By now, almost everyone in the US has heard about the horrifying case of the Clancy family in Massachusetts.

In January 2023, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan Clancy were strangled with exercise bands by their mother Lindsay, in their family home in Massachusetts. Lindsay then attempted to slash her throat and wrists and jumped out a second-floor window. Her husband, Patrick, found her when he returned from picking up a takeaway dinner and medicine for their daughter. He then found the bodies of his children in the basement.

Lindsay is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is currently on trial. Prosecutors say she planned the killings in advance and had sent her husband out on errands so she would have time to do so. Her defence team is arguing that she was not of sane mind, that she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, and should not be held criminally responsible.

Surely the most terrible thing that could possibly happen has happened to this family. And yet somehow, ladies, we have managed to make it worse. I say ‘we’. I’m being imprecise. A particular group of women, spurred on by social media and what looks like a bottomless need for validation, has decided to make a saint out of Lindsay Clancy – of all people. And an even more deranged subgroup has decided that, actually, it was Patrick, the devastated father, who murdered the children and framed his wife.

‘Last week, I thought Lindsay Clancy killed her babies during postpartum psychosis. I now believe Patrick Clancy drugged Lindsay… pushed her out a window, and strangled his children with exercise bands so he could marry his new wife’, said one conspiracy theorist quoted by the Boston Globe. This is despite the fact that not even Lindsay disputes that she killed her children. Patrick Clancy has also consistently defended Lindsay, telling the New Yorker: ‘I wasn’t married to a monster. I was married to someone who got sick.’ But because, according to strangers on the internet, Patrick quickly divorced his wife (reminder: she killed their three children) and remarried in a suspiciously speedy timeframe, the only possible conclusion is that he orchestrated the entire thing.

We need to have a hard conversation about the troubling effects of social media on the minds of young women. Because I regret to inform you that we have now reached the point where countless mothers are filming themselves weeping while throwing ice into bathtubs, weeping about how Lindsay doesn’t have her dead children’s ‘luvvies’ and ‘plushies’ (reminder: that’s because she killed them), and weeping while ignoring their own kids so they can continue their social-media posturing. All brought on by their wild over-identification with a woman who is not disputing the fact that she killed her three tiny, helpless children.

If any regressive misogynists out there are watching these nut jobs and muttering about how women should be ruled over by their husbands (and there surely are), these women are making their case for them.

Last week, a group of them even held a rally in support of Lindsay. Judging by their comments, the women interviewed by CNN at the supporters’ rally seemed to think that we have all been living in some kind of harsh, spartan, frontier world where it is demanded by patriarchy that women birth children in fields, alone, then pick up the still-wet sprog and hike across mountains while also making their husbands dinner.

‘We are here to send one message, and that message is that it should not take tragedy for people to start paying attention to mental health’, said one of the rally organisers. What planet is this woman living on? ‘Mental health’ is an obsession in American culture. We never stop hearing about ‘mental health’. We ask children, ‘How is your mental health?’. We demand that employers be solicitous of their staff’s ‘mental health’. Millions of hours of social-media content focusses on our collective ‘mental health’. If anything, we should shut the hell up about our ‘mental health’, and then maybe we would not be having a collective mental health breakdown.

‘She was failed, she was let down. So many women suffer from postpartum and they don’t always get the help that they need’, said one rally attendee. But trial testimony indicates otherwise. Lindsay had a team of medical doctors treating her. She had been treated in a mental hospital, where she had gone willingly. She had a close relationship with her mother-in-law, and her own mother often came to stay with her to help out. Her husband made good money and, when not travelling for his tech sales job, worked from home. ‘The family enjoyed trips to Cape Cod and spending time together at home in Duxbury, an affluent suburb located 20 miles outside Boston’, reports People magazine. Lindsay had worked as a labour and delivery nurse, so she would have had not just personal help, but also professional experience dealing with newborns and new mothers.

None of that matters to the Lindsay stans. When Clancy arrived at the courthouse last week, a supporter started clapping like an excited little girl, and said, ‘Oh, Lindsay’s here’, as if she were Taylor Swift or something.

Lindsay’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has also been adopted by this twisted fandom. One supporter has credited him with giving ‘a voice to all these women that have had no voice for so long’. ‘We are so grateful that someone is hearing us, and we can shout from the rooftops that finally, someone is hearing that we, as women, we do need help’, she told local media. ‘And we do need support. We love you, Lindsay.’

Everyone, even a woman who has admitted to killing her children, deserves a fair trial and a competent defence. But women have had no voice?! Is she joking? Women (myself included) are never done using our ‘voice’ – and we have an almost limitless number of ways to do so. This isn’t Afghanistan, you lunatics. This level of self-pitying delusion needs to be studied.

Of course, mental illness does not spare the well-off, and being a new mum can be extremely difficult and isolating. But – and I genuinely cannot believe I have to spell this out – that does not mean you get a pass for killing your children. Three beautiful, innocent lives are gone – forever. In any sane moral calculus, that counts for more than the feelings of Lindsay Clancy, and certainly far, far more than the feelings of a bunch of hysterical internet randos.