Hello and welcome to Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026. Somewhere out there, Google is quietly celebrating a birthday it didn’t actually earn today, and nobody’s going to stop it.
My calendar says it’s Chocolate Milk Day, Gold Star Mother’s and Family Day, the Day of Forgiveness, World Tourism Day, and Corned Beef Hash Day. Pour a glass of chocolate milk, take a moment for Gold Star families who’ve given more than anyone should have to, forgive somebody who’s earned it, book a trip if you’ve got the means, and fry up some corned beef hash while you’re at it — ideally not all in the same sitting.
Today in History:
1669: The island of Crete falls to the Ottoman Turks after a 21-year siege.
1779: The Continental Congress names John Adams to negotiate peace terms with Britain to end the Revolutionary War.
1825: George Stephenson’s Locomotion No. 1 pulls the world’s first passenger-carrying train on England’s Stockton and Darlington Railway.
1864: Confederate guerrilla “Bloody Bill” Anderson, riding with a teenage Jesse James among his men, massacres 20 unarmed Union soldiers at Centralia, Missouri.
1939: Warsaw surrenders after weeks of resistance to invading German and Soviet forces.
1940: Germany, Italy, and Japan sign the Tripartite Pact, formally allying the Axis powers of World War II.
1964: The Warren Commission publicly releases its report, concluding Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
1996: The Taliban capture Kabul, driving out the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani.
1998: Google marks this date as its official birthday, timed to an early milestone in its web-page index count.
2008: Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang becomes the first Chinese citizen to walk in space, during the Shenzhou 7 mission.
2023: NASA astronaut Frank Rubio returns to Earth after setting a U.S. record of 371 consecutive days in space.
2024: An Israeli airstrike kills Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a precision strike on a Beirut suburb.
Birthdays Today include: Mike Schmidt, Baseball Hall of Famer and three-time NL MVP; Gwyneth Paltrow, actress and Academy Award winner; Avril Lavigne, singer known for “Complicated”; Lil Wayne, rapper and Grammy winner; and Shaun Cassidy, actor and singer — if today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday from everyone here.
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Decent piece from Doctor Liberty Vittert Capito at The Hill day before yesterday. (Yeah, I’m a bit behind in my reading).
The topic is the Lindsay Clancy case in its aftermath — the Duxbury, Mass., mother who strangled her three children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan, in January 2023 — and specifically, what the polling data says about how America reacted to it. And yes, I know I’ve written about the topic before. That said, Capito brings serious clarity that deserves recognition to the case and its implications.
Worth noting up front, since Capito’s piece assumes the reader already knows: the case just ended, on September 4, in a mistrial. A deadlocked jury, after roughly 38 hours of deliberation spread across seven days, told the judge for a third time it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Clancy’s defense had pursued a lack-of-criminal-responsibility argument built on postpartum psychosis and, by her attorney’s own account, medication so aggressively prescribed that her husband had gone to her doctor the week before the killings to ask what was happening to her.
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Prosecutors, for their part, argued she’d planned the twenty minutes of solitude in which to act, sending her husband out for prescriptions and a takeout order timed to know exactly how long she’d be alone. Nobody disputes that Clancy did it. The entire fight was over whether she’s criminally responsible for having done it. And a jury of twelve honest Massachusetts residents, staring at that same set of facts, could not agree.
Personally, I’d like to see some legal penalties against the ones who were prescribing all the medication, but such is our healthcare system these days.
Which brings us to Capito’s actual point, and it’s a sharper one than “the jury couldn’t decide.”
Start with the number that surprised me most. It wasn’t the gender gap. It was the party gap.
Sixty-one percent of Republicans said Clancy was guilty of murder. Among Democrats, it was 34 percent. That’s a 27-point gap, nearly three times the gap between men and women. Three children were strangled in their home, and somehow even that got sorted along party lines.
When the killing of an 8-month-old becomes a question you answer by checking your team, we’ve lost something we can’t poll our way back to.
Just sit back and think about that. It’s not a soft point dressed up in statistician’s clothing. This isn’t a policy question where reasonable people split along ideological lines because they weigh competing values differently — tax rates, immigration levels, how much regulation an industry should carry.
This is “did this specific woman strangle these three specific children on purpose.” That’s a factual question with an answer, not a values question with a range of defensible positions. And somehow a 27-point gap opened up on it anyway, nearly triple the gap between men and women on the same question. If your political affiliation predicts your answer to “is strangling an 8-month-old murder” better than your actual read of the trial evidence does, the problem isn’t the jury. It’s the culture supplying the jury pool.
Massachusetts is traditionally a blue state, and dependably so nearly to the point of it being its own subculture. Republicans from that state could run for office in other states as Democrats, and nobody would question the party membership. So the polling data Capito lists should surprise nobody in the way the jury’s reaction to the case, meshes with the polling data she cites. Rather like being able to predict how someone will vote by an American Flag in the front yard.
Capito goes on:
Part of what we have lost is a shared moral vocabulary. We used to have words like “wrong,” “guilty” and “responsible,” and we used them without apologizing. Now, we reach for clinical language instead. We talk about “trauma,” “triggers” and “systems.” Diagnosis has quietly displaced judgment.
Mental illness is real, and the law rightly makes room for it. But when every terrible act gets explained by a condition, no one is ever responsible for anything. And a society where no one is responsible can’t protect anyone.
Indeed so, and our definitions changing is a topic I’ve also addressed in this column before, where I’ve argued that whoever controls the language ends up controlling the culture that language describes.
The Clancy case is a live measurement of exactly that dynamic. Capito rightly points to the Luigi Mangione case as the mirror-image example — a man accused of gunning down a health insurance executive in the street, transformed by a meaningful slice of the public into a folk hero fighting a supposedly broken system, the actual killing itself treated as almost incidental to the narrative being built around him. Same mechanism, same instinct: Find the sympathetic diagnosis, the systemic villain, the trauma narrative, and the act itself starts to recede into the background noise. Or as I said yesterday, when victims are lionized, victimhood becomes the coin of the realm. I should probably add that to my list of Eric’s Axioms.
Capito closes with the line that’s the real core of the piece:
As a mother, what frightens me most is that my son will grow up in a country that is learning to confuse empathy for justice. Empathy is a beautiful instinct, but a society that pours its sympathy onto the person who did the killing, while the children who died become an afterthought, has its moral math backwards.
And there’s the whole thing, stated as plainly as it can be stated and it is the very reason for this column today.
Empathy for the person who did something terrible isn’t itself the problem — understanding how someone arrived at an act of violence is legitimately part of figuring out what justice actually requires, and it’s part of why we have juries weigh criminal responsibility instead of just reading a rap sheet.
The problem is when empathy for the perpetrator starts eating the entire moral bandwidth in the room, until the actual victims — three small children who no longer exist because of what happened in that house — become a mere footnote to a story about the adult who ended their lives. When a hung jury on that question splits down party lines instead of splitting on “did I actually believe the psychosis defense,” we’re not looking at twelve people who disagreed about evidence. We’re looking at a people that’s forgotten how to agree on what a fact is, once that fact has to compete with which team gets to claim the sympathetic narrative.
I hasten to point to a piece our Jack Dunphy posted yesterday, wherein he says:
In the preface to his latest book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad implores readers to “[i]magine for a moment that the West’s intelligentsia, including its elitist progressive political class, is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire in every conceivable manner.” The result, writes Saad, is “a society that is galloping rapidly toward the abyss of infinite lunacy.”
Indeed.
And yes, I share the concern Capito and Saad express here for our future. As I have said previously, there isn’t a single part of this Clancy story that doesn’t fall under the heading of “Tragedy.” But the problem we face now, and going forward, is how many are holding the value of “empathy” over fact. A society that does that, is simply unable to protect anyone or anything. I hate to say this, because I know how some will react… but that’s a larger, much larger issue than the Clancy case itself.
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Thought for the Day: The Warren Commission’s report answered the official question and settled almost nothing in the public mind — proof that a conclusion and a consensus are not the same achievement, no matter how thorough the paperwork.
VIP members, I’d like to hear your angle. Your voice matters.
Take care, gang. Glad you came by today. Can I count on seeing you tomorrow?
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