Has Woke 2.0 Started?

By Abigail Anthony

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Ever since AOC quoted a local city councilman as saying, “Woke 1 was crazy,” a troubling thought has been lurking in my mind: The phrase “Woke 1” means there must be a Woke 2 — and potentially a Woke 3, Woke 4, and so on. I never believed that “wokeness” died; it simply grew quieter because its loudest activists retreated to private rooms for off-the-record discussions. Still, I’ve been wondering when the second era of wokeness would emerge.

 

Now, I believe I’ve already seen it. This summer, I observed aggressive illiberal extremism in three particular cultural episodes that eerily resembled the fashions of 2020: the Cambridge cover-up, the Clancy trial, and the Cornell case.

 

For those who didn’t follow the story, Jason Arday was the youngest black professor ever at the University of Cambridge in England — except his entire scholarly career was replete with academic misconduct, including extensive plagiarism and research fraud. He also regularly fabricated personal feats, like saying he that he volunteered abroad with a charity that has a policy to not send volunteers abroad. (See my reporting in National Review for a more detailed summary of his fictitious biography and academic misconduct, including our discovery that he falsely claimed to be a visiting professor at Ohio State University.) Arday resigned as more of his lies were exposed in the press, and nine days later, he was found dead in his home.

 

Arday personified wokeness: His “research” (even if it had entirely lacked stolen data and language) was entirely bogus drivel designed to advance predetermined conclusions about “racism” that would justify increasing DEI, and he surely would not have been deemed qualified for an academic position anywhere (let alone at Cambridge) if he fell into the “straight white male” category. But since his publications and career ascent aren’t limited to this past year, he cannot be construed as marking a new chapter of wokeness. Rather, the relevant barometer is that academia and mainstream outlets reflexively supported him this summer, even as his claims and papers were being picked apart in some outlets. Cambridge University initially defended Arday, as did a large swath of academics within and outside the school. The mainstream media largely avoided discussing the incriminating evidence behind the accusations and further downplayed the extent to which he had exaggerated his life achievements.

 

Mainstream journalists and the Ivory Asylum’s inmates decided that Arday was the victim of racism and that the villain worthy of opprobrium was the whistleblower, Nathan Cofnas — not because Cofnas’s exposé on Arday was factually flawed, but because he had previously written about IQ differences and disparate outcomes across racial groups. Once Arday was discovered dead, the hostility to Cofnas only intensified. The New York Times reported in late September that Cambridge abandoned its previous plans to investigate the hiring of Arday, and the university will instead examine whether it offered sufficient support to Arday as the controversy gained traction. By contrast, Cofnas was suspended by his own institution in Belgium, Ghent University.

 

This affair only reaffirmed that even the most prestigious institutions, ostensibly dedicated to truth and research, were willing to ignore heaps of damning evidence for the sake of appearing sufficiently committed to social justice, DEI, anti-racism, and all that jazz. Rather than admit to wrongdoing and acknowledge the plain facts, the university’s leadership espoused a nonsense “racism!” narrative, condemned the people who defended meritocratic standards, and then rescinded its conciliatory institutional inquiry that had been offered solely because public criticism was mounting.

 

But worse than elevating Arday to innocent martyr status was the campaign against Cofnas, who did what an academic is supposed to do: present evidence and seek the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. A great, and significantly concerning, irony is that Cofnas himself had previously been dismissed as a fellow from Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College for the supposed crime of writing articles that offended minorities within the academy; he published a blog post that qualified as “a rejection of diversity, equality, and inclusion” and thereby violated the college’s “core values and mission.” In other words, the guy who did actual research was the one actually booted from his Cambridge office.

 

***

 

The second phenomenon of mass delusion was apparent in how left-leaning women responded to the Clancy trial. Former mother Lindsay Clancy faced three first-degree murder charges. Her defense team did not dispute that she strangled her three children — Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months) — to death with an exercise band in January 2023. The trial more narrowly focused on whether she was suffering from “postpartum psychosis” (potentially induced by medication) when she committed the murders; if she was in such an altered state when she committed the murders, then she could not be held criminally responsible. One lone juror, a black man, prompted the judge to declare a mistrial after six days of deliberation.

 

A lot of crazy progressive women who weren’t on the stand for insanity expressed their “solidarity” with Clancy. To support her, several hundred women dressed up in pink and rallied outside the courthouse when the trial was ongoing, insisting that the case represented how the medical system mistreats and dismisses female patients, particularly those with postpartum health issues. Of course, activism also occurred online. A woman (who claimed to be an ob-gyn) posted a video to social media where she explicitly thanked Clancy and attested that it is difficult to be a mother to three children. “I don’t know what else [Clancy] could have done,” she said. (The most charitable interpretation possible is that the ob-gyn was praising Clancy strictly for seeking medical help related to her mental health, though that isn’t obvious.) The New York Times ran the headline “I Study Women Who Kill Their Children. Lindsay Clancy Deserves Mercy.”

 

Elaborate explanations emerged to excuse the murderess’s actions. “Stop thinking about these kids as people and think about them as ceramic vases for just one second,” a woman and self-described “forensic scientist” said as she compared Clancy’s case to that of an epileptic person who involuntarily broke expensive pottery in a museum. Complex conspiracy theories attempt to argue that Clancy’s husband was somehow in on the murders, or even entirely to blame. Clancy’s lawyer has been praised as a “feminist icon” and hailed as “the voice of so many moms,” even though a fraction of a percent of new mothers have postpartum psychosis, and an even smaller subset kill their children. Mothers watched Clancy achieve something like sainthood, and now, there have been several reported instances of apparent copycat cases: As a CNN headline put it, “Illinois mother texted friends about Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial hours before killing her 2-year-old, prosecutors say.”

 

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a society that celebrates the murder of children in utero naturally progressed to celebrating a woman who murders her children outside the womb. But an unanticipated outcome to the trial was the fervid witch hunt — not targeting Clancy, but rather the dissenting juror. “He had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsey viciously killed her children,” a female juror later said in an interview on NBC TV. Another female juror explained to the public that the man was “arrogant,” which just means he didn’t do exactly what they kept nagging him to do. Journalists decided to actually investigate for once; the public was informed of every infraction the male juror had ever committed, which is among the few instances of the left and the mainstream media discussing any wrongdoings committed by a black man. We know that he faced eviction due to unpaid rent and had been served a restraining order, yet the ugly facts about George Floyd’s multiple crimes were hardly ever mentioned during Woke 1.

 

***

 

Finally, there is the so-called Cornell 7 debacle. The publicly available information suggests that Jane Doe had enthusiastically consented verbally to a wide range of extreme sexual activity throughout the evening. (Just describing the escapades in detail would corrupt a virgin.) Afterward, she affirmed in writing that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal” and “our body our choice.” She was so unbothered by the fraternity boys that she wanted to party with them again and had plans to do so. Later, Doe claimed she had been raped — after scandalous rumors were gaining traction on campus, after her sorority sisters construed the shame as evidence of sexual abuse, and after she was disinvited from a fraternity party.

 

Progressives have responded to the Cornell debauchery by displaying the same totalitarian impulse that was present in 2020: The men are presumed guilty, and everyone must condemn them. As was the case during BLM, leftists have resorted to social media to express their support for Jane Doe by sharing infographics with misleading statistics, posting “MeToo” style narratives, and demanding comprehensive reform. To advance their interpretation of that scandalous Cornell evening, the left-wing activists are pressuring higher-education institutions to support Doe and adopt policy changes — the same way that faculty and students issued statements urging their universities to implement “antiracist” measures. For example, the undergraduate senate at Princeton released a letter insisting that their school express “solidarity” with Doe, rework its Title IX policies, and much more. Cornell itself has responded with an iron fist, recently banning social events at all fraternities for the school year — even though the specific fraternity where the purported “sexual violence” occurred (as well as the accused individuals) had already been punished.

 

***

 

What do all these instances have in common with one another, and with 2020-era madness? First, facts are disregarded and suppressed in the media. Second, everything is construed in terms of an oppression hierarchy, while the victims are misidentified. In some instances, the condemned villain is actually the good guy. Third, important long-standing norms are abandoned with little regard for the long-term consequences. Extensive plagiarism and research fraud is somehow excusable, harassing a particular juror is encouraged, and consent is construed as something that can be retroactively repealed. Fourth, there are social demands for individuals and institutions to proactively affirm that they agree with the progressive stance du jour. Perhaps the most clearly shared trait, though, is the groupthink: In each of the three examples, and back in 2020, leftists instinctively arrived at the same conclusion and did not entertain any challenges, then they attempted to promote a consensus by punishing critics. But the worst thing is that the groupthink doesn’t involve reasonable ideas. Instead, it consists of absolutely absurd beliefs, seriously erroneous interpretations of facts, and extreme demands.

 

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of recent anecdotes about growing illiberalism: We could point to the popularity of Democratic Socialist candidates or the anti-ICE protests, along with other examples, as additional evidence. But these three episodes lead me to conclude that either Woke 1 never ended and is awakening from a brief hibernation, or we’re living through the earliest stage of Woke 2. Either way, illiberal sentiments are shared more openly, more widely, and more passionately — all of which is worrying. The good news, if there is any, is that I might be wrong: This is an observation of the culture, not a quantitative study supported by a rigorous methodology. In fact, I really hope that I am wrong. But I suspect that if the midterms elections wind up with Democrats in control, or even simply more heavily represented in Congress and elsewhere than they are now, then wokeness — whether a continuation of Woke 1 or a sequel with distinct characteristics — will erupt immediately thereafter.

Troy Jackson’s Petulant Debate Haunts His Campaign

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

If Abdul El-Sayed had as strong a debate as some observers claimed he had, the press would not have spent the last week and a half talking only about the accusations Mike Rogers made on the debate stage and El-Sayed’s failure to defuse them to reporters’ satisfaction.

 

Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, Troy Jackson, is experiencing a torment similar to El-Sayed’s this week after he delivered one of the more petulant debate performances in recent memory.

 

For most of the week, Jackson has been haunted by his conduct during a debate in which an audience member heckled his opponent, Senator Susan Collins. “This is obviously one of Troy’s supporters,” she joked. “Oh, shut up,” Jackson barked back. “I don’t even know that kid.”

 

The aside has become a sticky moment for Jackson. Combined with his penchant for rolling his eyes when his opponent speaks and condescending to her even as he accuses Collins of “talking down” to him and his fellow “working class” Mainers, it reinforced the perception that Jackson can be a bit of a jerk.

 

At least, that’s what we can deduce from the political press’s persistent but, thus far, unsuccessful efforts to help Jackson recover from his error.

 

“Do you regret saying that to Senator Collins?” one local CBS News reporter asked. “No,” Jackson replied. “She accused me of setting that up, which is completely untrue,” he bristled. “You know, I’m not going to mince words anymore.”

 

Somehow, this indignant display failed to reassure Jackson’s constituents. Over the weekend, he trudged his wounded ego with him for a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, which went about as well as his encounter with CBS News:

 

WATCH: Democrat MESEN candidate Troy Jackson refuses to apologize to Susan Collis over telling her to "shut up" during a recent debate, says he did it because he's tired of feeling "talked down" to. Soft followup from CNN's Dana Bash. pic.twitter.com/XMK7b4lFWF

 

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) October 18, 2026

 

“What I’m not going to be is talked down to by Senator Collins,” Jackson stressed, his body language clearly conveying his irritation with the news cycle he’d created and the reporters driving it. “I just think that was another situation where she was talking down to me and, you know, so I’m not going to apologize for that. No.”

 

To her credit, Bash took the conversation in a more serious direction by implying that Jackson’s conduct on that debate stage was indicative of his rumored “aggressive” encounters with women.

 

Fortunately for us, PolitiFact ruled that the rumors are “false.” It’s probably true that Jackson “threw a water bottle during an argument” with a female staffer, but “none of the accounts said the bottle hit her.” Phew!

 

Jackson stood his ground, insisting to Bash that Republicans who call his character into question are acting in bad faith. But it’s Jackson’s own demeanor that lends credence to those claims. Like El-Sayed, Jackson will not be goaded by the press into eating enough crow to put the controversy to bed.

 

Despite the tailwinds at the party’s back, the pride evinced by candidates such as Jackson may still rob the Democrats of a historic night on November 3.

The Left’s Performative Misunderstanding

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

Dan Levy is disappointed in you, America.

 

The Canadian comedian and self-appointed humor policeman has expressed his disgust with Shane Gillis’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue, in which Gillis joked that some women now “just dress like whores” at the gym.

 

“Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores,” Levy said on Instagram. “It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”

 

After saying he was “speechless” that such a thing could be broadcast on national television, Levy bravely overcame his speechlessness to complain that “more men need to be standing up in opposition to it because it’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a ‘conversation’ as opposed to a ‘crime.’”

 

You have heard of Levy, whose comedy is so nuanced that he gave his hit show the cryptic name Schitt’s Creek, only because he is the son of comedy royalty — effectively the Don Jr. of Canada. His father, Eugene Levy, was a founding member of SCTV, a show that trafficked in unfortunate racial, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes in much the same way that SNL has over the years. Eugene Levy is perhaps best known to American audiences for his role in a movie where a teenage boy copulates with a hot apple pie.

 

Nonetheless, despite his comedic DNA, Levy appears to have joined the hordes of people who don’t know what a “joke,” a “comedian,” or a “sketch comedy show” is. SNL has been the home of offensive comedy for 52 years. In October 2020, comedian Bill Burr gave a monologue in which he mocked white women for making the “woke” movement about them, referring to them as “b*tches.” Levy was so outraged, he accepted an invitation to host nine episodes later. All principles are negotiable when your career could use a boost.

 

But the performative whiners on the left simply can’t leave Gillis alone. After being named as a cast member and “canceled” before his first episode for making crude jokes about gays and Asians on a podcast before his SNL hiring, Gillis became one of America’s biggest comedians and has hosted the show three times. Every time, his appearances have been followed by theatrical bellyaching from progressives, angry that their inner sanctum has been breached by someone unwilling to adhere to their cultural dictums. (Gillis is no conservative; a month ago he mused about the need for “free” health care.)

 

So what was Gillis’s crime? First, a bit of semantics: Gillis never called any women “whores,” as Levy alleges. He joked that women at the gym dress like whores, which is a different accusation. If I walked down the street wearing a Milwaukee Brewers baseball uniform, people would say I was dressed like a Milwaukee Brewer, but nobody would think I played Major League baseball.

 

Second, it may surprise some people that, to make a joke, comedians occasionally say things they don’t believe or that aren’t true. In Burr’s 2020 monologue, delivered during the Covid-19 pandemic, he joked that people shouldn’t wear masks because the world has too many people and you should be able to take out your grandma and grandpa if you want. He also made light of former SCTV cast member Rick Moranis being cold-cocked in the streets of New York, using that assault to cheerfully declare that New York City was back.

 

Did Burr really want you to kill your relatives? Was he happy Moranis got decked? Those who know what stand-up comedy is — namely, everyone who hadn’t accidentally ingested Tide Pods — understood that this was simply Burr’s sardonic style. The best laughs come when you laugh at something you know you’re not supposed to, and comedians like Burr, Louis C.K., and Gillis are technicians at this style: setting a controversial rhetorical trap and letting you watch them escape it.

 

Similarly, Gillis’s critique of modern gym fashion wasn’t to get a laugh at his bravery for using the word “whore.” In fact, the first half of his bit sets up a joke where he is the punchline, musing that he is now in the background of a bunch of TikTok videos leering at women in tiny shorts. Ultimately, he is the creep in the story he’s telling.

 

All of this matters because, ultimately, none of it matters. In the attention economy, consequential events fly by unnoticed while internet barkers take faux umbrage at the most inoffensive remarks. Social media exists for people to performatively and proudly misunderstand things to create a synthetic reality where only they have the moral high ground. If it isn’t Shane Gillis, it’s a new Sydney Sweeney ad or Sophie Cunningham expressing an opinion on biological males in women’s sports. It’s all just grist for the content mill.

 

And, of course, Gillis’s critics don’t much care for the cause of women’s rights. The Venn diagram of people yapping at Gillis yet savaging Susan Dell’s looks after she pledged over $6.2 billion to help kids start savings accounts is a single circle. Whether you’re allowed to age in public depends on your associations with the White House.

 

Yet progressives refuse to learn any lessons from their phony hysterics. They are blind to the ways their woke one-upmanship backfires. For one, Gillis’s monologue has prompted thousands of women across the country to post photos of themselves working out in very little clothing. The men come out way ahead on that transaction.

 

Further, any time they overreact to Gillis, it simply exposes their absurdity and makes him stronger. Gillis’s career exists because they don’t want it to — every complaint brings him more viewers and broadens his appeal.

 

Is there nobody on the left who can explain these things to their own kind? Are there any old-school Democrats who can note, for instance, that SNL, a show with a profoundly liberal sensibility, used to regularly mock different races, poke fun at gays and disabled people, and feature monologues where malodorous women were told to “wash their ass” properly? And yet, while this all may be tasteless, society has survived and, in many ways, gotten much better.

 

More than 60 years ago, the historian Daniel Boorstin warned that America was filling up with “pseudo-events,” happenings staged for no purpose other than to be reported on. He also defined the celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

 

Boorstin didn’t live to see Instagram, but he would have recognized Dan Levy on sight: a man famous mostly for his last name, manufacturing a scandal out of a joke in which the comedian was self-deprecating. None of this was ever about women, or gym shorts, or even Shane Gillis. It was about being seen being offended.

 

Society has survived controversial comedians before, and we will survive Shane Gillis, too, as long as we preserve the quaint notion that sometimes a joke is just a joke.

Whatever Happened to Saying No?

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Saturday, October 10, 2026

 

In the bad old days under the evil patriarchy, most women had a standard response for male sexual advances. It was “no.”

 

No extraordinary or specific case was required for this no. If the man wasn’t a husband or at least a steady boyfriend, “no” was the default assumption. Of course, this didn’t mean that no one was having premarital sex, but it did mean that saying no was a common practice.

 

Then, vis-à-vis men seeking her attention, a woman’s “no” was normal, for reasons of virtue or, at minimum, social prudence. In the post-Sixties era of “sexual liberation,” female chastity is considered absurd, even medieval, and, as a direct consequence, a “no” is devastatingly personal and can be awkward to deliver, since it’s a personal evaluation of a specific man and his offer. It’s the kind of direct confrontation that many women naturally shy away from.

 

A “no” is harder to utter now that it’s no longer backed by the force of social convention. Nevertheless, this does not excuse women’s hesitancy to deploy the answer, nor does it deprive them of agency when they don’t.

 

Yet the modern social difficulties of “no” do explain some of the psychology behind the dangerously fantastical statements by the latest Woman Who Must Be Believed — the Cornell University student granted anonymity as “Jane Doe” in her recently filed civil complaint. According to documents filed in her lawsuit, she “felt as if there was no way for her to escape this room full of predatory, fraternity men.” As an adult woman, Jane Doe says she was too intimidated by a bunch of frat guys, with whom she consensually engaged in various sexual combinations, to give them a single, old-fashioned “no.”

 

Jane Doe’s own original statement to police in 2024 does not describe male conduct that could be labeled intimidating in any commonsense way. Instead, the alleged “victim” recounts, in her own words, instances in which the young men regularly “checked in” for her consent, reminded her that she could stop, ceased sexual activities when she expressed any wish to stop, took her to sit down when she was dizzy, and undertook other little acts of deference that are honestly surprising in the context of an alcohol- and ketamine-fueled, late-night orgy.

 

But the new version of the two-year-old story contradicts the prior sworn statement, which she reviewed and amended, that she provided to the Cornell Police Department in November 2024. In her later account, she was “forced” to remain in the room and continue to engage in group sex and drug use. In the face of the social awkwardness of saying no, some women have retconned their reluctance to say “stop”; instead of describing themselves as embarrassed or regretful participants, they now say they were intimidated. Coincidentally, this transforms them from social laughingstock or guilt-ridden sex partner into the highest rung on the progressives’ social ladder: the victim.

 

Of course, during a true sexual assault, in any era, a “no” does not work. Indeed, the definition of rape, not to mention its major criminal and social sanction in virtually every civilized society, depends precisely on a man’s disregard for a woman’s “no.” But the gulf in the absence of “no” has left us with an entire category of regretted and regrettable sexual encounters in which the boundary between legal and illegal is determined mainly by the woman’s unspoken feelings and state of mind.

 

Under old rape law, a woman had to show “utmost resistance” to validate her claim. Perhaps that was unfair. But now, the de facto standard for a claim of rape doesn’t seem to require female resistance at all. It’s enough for her to say, retroactively and long after the act, that she “felt” raped, even if at the time she expressed enthusiasm for, or even initiated, the sexual encounter.

 

It is not only the seven young men at the house party who are being blamed for Jane Doe’s AWOL “no.” It’s also the university, the entire Chi Phi fraternity, associated executive board and alumni organizations, her own sorority, and, just for good measure, a bar named Moonies that allegedly served her a drink earlier in the evening. Some feminists are even blaming Trump, though the house party in question took place when Biden was president. In response to the now-notorious scandal, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has reopened debate over the fact that state law correctly does not define sexual relations while voluntarily intoxicated as assault. (Sure, let’s make it illegal to have sex after sharing a bottle of wine, as if we didn’t have enough of a fertility collapse already.)

 

The end result of liberal sexual ethics writ large — according to which women seldom say no and they can be, or should be, every bit as debauched as men — has not been a joyful bacchanal but a minefield. It’s a two-tiered system for the sexes.

 

Female sexuality is practically unlimited, but it’s not coupled with an expectation of responsibility or agency, or even the minimal requirement to know and clearly communicate one’s own mind. On the other side of the ledger, male sexuality is maximally constrained. In a reversal of biological fortune, men are now expected to be the brakes on sex, even when women directly advertise that they are eager and open to all comers. In the face of “free p****,” to quote one defendant’s vulgar chat message, they must either be rapists or monks. Even turning away from sex openly offered by a woman who seems in possession of her faculties can land you in trouble if you’re a man: At least three of the young men charged in this case had no sexual contact with Jane Doe at all, and their alleged crime is walking into the room before opting to go out for a Big Mac instead of having sex with her.

 

It’s a schizophrenic approach that leaves an increasing number of young men having to choose between retreating into digital inceldom and living under a sword of Damocles that can come down on their head at the post-hoc whim of a female accuser.

 

Feminists understandably balk at the idea that women ought to be at all times under the supervision and control of the men around them. Yet they now claim that “no” is so difficult and so beyond women’s ability that we need to reinvent the old patriarchal structure, this time made more insane by the fact that it’s no longer a woman’s father or husband — who at least presumably love her and have her best interests at heart — who is responsible for controlling or curtailing her sexual escapades, but random fraternity brothers instead.

 

Conservatives have always had moral reasons to oppose the sexual revolution, wisely suspecting that “free love” wouldn’t bring the bliss promised. But irresponsible “sexual liberation” for women and legal puritanism and punishment for men may be the worst of all worlds. If we women do not wish to return to the days of legal chaperones, we must relearn how to deploy the simple no.

Cornell and the Modern Sexual ‘Contract’

By Daniel Foster

Friday, October 09, 2026

 

In the context of the discourse over Cornell (which I otherwise intend to continue avoiding), Oliver Traldi, a philosopher at the University of Toledo and an occasional National Review contributor, argues against the familiar complaint that modern sexual ethics has been reduced to “consent.” He says this overlooks all manner of judgments people routinely make about putatively consensual sex. His examples include “misrepresentation, infidelity, mismatched expectations about the future, age and power disparities” and even bad sex, which, he observes, “is frequently moralized.” Josh Barro agrees that these examples demonstrate the persistence of moral standards beyond consent.

 

I don’t think they establish that at all.

 

Start with misrepresentation. Nobody can meaningfully consent to being defrauded. That’s a basic principle of contract law, in which material misrepresentations can make agreements voidable. Sexual consent, likewise, is usually understood to require some degree of transparency and disclosure about the conditions under which it’s given.

 

Mismatched expectations about the future can be understood similarly, although here we get into the realm of implied promises, which complicate plenty of contract disputes, too. If one party induces another into a sexual encounter conditional on promises (explicit or reasonably inferred) she knows to be false, the objection is that she fraudulently obtained consent. Consider the straightforward case of two people who sincerely want different things, are honest with each other about that, and have sex anyway because they’re looking not for the Right One but for the Right Now. Does contemporary sexual ethics render a judgment here? I don’t see a lot of that.

 

Age and power disparities are more attenuated still, but they likewise have analogues in contracts. We don’t automatically regard every agreement between unequals as invalid, but we recognize that disparities in maturity (and certainly in majority), authority, resources, or other forms of power can raise questions about whether consent was coerced. Progressive morality simpliciter, and therefore progressive sexual morality, often assumes that the existence of power disparities can make the exercise of individual agency illusory. Even if you think you’re doing something you want to do, that desire may itself be the result of structural forces that undermine your agency. You might have given “consent,” but it was under conditions resembling the Marxian notion of false consciousness. Again we find the moral objection isn’t about doing the thing but about the counterfeit nature of the consent obtained to do the thing.

 

Lastly, it’s true complaints about “bad sex” sometimes get moralized in the discourse, but there’s no controlling progressive norm there that I’m aware of, and such claims are often viewed skeptically even by people who are otherwise all in on the program. Still, they can be understood in something like the language of “fraudulent services,” as it were.

 

So, it seems to me Traldi’s putative counterexamples aren’t that at all. If anything, they demonstrate how much work we ask consent to do. Now, I think it’s probably more precise to refer to modern sexual ethics as “contractarian,” because they rely on a bunch of auxiliary concepts from the world of voluntary agreements. But consent is still a necessary condition of contract.

 

And the broader point is that a contractarian sexual ethics has no room for virtues that ought to be promoted, vices that ought to be prevented, rights that ought to be respected, or obligations that ought to be fulfilled—none that are independent of whatever settlement you might have negotiated at the bar.

 

We remain perfectly comfortable (more comfortable than ever!) condemning someone for taking sexual advantage of another. We are much less comfortable saying that two people have made a morally blameworthy sexual choice for themselves and for each other. What we’ve largely abandoned is the confidence to say that some kinds of sex ought not to be had at all, even by people who are perfectly free to choose.

The Cornell Seven Case and the Perils of Sexual Liberation

By Caroline Downey

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

The frat bros involved in the pending Cornell University sex abuse case are dirtbags — and many other epithets that I cannot use here. Let’s just get that out of the way. They are not necessarily criminals, however, even though the internet has condemned them as such in a knee-jerk reaction to the gross details that emerged this week.

 

On the night of October 19, 2024, and into the wee hours of the morning, seven male students engaged with one female student in an orgy, while all were evidently heavily inebriated and high on drugs. Two years after the woman signed off on an official statement, sent to the local New York district attorney, testifying that the debauchery that transpired was consensual, she has filed a complaint alleging rape.

 

Her original statement gave the prosecutor no reason to escalate, as she did not present evidence to him of criminal wrongdoing. But the mere fact that Jane Doe launched a new lawsuit, in which she significantly changed her story, sparked a firestorm. Much of social media, pivoting from the rabid defense of self-professed child-murderer Lindsay Clancy, is saying these men are felons. People on Instagram and X are lambasting the school for giving the men a slap on the wrist by allowing them to write an apology essay as disciplinary action when they really deserved life in prison. Case closed.

 

Unfortunately for the online mob, that’s not how due process works.

 

As my colleague Dan McLaughlin points out, for it to be first-degree rape under New York law, the victim had to have been physically forced into the sexual act or unconscious or unable to communicate as it was happening. Doe’s original statement does not say that.

 

For it to be second-degree rape, the victim had to be mentally incapacitated. For someone to be deemed mentally incapacitated, New York law says they had to be drugged without their consent. But Doe voluntarily consumed the ketamine, alcohol, and marijuana on the night of the incident, even snorting a substance off one of the guy’s sexual appendages, according to her own statement.

 

For it to be third-degree rape, the victim must state that they do not consent. According to the DA’s review of Jane Doe’s original statement, she said both yes and no to various sexual acts throughout the night. She verbally said yes to two group-sex overtures, no to another, and the men at each point obliged.

 

So, according to the legal standard of consent in New York State which we just outlined, Doe was capable of consent and both exercised and withdrew consent during the multi-hour stretch.

 

None of this morally excuses the men’s conduct, which is reprehensible. The screenshot of the fraternity’s group chat in which one of the defendants advertised “free p****” and another later asked, “shop still open?” makes one lose a lot of faith in how young men are being raised and behave. All the students there, both Doe and the men, were intoxicated and on substances, so it’s safe to say all their judgments were impaired.

 

They didn’t respect her dignity, and they didn’t respect their own, quite frankly. Still, no man in a drunken state should see a girl in her drunken state and think it’s a good idea to participate in a sex marathon alongside other drunken dudes that, let’s be real, is uniquely degrading to her.

 

The accused men, regardless of a verdict or settlement, will face the consequences of their decisions in the job market, in the dating pool, and beyond. If you lose your livelihood because proof that you are a scumbag was telegraphed to the public, that’s the price you pay. But prosecuting and convicting someone of rape means something entirely different — it means depriving them of their constitutional liberty. So, the court better be sure that rape is clearly what occurred.

 

We’re told that under modern feminism the sexes are totally equal, as are all the many sexual lifestyles. Anything goes in the sexual arena, with the one caveat being “consent.” Doe said in her original statement that she gave that consent at each step of the way. Yet, many on social media are still upset by what happened.

 

Perhaps that’s because, deep down, they know that just because it may have been consensual doesn’t mean it wasn’t messed up. Adult entertainment star Bonnie Blue had sex with over 1,000 men in twelve hours for some twisted challenge that ultimately earned her a ton of money, at the expense of her soul. It was consensual. Still, should so many guys have lined up to take her up on the offer? Should she have made this offer in the first place? No. Even the most fervent of feminists could not deny there was something sinister about it.

 

The drama at Cornell lays bare the perils and false promises of sexual liberation. It opened Pandora’s box, from which sprang hookup culture on college campuses, OnlyFans, and rampant pornography, which no doubt influenced the seven men’s behavior that October night. With consent as its only moderating principle, the sex-positivity movement invited a world of depravity with blurred lines and infinite regret.

 

While the Cornell case has not resulted in anything resembling criminality yet, one thing is for sure: This is radical feminism’s chickens coming home to roost.

The Mob Never Learns

By Justin Dillon & KC Johnson

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

 

The mob has now come for Cornell. And this time, it even has a superhero.

 

Last week, a female Cornell student claiming to have been gang-raped by members of the Chi Phi fraternity almost two years ago sued Cornell, Chi Phi, various Cornell administrators, and — by name — the seven Cornell students who were allegedly involved in the rape. The case quickly went viral, and the reactions have broken down along predictably partisan lines — with everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Hollywood actress Florence Pugh (who plays the Black Widow–esque Yelena Belova in the Marvel Universe) weighing in, and most people immediately assuming guilt.

 

The lawsuit was filed by a plaintiffs’ firm that has previously sued Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs.  There is much in it that should raise some eyebrows — but not necessarily for the reasons the plaintiff wants.

 

Here’s what we know: In 2024, almost three weeks after the incident, Jane Doe filed a report with the Cornell University police. According to the local district attorney, who would later decline to file charges in the case, what she said then is not what she’s saying now:

 

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual. My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later. Furthermore, I have never been contacted by Jane Doe’s attorneys. Not to inform me the original statement was inaccurate and not to ask me to reconsider our decision. Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe’s attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit’s allegations.

 

District attorneys almost never release statements like this — much less include, as he did, a lengthy excerpt from a statement Jane Doe gave his office two years ago.

 

It’s unclear whether Cornell had access to the DA’s legal analysis that the conduct, as alleged, did not constitute sex without consent when the university went forward with its own Title IX investigation. (While a Title IX process uses a lower standard of proof than does a criminal trial, the underlying factual question — did Doe’s allegation, if true, constitute a sexual assault — was the same in both matters.) Subsequent statements from both Doe’s attorney and Cornell indicated that the university’s investigation found all seven of the male students responsible for at least some form of misconduct. Two of them were expelled, and the other five appear to have received suspensions or some other form of punishment.

 

We don’t know why Cornell expelled only two of the students, because no one has (yet) leaked the investigation report in the case. Doe’s lawyers could have included the report as an exhibit to their complaint but chose not to do so. They also failed to mention texts showing that the accuser told one of the young men just two days after the incident that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” And we also don’t know if Cornell was aware of those texts, which most reasonable people would consider highly exculpatory.

 

We do know, however, that Cornell is almost the last school in the country that would bend over backwards to help a male respondent beat a Title IX charge: It is in the top five of universities nationwide that have faced lawsuits by male respondents who claim their cases were handled unfairly. There is simply no reason to believe that in a case involving allegations of a gang rape by fraternity members, Cornell suddenly decided to favor respondents.

 

Yet the plaintiff has sued Cornell and the seven accused students, almost two years after the fact. Why the wait? The answer is almost certainly the vulgar screenshotted text that was pasted into the complaint, which the New York Post reported was leaked much later by someone in the group chat. That text doesn’t shed light either way on whether or not the plaintiff consented or whether she was too drunk to consent. But it does indicate — as the DA later noted — that “the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible.” Her skilled attorneys clearly understood its PR value — and they were right.

 

For years, accusers’-rights lawyers have been trying to convince courts to make a positively dystopian legal ruling: that refusing to find a respondent guilty and expel him can — standing alone — violate Title IX. So far, they have failed — in the Sixth Circuit against Michigan State, in a district court decision involving the University of Nebraska that the Eighth Circuit declined to immediately review, and most recently in the Seventh Circuit against the University of Wisconsin.

 

That may be why the plaintiff here filed not in federal court — which has been uniformly hostile to some of the claims she brings here — but in state court. (And oddly, in Manhattan — even though Cornell is located in Ithaca, N.Y., more than 200 miles away.)

 

Other strategic choices she made raise similar questions.

 

For one, the complaint is littered with inflammatory or misleading statements. The plaintiff claims not to know whether the Title IX process against the accused students has been completed — even though, under federal law, Cornell had to tell her that, and one of her lawyers has admitted that the process ended with two expulsions. She insinuates that some of the punished students only had to write a reflection paper, which is almost certainly untrue and likely referred to reflection papers that are submitted as part of a typical sanctioning process. And she took the highly unusual step of identifying the accused students by name, knowing full well that doing so would set a mob upon them.

 

Indeed, the mob responded as expected. The Cornell student newspaper threw any semblance of objectivity to the side and authored a grotesque house editorial that literally began by listing all the male students’ names. The editorial added that “if Cornell follows the law, then we should have access to a public deposition issued from the school.” But the Title IX process doesn’t involve sworn depositions, and in any event federal law requires that campus sexual assault hearings be closed to the public.

 

AOC, meanwhile, traveled to Ithaca to denounce Cornell’s “culture of rape,” shown by an incident in which “seven men drugged and gang-raped a 20-year-old woman.” (The New York City congresswoman did not indicate how she reached this factual conclusion.) She castigated Cornell for only expelling two of the male students, while making “the rest write essays as their form of punishment.” Even Doe’s lawyer hadn’t made such a claim, which Cornell publicly denied. And for good measure, AOC’s rally opened with the student sponsors leading the crowd in a chant for a free “Palestine,” “from the river to the sea.” (Because of course it did.)

 

All of this is happening as Democrats are poised to take over both houses of Congress — and possibly the White House in 2029 — and call for a return to Obama-era Title IX policy, when respondents had few due process rights and bias toward complainants was seen as a feature, not a bug. So voilà, we have an allegation that Cornell somehow swept a gang rape under the rug, even though the facts seem to suggest no such thing.

 

We have seen high-profile college gang-rape allegations before, and we don’t yet know how things will turn out. At one extreme were the Duke lacrosse case from 2006 and the 2014 UVA/Rolling Stone case, both utter hoaxes where no sexual contact of any type occurred. At the other extreme was a 2013 gang rape by several Vanderbilt football players that led to several criminal convictions and the two ringleaders’ receiving long terms in Tennessee prison.

 

At this point, the Cornell incident most resembles an allegation of gang rape against members of the 2016 University of Minnesota team. In that case, the school immediately suspended (and thus publicly identified) ten of the players right before a bowl game. Only later did it become clear that at least some of the players were wrongly accused — even if the general conduct of multiple players having sex with an intoxicated woman in their dorm room was, to borrow from the Cornell DA, “disgusting and morally reprehensible.” The university ultimately paid $500,000 to the female complainant — while arguing that at worst its Title IX policies were biased against all accused students, and not just accused men, to defend a lawsuit filed by the accused football players.

 

The point of due process is to sort the sheep from the goats, so that guilty people can be held responsible and the lives of innocent people will not be ruined. Allegations are not evidence, and mob justice is no more real justice than Florence Pugh is a real superhero.

True Crime, False Witness

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

In the more than two weeks since a Massachusetts judge was forced to declare a mistrial in the case against Lindsay Clancy, the defendant’s supporters have not let up in their campaign to ruin the life of the lone holdout juror whose confidence cost Clancy an acquittal verdict.

 

We now know that juror’s name, but only because his fellow jurors and their cheering section in the press did their utmost to out him. When his critics weren’t seeking to expose the juror’s identity, they were besmirching his character and judgment — sometimes in especially delusional ways. “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children,” as one juror memorably put it, betraying both her personal affection for the defendant and an unsettling inhumanity.

 

“I didn’t have any doubts,” Michael Péguy Desronvil, a father from a Haitian migrant family and the holdout juror, said in his own defense. “As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence presented.” It’s not hard to imagine the abuse Desronvil likely endured for refusing to affirm what he did not believe.

 

For his troubles, Desronvil may face a judicial investigation if Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer gets his way. Her counsel wants to examine the juror’s mobile phone to see whether outside influences swayed him during the trial, as if that’s the only way the prosecution’s case could have persuaded anyone.

 

It’s not exactly hard to believe that Clancy killed her three young children. No one at the trial claimed she hadn’t. Rather, the defense contended that mitigating circumstances around the triple homicide excused, if not exculpated, the children’s killer. A plurality of Americans — including a plurality of women — reject the temporary postpartum insanity defense, but at least it’s an argument. What’s not even remotely plausible is that Clancy’s husband, Patrick, played some nefarious role in his children’s slaying. And yet, a significant constituency seems deeply invested in that unreality.

 

Patrick Clancy sat down with 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat over the weekend for an emotionally taxing interview in which he describes the experience of finding his family dead, save one child who passed away in his arms. He also describes the ordeal he’s experienced since the trial started, in which what must feel like an army of his wife’s supporters has done its utmost to make his and his new wife’s lives miserable. Maybe they’re convinced that, with a sufficient level of harassment, Clancy will have a theatrical meltdown in which he confesses to having framed his former wife. Maybe they’ve watched too many movies.

 

Indeed, a whole industry seems committed to retailing dubious but less-than-defamatory claims about Clancy designed to implicate him without leveling any concrete charges: the business of amateur “true crime” sleuthing.

 

The Crime Junkie Podcast contributor Briana Whitney savaged Douthat and 60 Minutes for failing to confront Clancy with the semi-cogent and wholly implausible theories that help “true crime” podcasters fill time. “If you’re frustrated by what you just watched, you’re not alone — we truly don’t know anything from Patrick,” she insisted. “I still think it’s far more likely that he did it than Lindsay,” said the TikTok star JA Kramer, who created a PowerPoint presentation titled “Patrick Did It.” Some even seemed to take pleasure in Patrick Clancy’s torment. As the content creator Alexis Rose said immediately following the CBS broadcast, “The bliss I feel in knowing that Patrick knows that I know.” Each complained that Douthat failed to press Clancy on the various vivid theories that populate the internet, which include the claim that he “hired a body double to go to the CVS for him” while he framed his wife for his kids’ killing.

 

From the casual slandering of the holdout juror to the possibly actionable denigration of a grieving father, the perversions we’ve had to witness have little to do with the facts in evidence. Rather, they seem to be motivated by their theorists’ desire to prove their membership in an exclusive club. They want to believe that they have seen a hidden truth. They want to think that they are so perceptive as to understand that every story has a far more complex, and more satisfyingly dramatic, subplot. “In the case of Patrick Clancy, there is a deep-rooted willfulness to not see things as they are,” our own Eva Terry wrote in an insightful analysis of Clancy’s interview. She’s right. That’s a problem that plagues “true crime” fandom.

 

Not every, or even most, of the defamatory allegations bandied about on your favorite podcast can be remedied in civil courts, but some have been. Earlier this year, an Idaho jury awarded Rebecca Scofield $10 million in damages — more than her lawyers sought — after she proved that “psychic detective” Ashley Guillard’s wildly popular TikToks alleging that Scofield was responsible for a quadruple homicide in 2022 were baseless. The YouTuber Ryan Upchurch was ordered to fork over almost $18 million after he spent weeks harassing the family of missing teen Kiely Rodni, alleging that her relatives were behind it all. It’s gotten to the point where being sued has become a point of pride within the true crime community — perhaps because the industry’s presenters typically couch their claims in language that indemnifies the speaker.

 

Given how common the dramatization of criminal cases has become on this medium, it makes no sense to allege that there’s something special about Lindsay Clancy’s case. Her horrific acts did not inspire so much fan fiction because her actions shine a spotlight on the “harsh realities of motherhood” or because her backers refuse to confront the “horrifying reality” of her alleged crimes. Clancy herself was only a catalyst for the phenomenon that truly jazzes true crime enthusiasts: how these outlets let listeners imagine themselves as a real-life Columbo.

 

According to some psychologists, the true crime genre — which “utilizes techniques from fiction, like dramatic narrative arcs and characterization techniques” to “deliver compelling stories” — is an elaborate coping mechanism. “The true crime stories they listened to validated both past experiences and future fears of gender-based violence,” Psyche contributor Amelia Anthony postulated. It is the refuge to which women who come up in “violent and patriarchal societies” like our own retreat.

 

Anthony cited Yale University professor Jeffrey Alexander’s work on the phenomenon of “cultural trauma” to illustrate her point. Alexander’s contributions are helpful, although perhaps not as Anthony intended. “For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises,” Alexander wrote. What he calls “collective actors,” and what Max Weber called “carrier groups” — each with their own “ideal and material interests” — use their talents to “represent social pain” as a means of establishing their place in the social pecking order.

 

There is value in the exploration of that “social pain.” Some call it a “psychological rehearsal” for the eventual experience of trauma. But the overexposure to these “carrier groups” has a proven capacity to convince lay observers to overestimate their own personal risk, experience anxiety, and, most observably, succumb to an irrational level of mistrust in individuals and institutions.

 

The Clancy trial and its aftermath have given us a full-spectrum look at what a pathological level of mistrust paired with unearned self-confidence looks like. The business of “true crime” has led its consumers to conclude that there’s always a third act — a twist at the end of the teleplay that provides the audience with a tidy payoff. “But crime cases don’t follow a clean narrative, even though viewers and listeners really want them to,” said one media studies professor.

 

In the end, “true crime” isn’t about the perpetrators, the victims, or even the state’s discrete allegations in this case or the other. It’s about us — the viewer, the listener, the host and guests — all displaying their infinite capacity for cleverness. And if that exhibition produces entirely new victims or revictimizes the already traumatized, well, that’s a small price to pay.

‘Woke’ Is Not Dead

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 20, 2026

 

With President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, many cheered what they took for a cultural counter-swing, a meaningful movement away from radical progressive ideology and toward something resembling common sense.

 

Woke is dead! We’ve broken free from far-left ideological capture. We’re so back!

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news: “Woke” is not dead. It has merely evolved, as recent events attest.

 

If you’re the type of person who checks social media or the news only infrequently, you may have been shocked last week to learn that bombshell starlet Sydney Sweeney had personally attacked female athletes and set gender equality in sports back a thousand years.

 

She did nothing of the sort, obviously. She simply appeared — half naked with her unmentionables obscured by athletic gear — in a racy ad for a sports-prediction company. That’s the entire story. The “scandal,” if we must call it that, can be summed up in one sentence: a company put a hot, scantily clad blonde in a commercial. Except for the overreaction, there is nothing more to say about it.

 

But try telling that to the harridans and too-online weirdos who treat anything short of born-alive or late-term abortion as an assault on women: a cohort that, ironically enough, claims powerlessness as an identity even as it drives whole news cycles and endless debates about whatever has offended it that day.

 

There is no logic to it. Only raw emotion and bottomless grievance. In other words, “woke.”

 

Or, consider the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who killed her daughter and two sons. In this episode, activist jurors set out to correct perceived historical wrongs, rather than decide the matter directly before them.

 

Clancy has admitted to the murders. The question was never whether she did it; it was whether she was in her right mind when she did.

 

Yet, the jury did not return a verdict of “not guilty” by reason of insanity, nor did it convict her of murder or manslaughter. After days of deadlock, the judge declared a mistrial. Eleven of the twelve jurors — nine women and two men — were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible. The lone holdout was a black man.

 

The crazy thing is not necessarily that those eleven jurors, including every woman on the panel, believed Clancy was insane (and therefore not responsible for her actions) when she strangled her three children. It is that most of them — including nurses who leveraged their professional credentials to serve as unofficial expert witnesses in the jury room — seemed determined from the get-go to acquit her because they thought a not-guilty verdict would start a broader conversation about women’s mental health.

 

Juror Paula Devlin said as much after the mistrial. The jury, she told Fox News, “had a chance to get a conversation started that could change something.” She hoped “no other woman or husband has to go through this.”

 

Three majority jurors, including the forewoman, said after the mistrial that “they would be in court every single day supporting Lindsay Clancy” in a retrial, according to an NBC News affiliate.

 

Meanwhile, the real reason the jurors were there — to decide what justice for the murders of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months, should look like — went by the wayside.

 

For the modern radical progressive, the lives of children are always secondary to the almighty cause.

 

A brief review of the news last week might also leave you thinking there is an epidemic of racist lynchings in the United States.

 

There isn’t, but you try telling that to people such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, importantly, is at the forefront of the effort to recast “woke 1.0” as merely a series of passionate dialogues rather than a period of violent and destructive progressive excess.

 

On September 10, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) wrote: “Black folks are being found hanged in America. This is a national crisis and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country. We’re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings.”

 

Said Ocasio-Cortez on social media, “This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto @RepPressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”

 

In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, Pressley and nearly 60 colleagues wrote: “In 2026 alone, there have already been at least 10 reported hangings of Black people. They were as young as 18 years old and lived in different parts of the country, including Mississippi, Michigan, and New York.”

 

The letter cited an August 27 Washington Informer article that highlighted the hanging deaths of nine black people, four of which occurred between 2024 and 2025.

 

Of the nine, eight have been ruled suicides or cases where investigators have found no evidence of foul play, though some families dispute the findings. One exception produced a homicide charge, but nothing so far shows it as a racial lynching. The man charged in the murder is black.

 

The states where the deaths occurred include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, and North Carolina.

 

The Informer article did not mention every case from this year. There are at least two more: one ruled a suicide, and one still under investigation.

 

For context, nearly ten non-black people were also found hanged in public and outdoor places between 2024 and 2026. One of them, Cory Zukatis, a white homeless man in Mississippi, was even found hanging from a tree on the same day as one of the cases cited by the Informer.

 

Zukatis’s death, which went basically unnoticed by activists and national media, was ruled a suicide.

 

In 2024 alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 11,453 suicide deaths by hanging or suffocation. Roughly 8,500 to 9,500 of them were white.

 

Despair and depression make people do terrible things, regardless of the color of their skin.

 

Yet this truism did not stop Ocasio-Cortez from spreading a hate-crime panic, nor did it stop newsrooms from giving her the headline she wanted.

 

From the Associated Press last week: “Cases of Black people found hanged in the U.S. South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history.”

 

It is not much of a “ding-dong, the woke is dead” moment if we are still running with these hate-crime hoaxes.

 

There is more.

 

In Seattle last week, a coalition of business leaders begged Mayor Katie Wilson to reactivate the city’s surveillance camera network in high-event areas, an ask that came just weeks after a mass shooting at the Bite of Seattle festival. Wilson declined. She maintained her support for the city’s Office of Civil Rights, which argues that the cameras could threaten “disparate impacts on racially and socioeconomically marginalized communities.”

 

Then there is the New York Times, the most powerful news organization in the country, which last week questioned the average Israeli’s perception of the October 7, 2023, slaughter.

 

“[Israelis] still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” the report initially said of the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

 

An editor’s note later explained: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.”

 

The amended version still says, “Only a small minority of Israelis have protested against the military’s conduct in the war.”

 

Hate-crime hoaxes, bogus narratives in major media, exploiting murder as a “teachable moment,” the abuse of the English language, and hard-on-law-enforcement whackadoodle social experiments — this all sounds a lot like 2016–2024, if on a slightly smaller scale.

 

In Maryland this month, the University of Maryland Senate voted 108–22 to strip all instances of the term “DEI” from its bylaws and replace it with “belonging and community.” It also voted to rename its “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee” the “Belonging and Community Committee.”

 

But don’t get too excited: Only the labels changed. The services and policies remain the same.

 

No, woke is not dead. It’s not even on life support.

The Lindsay Clancy Trial and America’s Twisted Fascination with Crime

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, September 03, 2026

 

Lindsay Clancy has admitted to strangling her three young children — five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan — to death in her suburban Boston home in January 2023. She is now on trial facing three counts of first-degree murder; she has pled not guilty by reason of insanity.

 

As of this writing, the jury is still deliberating.

 

That jury is not working in as much privacy as the judge would like, thanks to the actions of a self-described “crime junkie:”

 

A woman arrested Tuesday outside the Massachusetts courthouse where the trial of Lindsay Clancy is being heard took video of jurors in her case leaving the court, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.

 

Massachusetts State Police said 56-year-old Dawn Light, of Sutton, was arrested minutes after jurors had been dismissed for the day at Plymouth Superior Court. She was expected to be charged with intimidation of a witness, juror or person furnishing information in connection with criminal proceedings.

 

A self-described “crime junkie” and Clancy supporter, Light said she has attended several days of the Massachusetts mother’s trial, along with other high-profile cases, including those of Alex Murdaugh and Karen Read.

 

Light was found inside a vehicle in the parking lot, and told police she had been waiting to see whether Lindsay Clancy would come out of the building. Piacentini said Light allowed police to look through the photographs on her phone. Troopers found a deleted video of jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial coming out of the courthouse building, Piacentini said.

 

The Clancy trial is occurring in Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., about an hour and a half’s drive from Light’s hometown of Sutton. The Alex Murdaugh trial was in Walterboro, S.C. Apparently, this woman is some sort of high-profile trial tourist? The world has a lot of people with strange habits, but if you’re a “crime junkie” who has traveled to watch high-profile trials, then you would understand the importance of keeping the identities of the jurors private during the trial, and why you shouldn’t be taking pictures of them. This makes it difficult to believe this was just some innocent mistake.

 

My old podcast co-host Mickey observed that some people who think they are “true crime” fans are in fact just fans of messy human dramas. They’re not all that interested in the police work, forensics, or evidence that led to the arrest of the person who committed the crime. They just enjoy a detailed look at someone else’s life that is much worse than theirs.

 

As for Clancy’s case, postpartum depression is real; it is not merely a reflection that a new parent was or is “selfish,” as a certain attention-craving influencer contended. Postpartum psychosis, manifesting in the form of hallucinations, delusions, mania, or other symptoms, is also real, but very rare; affecting “between 0.089 and 2.6 out of every 1,000 births.”

 

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I figure hallucinations, delusions, or mania would not manifest in the form of Googling to figure out the amount of time your husband will be out of the house while picking up take-out food. An action like that indicates forethought, which suggests that the person doing that recognizes the likely consequences of her actions.

 

However, Massachusetts law is different from many other states in the country, in that once the defendant has pled insanity, it is up to the prosecutors to prove the defendant was sane while committing the crime:

 

In many jurisdictions, insanity is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden falls on the defense to prove that a defendant had “a mental disease or defect” that prevented them from understanding the nature of their actions, [Northeastern University law professor Daniel] Medwed said. But that is not the case in Massachusetts, he said.

 

Procedurally, that means the defense “doesn’t have to do as much” in the way of persuading jurors compared with other states, according to Medwed.

 

It still has to present expert witnesses, demonstrate that Clancy had postpartum psychosis and contend with the 15-minute timeframe wherein the alleged crime took place while her husband was out running an errand.

 

Even when a defendant uses the insanity defense, there often isn’t a fixed list of mental illnesses that qualify for the defense. In some states, statutes or case law identify specific disorders that may satisfy the legal standard, Medwed said.

 

Massachusetts doesn’t have such a list and leaves the determination largely to jurors, who must decide whether a defendant’s mental defect impaired their cognitive capacity or ability to control their actions at the time of the alleged crime.

 

Considering how Massachusetts law requires jurors to make an enormously consequential decision about Clancy’s mental state, it is not exactly surprising that the jury is coming back to the judge with questions.

 

Our Caroline Downey laid out how, “No, Not All Women Identify with Lindsay Clancy,” contending the trial is “Luigi Mangione madness all over again.”

 

The phenomenon of members of the public becoming enthusiastic fans of defendants accused of terrible crimes is not a new phenomenon.

 

Think of the crowds with signs saying “the Juice is loose” during O. J. Simpson’s attempt to evade police in a white Bronco. Serial killer Ted Bundy received hundreds of love letters while behind bars. Or go back even further:

 

In April 1934 Warner Brothers released a newsreel showing the Division of Investigation [the precursor to the FBI ]manhunt of John Dillinger, one of the nation’s most notorious criminals. The newsreel showed footage of Dillinger’s father, an elderly farmer, and the residents of Mooresville, Indiana, Dillinger’s hometown. Movie audiences across America cheered when Dillinger’s picture appeared on the screen. They hissed at pictures of D.O.I. special agents. When he heard the news, D.O.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover was outraged . He put the town of Mooresville under surveillance, and threatened to prosecute the Dillinger family unless they cooperated with the D.O.I.

 

There are, no doubt, quite a few women out there who struggled with postpartum depression and feel like no one listened to them or took their problems seriously.* There are women out there who have had a bad experiences with antidepressants and bad experiences with mental health professionals.

 

None of that justifies murdering your children. And virtually all the women who faced those issues did not murder their children. Not only did step one (postpartum depression, medication, bad experiences with mental health professionals) not automatically lead to step two (murdering children), step one almost never leads to step two. Thus, at least from where I stand, you cannot escape the consequences of your actions in step two by citing the factors in step one.

 

We tend to see this cause célèbre effect when an accused defendant attempts to transform themselves into an avatar of a particular group.

 

From the Atlantic’s article, “The Women Obsessed with Lindsay Clancy”:

 

The public loves to watch mothers on trial and partake in their judgment. There was Susan Smith, who had drowned her three children in a South Carolina lake and was found guilty of murder in 1995, despite having a history of trauma and sexual abuse. And there was Andrea Yates, who had drowned her five children in a bathtub and was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and then retried in 2006, when she was found not guilty by reason of insanity after witnesses testified that Yates had experienced severe postpartum psychosis and schizophrenia.

 

The Clancy trial is now part of this sadistic American tradition, but it has also become something else for the women who have been showing up in person. It was not enough for them to watch the proceedings on television, or listen to some lawyer on YouTube, or even stand outside the courthouse wearing pink and waving signs in support of Clancy, as hundreds of women did one day earlier this month. They did not want to be outside rendering judgment; they wanted to be inside, on the third floor, sitting on the wooden benches, as close as possible, in case they could notice some detail, some gesture, some pause or expression or word that might reveal a truth they could recognize from their own experience. Each was there for their own reasons.

 

Lindsay Clancy, you see, is every woman — or least that’s the argument they want us to believe.

 

Except she isn’t. She is just about as extreme an outlier as you can get. There are about 85 million mothers in the United States; about 250 mothers murder their children each year.

 

O. J. Simpson was not every black man. Luigi Mangione is not every person who’s been frustrated with a health insurance company. John Dillinger was not standing up to a corrupt establishment when his bank-robbing gang was killing people. There are certain segments of the public who are distressingly gullible whenever a defense attorney or an unscrupulous media set out a heroic narrative about someone who violently harms others, a narrative that often requires us to hand-wave away the victims of their crimes.

 

But we live in the era of the influencer and the social media algorithm, not the reporter and the editor. The systems of public discourse in the past (generally) put higher priority on accuracy; people didn’t like being misled or finding out that what they had been told wasn’t true. (When Dateline NBC admitted it had secretly used explosives in its depiction of the effects of a gas tank rupture of a General Motors truck, it was a big deal.)

 

Now . . . the social media algorithm doesn’t measure offerings based upon accuracy; it measures offerings based upon the number of reactions and responses they get. Provocations, outrage, the most incendiary claims, the hottest takes — the simple mentality of the algorithm is that if something is getting a big response, it must be good and deserves to be promoted to an even wider audience.

 

My colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez, who has a heart the size of Alpha Centauri, urges us to pray for wisdom for mercy and justice. That sort of sensible, empathetic, victim-centered approach to this horrific crime is never going to get picked up and promoted far and wide by a social media algorithm. It’s too reasonable and compassionate; it doesn’t make you angry.

 

You can say you don’t care about Candace Owens, and I’m not saying you must care. But note that on August 20, a video of Owens laying out her views on the Clancy case was posted on X:

 

Lindsay Clancy is obviously not guilty. There is a fleet of doctors who should be imprisoned for what they put her on. I regularly speak out against Big Pharma. They get away with murder, all the time. And in this case, they are getting away with the murder of, really, her three children, but also completely destroyed her life. Lindsay Clancy, in my opinion, is not guilty. She was put into an intentional psychosis, when she probably just needed to give her kids away for a weekend to get better. But they constantly give you these drugs that do not make things better. And the cocktail of ten pharmaceutical drugs that she was on was absolute madness.

 

That post has 2.4 million views. Remember, creator revenue is tied to the number of views a post gets.

 

*From Psychology Today: “A recent survey of 900 women aged 25-34 found that 93 percent reported feeling dismissed when seeking medical help. The survey also found that over 40% visited multiple providers to receive a diagnosis, and almost the same percentage were prescribed medications without a full investigation into their symptoms.”

 

Maybe we have an astonishingly bad crop of doctors out there, and they’re all treating women ages 25 to 34. Or maybe the poll respondents’ threshold to not feel dismissed is unreasonably high. The fact that around 40 percent kept going to doctors to get the diagnosis they wanted to hear or that made sense to them, and that about the same percentage ended up getting prescribed medications without a full investigation into their symptoms, makes me suspect that some degree of this phenomenon is patients who want a particular prescription drug and who will keep doctor-shopping until they find one willing to write that prescription.

 

ADDENDUM: Yesterday, the good folks at CNN had me on to discuss Senator Ed Markey’s not-all-that-surprising primary victory — “Next to the Supreme Court, being a Democratic senator from Massachusetts is the most secure job in Washington” — and the upcoming Republican midterm convention in Dallas — “I want to see the political strategist in Texas who said, ‘Let’s do our big convention. Let’s do something we usually do in a presidential year, and let’s put it right up against . . . NFL football.’ Because as we all know in Texas, football is just not a big deal.”