprise, then, that many young socialists have neglected the economy, unions, and free healthcare as their organizing principle in favor of, say, the war in Gaza or LGBTQ issues. As the sociologist Vivek Chibber has argued, socialist organizations “have to largely imagine what [working class] interests are”, since they don’t learn through direct engagement.
A movement that has to imagine the working class from the outside will, unsurprisingly, keep producing leaders who look like Gustavo Gordillo or Grace Ryan, who — without a hint of irony — invoke noblesse oblige, the paternalistic fantasy of upper-class gifts bestowed on the grateful poor.
Scary—but somewhat elusive—white supremacists. Ira Stoll writes at the Washington Free Beacon that even though the FBI says there are 7 times as many anti-Jewish as anti-Muslim hate crimes, the New York Times is stoking a panic about Islamophobia.
Young at Heart. “Democrats Are on the Verge of Picking Another 80-Year-Old,” Politico says. He’s Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey. Politico admits that the party “is still traumatized” by the Biden presidency (so am I!) …
But much of the party’s insurgent energy is coming from the left — and that might be what saves Markey.
“Mr. President, Sometimes Silence Is Golden” is the headline on Frank Miele’s RCP piece. Miele mentions a speechifying occasion:
Every other politician was sticking to talking points, glib and predictable, but Trump was saying whatever came into his head, consequences be damned.
In 2026, that same verbal recklessness is likely to cost Trump a Republican Senate and House and very possibly make it impossible for him to be succeeded by a Republican two years later.
If you are a Democrat, that’s great news. But if you are a Republican, or just someone who was inspired by Trump’s promise to blow up “politics as usual,” it’s demoralizing at best – and terrifying at worst.
But nobody could begrudge President Trump a victory lap at the hugely enjoyable and patriotic IndyCar’s Freedom 250 race here in Washington Sunday.
