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.”

 

 

Radical Chick

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

In the late 1950s, Gloria Steinem went to work for an organization called the Independent Research Service, in which capacity she helped organize delegations of young progressive Americans—young, progressive, non-communist or anti-communist Americans—to attend worldwide youth meetings otherwise dominated by (and usually organized by) the Soviet Union. It was a way of communicating to young progressives abroad that there was room for left-leaning idealists on the American side of the Cold War, that Moscow was not the only political center—or even the natural one—for such ambitions. Of course it was a CIA front, as Steinem later acknowledged unapologetically. While many of her progressive allies saw the CIA as something from an Oliver Stone fever dream, Steinem insisted that the agency she had worked for had been professionally run, liberal in its sensibilities, and interested in means beyond violence for achieving its ends.

 

The CIA connection is one of many details in which Steinem’s life curiously mirrored that of her near-contemporary (only nine years her senior) William F. Buckley Jr., who briefly served in the CIA in the early 1950s, a few years before Steinem. (It is a myth that the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom provided the initial financing for National Review, though National Review editor James Burnham had helped to set up the organization, which did fund publications and organizations such as Partisan Review.) Steinem, like Buckley, was a charismatic young journalist who made a reputation at a young age, who founded organizations and a magazine that was her major contribution to intellectual life, who published works of memoir and autobiography but never wrote a “big book” of the kind associated with public intellectuals; both had Hollywood connections through their families, with Buckley’s son, Christopher, being the author of Thank You for Smoking and Steinem being stepmother to actor Christian Bale. As with Buckley, it is easy to go through Steinem’s words over the years and find many things that she probably wished she had not said or written and many things that her admirers certainly wish she hadn’t said or written.

 

Steinem was many things in life, from undercover Playboy bunny to an honorary chairman (forgive me) of the Democratic Socialists of America. About the latter, it is worth appreciating that Steinem’s anti-communism did not end with her career at Central Intelligence: Her Ms. magazine performed a public service by promoting the work of exiled Soviet feminists (in a Ms. cover story, promoted just below the “Male Strippers?” feature), who described a union of socialist republics in which the egalitarian dogma was entirely at odds with the facts on the ground. Of course life in Soviet Russia was patriarchal, one of the exiles observed: “The major difference is that women in the Soviet Union have no right to protest.”

 

For much of the 20^th century, Steinem was on the left wing of what used to be known as “Cold War liberalism,” the political tendency that produced figures such as Steinem on its radical edge, President Harry Truman and Sen. Henry Jackson at its center, and on its right side figures such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the intellectuals who eventually would come to be known as the neoconservatives. Her ideas were American ideas—when they were right and when they were wrong.

 

Mostly, they were wrong. Steinem managed to be on the wrong side of practically every specific political issue about which she took a definite view, from supporting Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 to her radical-chic socialist posturing to the ghoulish lifelong enthusiasm for abortion that so nearly defines her public career. But if there is a throughline connecting her anti-communist work at the CIA way back in the Eisenhower years to her à la mode liberationist zeal in the 1970s to the plodding, greatest-hits tediousness of her final decades, it is an admirable one: She opposed totalitarianism, subjugation, and coercion, and she saw the tragedy in lives that were made unnecessarily small and miserable by forces beyond the control of those individuals—not only women—who have little opportunity to act but instead are acted upon.

 

Of her many incarnations, the one that seems to me the best—and most effective for the things that Steinem herself wanted to accomplish—was her jet-setting 1970s activist-journalist happy warrior era, when she seemed to be having just a little bit too much fun for some of her fellow feminists to stomach, when she was accused of being too interested in and too reliant upon glamour. It may be amusing to think of the famous feminist dolled up and costumed as a Playboy bunny, but the journalism she produced from that experience was first-rate: Her readers got an idea of the informal expectations attached to bunny life from the details Steinem reported, including the fact that bunnies were made to get STD screenings as a condition of employment. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, embarrassed by the story, had his club’s policies changed. As a journalist, Steinem did real work. And she was a pretty good advertisement for her worldview in those years, not only because she fit the bunny costume.

 

I am reminded again of Buckley, who both abominated the “Playboy philosophy” and wrote at times for Playboy, joking that it was the only forum in which he could be sure of reaching his son. (I suppose I should note here that I also wrote once for Playboy, a fact that seems to have embarrassed the former owners. I suppose I am too disreputable for the softer kind of pornographers.) Writers do as they must—they go where the readers are. Steinem came from a left that was a bit less scolding and a bit less moralistic than the one we have now. For a while there, she seemed to be having a pretty good time.

 

Steinem found much to criticize in the time and place to which she was born, and much of her criticism was merited. But she also was born into a time and place that made possible a career such as hers—or, rather, that made it possible for her to make possible a career such as hers. All in all, I prefer the milieu that produced Steinem and Buckley—and Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Joan Didion—to the one that has to its credit Joe Rogan and some people who play computer games while other people watch them playing computer games. Steinem was born the year Adolf Hitler became führer and lived into the age of artificial intelligence—that is an awful lot of history to be mostly, tragically, but not exceptionlessly wrong about. But she was, fundamentally, right about the one big thing that held her attention, and it is to her credit that some women today are treated less shoddily than they were a century ago. Gloria Marie Steinem, dead at 92. RIP.

It’s No Mystery Why Young Men Are Leaving the Workforce

By Caroline Downey

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Gen Z are an enigma to some people. Why are they whining about $20 burritos? Why are they obsessed with buying a starter home? Why aren’t they dating? The typical answer is that something mucked up the natural order. Among other culprits, technology contributed to the phasing out of both old-school courting rituals (say, approaching a love interest at a bar) and some sectors of employment. The latest head-scratcher, it seems, is: “Where have the men gone in corporate America?”

 

The guilty parties will play dumb. But the answer is no mystery — because it wasn’t really a voluntary exit, was it? It was expulsion and exile.

 

“American women now hold 176,000 more payroll jobs than American men,” according to the Wall Street Journal and July data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

For many years under progressive administrations and in major companies, the DEI regime has reigned. A lot of firms had either official or unofficial gender and/or race targets they were striving to meet. The NASDAQ, which includes more than 3,000 major companies, had rules requiring its listees to publicly disclose diversity statistics and to have — or explain why they did not have — at least two directors who are minorities, including one who self-identifies as female.

 

Though not a strict numerical quota, such forced diversity disclosure served as a moral litmus test for companies. Though a court eventually struck down the rules, the exchange for over three years signaled that females should be privileged in C-suites.

 

That and other virtue-signaling memos trickled down through the culture to this generation of young men. In college, I remember a male friend’s frustration as he and other finance undergrads competed for a small pool of jobs while big banks clamored to fill spots with females, despite their having, in his telling, less impressive applications.

 

Before President Trump issued executive orders prohibiting DEI in the federal government, affirmative action in the awarding of government contracting was widespread, effectively a different kind of cronyism.

 

The message was the same in college admissions. Before the Supreme Court declared affirmative action in admissions unconstitutional in 2023, colleges participated in discrimination against white men by applying racial preferences. Even now, some schools, including Duke Law, have tried to circumvent the Supreme Court’s Harvard ruling via proxy discrimination, developing mechanisms to flag for ostensibly marginalized backgrounds in admissions essays and usher in minority candidates.

 

As for women, their rising numbers in colleges were aided by the lifting of artificial caps on female enrollment. Before the 1970s, schools such as Yale University limited female enrollment to a small fraction of the class. With affirmative action and Title IX, universities dropped these ceilings and invited many new female students. However, some STEM institutions didn’t just open the doors — they gave favorable consideration to women to counter underrepresentation.

 

“Girls are twice as likely as boys to get into Caltech or MIT, to make up for the fact that they are half as likely to apply,” the Washington Post wrote in 2024.

 

To be fair, now that females make up nearly 60 percent of all college students nationwide, some colleges have allegedly practiced gender balancing in the other direction. Dubbed “affirmative action” for men, this isn’t the way, either. But even if female enrollees didn’t technically steal spots that would otherwise go to men, the disproportionate number changed the constitution of the average college. It is not a coincidence that gender studies, which is based on the idea that the patriarchy is the root of evil in society, has exploded as a discipline across academia in the past decade. With women dominating, colleges have evolved to focus on women’s concerns, as Helen Andrews wrote in her essay “The Great Feminization.”

 

Gee, maybe that was a deterrent to men? If colleges are increasingly adopting an ideological tone that treats maleness as problematic, that might chase men out or keep men away.

 

A conscious policy choice that has displaced young men in the workforce involves legal immigration programs such as H-1B, which, aside from being a corrupt labor arrangement, takes jobs from young men in technical fields. For those who would argue that these immigrants bring special genius and expertise that Americans cannot provide, there is no highly skilled worker shortage in the United States. Rather, it is more likely that the infusion of foreign labor depresses wages for Americans, disincentivizing them from putting their STEM degrees to use or pursuing them in the first place.

 

That being said, there is a whole sector begging for young men to join. An analysis this year found that nearly 1.4 million trade jobs across seven essential industries will be unfilled by 2030. Since the turn of the century, labor force participation has steadily declined across the board. As tradesmen retire, new apprentices aren’t replacing them fast enough. For every five tradesmen who leave the workforce, only two younger workers step up. There is incredible financial opportunity for young men in vocations if they want it.

 

It’s true that for many years, young men have repeatedly run into walls erected by politicians and corporate partners who determined that the appearance of equity was more important than fairness. The trend of the stay-at-home boyfriend is partly a consequence of a workforce now dominated by women, which was not so much an organic development as one that was socially engineered. Their disengagement from American life did not happen in a vacuum. Young men feel defeated, and they cannot be entirely blamed for that.

 

But the answer is not to grovel to despairing young men or treat them with kid gloves. The Trump administration has done the foundational work of ripping up the institutional barriers standing against men, though some remain. We, as a culture, must continually affirm that young men are valuable parts of our economy and our future. And entrepreneurship and getting your hands dirty are still paths welcome to young men who desire to build.

Sex and the Socialist Girl

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, August 14, 2026

 

Maybe the two recent Democratic primaries everybody has been talking about are a sex story and not an ideology story.

 

Indulge me—it’s August.

 

In Michigan, far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed saw off relatively moderate Haley Stevens to secure the Democratic nomination for the Senate election. El-Sayed has a record of ideological extremism and has lost the only election he ever contested; Stevens has successfully sought election to the House four times. El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—the main characters in the 2026 Democratic primary season—and he disavows socialism per se, but he is closely aligned with a basket of DSA deplorables, Hamas apologists, and the like.

 

In Wisconsin, the DSA candidate, Thanksgiving-hating weirdo Francesca Hong, saw her commanding lead in the polls disintegrate as David Crowley, the relatively moderate chief executive of Milwaukee County, rose from the political grave to exile his socialist comrade to political Siberia.

 

There is a difference between reporting and storytelling, and the story many observers wanted to tell this summer—that this primary season is a referendum on the ideological future of the Democratic Party—is at least in part at odds with the reported facts. Sometimes the DSA wackadoodle pulls it out, sometimes the relatively sober municipal-government guy takes the win. That’s the thing about elections: Whatever you may hear on the internet, they really are not fixed—on Election Day, things can go either way.

 

There are many variables at play in our elections beyond issues and ideology. Some of you will be familiar with the bit of trivia that while Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to win a presidential election, the taller candidate usually wins—the taller guy (and it was always a guy) won every single presidential election from 1900 to 1968. Women have been heads of government in the United Kingdom and France, in India and Pakistan, but no woman has ever managed to get herself elected president of these United States, and only two women have ever managed to secure a major-party nomination. (One might be tempted to put an asterisk next to Kamala Harris, who enjoyed a shortcut to the nomination.) But that is a pretty small data set.

 

And there is not much to be learned from the small dataset of two Democratic primary elections in the Midwest in Anno Domini 2026. So let us consider some larger datasets.

 

The general consensus among psephologists is that female major-party candidates do about as well as male major-party candidates for federal office, ceteris paribus. But the picture gets a little more complicated when you start asking the right questions. It is interesting to know the answers to questions. It also is interesting to think about which questions are not asked, or not often asked.

 

In the Michigan and Wisconsin primary races, the male candidate beat the female candidate in both cases. I had a vague impression that female candidates run at some disadvantage vs. male candidates and went looking to see whether there was anything to back up my hunch. The easiest answer to get was the answer to a question that I was not asking—which is to say, I was informed that female candidates for the House and Senate succeed at about the same rate as male candidates when one controls for the very lively variable of incumbency. Male and female incumbents tended to win at similarly high rates, male and female challengers tended to win at similarly low rates.

 

Open seats, in which the variable of incumbency is eliminated, reveal a little bit more. In a study of open-seat House elections from 1994 to 2004, scholars publishing in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy found that “quality female candidates running in open seat elections are less likely to win than are quality male candidates.” (Some readers will zero in on the word quality and wonder how this variable is treated; the methods include accounting for factors such as having been elected to another office. The technique is limited, but the standard is evenly applied.) But that still did not quite answer my question: I did not want to know how women did overall—I wanted to know how women did when running against men.

 

Women facing men in U.S. Senate elections have a relatively poor record even when incumbency is not a factor. (The Dispatch has a policy of disclosing AI use. In this case, I had Claude compile a spreadsheet of Senate races in which major-party candidates of opposite sexes faced off and then checked the results against Wikipedia election results and English-major math. The results are consistent with the publicly accessible data.) Women defeated men in only 38 percent of all male-female Senate contests from 1972 to 2024. That’s in part the incumbency issue: As you would guess, female incumbents defeated challengers about 82 percent of the time, a high rate but slightly below the success rate of male incumbents, of which there have been many more. But in male-female open-seat Senate elections, women remain just under 40 percent—which is to say, women facing men in open-seat Senate elections are only very slightly more likely to win elections in that set than elections in the larger set of all male-female Senate elections, about half of which consist of female challengers facing male incumbents, a tough situation in which only 9 percent of women win.

 

What gives?

 

“A substantial body of research shows that voters display a number of biases toward female candidates,” the scholars in the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy report. “These biases range from associations between gender and ideological extremity, issue competence, leadership traits, and even a generalized preference for a male-dominated government.” I do not think that anyone who has spent much time talking to American voters—of any ideological persuasion—will find much to argue with in that.

 

To repeat: The dataset here is extremely limited, and I do not propose to argue that the results in Michigan and Wisconsin suggest that sex plays a dispositive role in Democratic primary elections.

 

But it does seem clear that ideology does not play a dispositive role, either.

The Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

The Women’s National  Basketball Association is once again in the  news, a bit like a recurring flare-up of gout: You have no idea where it comes from or why it strikes so randomly, but when it does, it’s the only thing you can talk about. Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham — she of the magnificently memetic pointed finger — is apparently now on trial by underemployed left-wing controversialists and bored Bluesky types alike for her repeated public expressions of TERF-like bigotry and exclusion. At least I’m told that’s what they are; her comments read to me like common sense, politely phrased, but that’s why I let others do the thinking for me.

 

Then of course there is Cunningham’s superstar teammate Caitlin Clark. I’m willing to bet that if my readers know anything at all about the WNBA, it is either directly or indirectly related to her. She is widely believed to be one of the best players in the game and is beyond a doubt the league’s marquee attraction. When she went down with injuries last season, ticket sales for away games plummeted along with the league’s already meager ratings.

 

So I have never understood why sports columnists, as well as much of the league itself, seem to hate her. Perhaps it’s jealousy. But it sometimes results in true verbal atrocity, which brings us to what I will label — in July, mind you — the Most Irresponsibly Stupid Column of the Year. Come on down and collect your prize, Nancy Armour of USA Today!

 

Armour’s column is so stridently deranged that its title announces up-front that you’re taking a temporary trip to the moral funhouse: “It’s Time to Stop Pretending That Caitlin Clark’s Flops Are Harmless.” First off, for those prone to misusing the phrase “begging the question,” here is a perfect example of a title that does just that: it assumes that what we’ve seen are flops. I see a woman who has, quite frankly, been kicked around the court like a hackeysack by opposing teams for several years and is complaining to the refs about not getting foul calls, as players often will. How is that harmful?

 

Because in Armour’s moral world, the real threat here is not to Caitlin Clark’s right quadricep but rather to the dignity and safety of the black women who play against her. As Armour describes it, if Clark “flops” during a game . . . she’s apparently encouraging her white fans to take justice into their own hands and lynch the hated blacks. I’m not kidding about this, though I wish I were:

 

It shouldn’t need reminding this country has an awful history of Black people being harmed, even killed, in the name of “defending” white women. The irony of the WNBA’s All-Star Game is that it’s happening this weekend in Chicago, the hometown of Emmett Till, who became an icon of the civil rights movement after his tragic murder. The local art gallery is currently hosting an exhibit imagining his life if he hadn’t been lynched. While it’s incumbent on the WNBA to do more to protect its players, there also should be an expectation on Clark to recognize the broader implications of her actions being weaponized.

 

First off, marvel at that rhetorical stretch. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi by Jim Crow racists in the Fifties, which is just like Caitlin Clark complaining after being fouled at next week’s All-Star Game . . . and it’s all connected because Chicago. (This one fact alone meant I had to write this. Somehow it’s always MAGA country’s fault.) Then step back further and gaze with disbelief upon the neo-Stalinist moral logic: because others might react badly to her public disapproval at being abused, she must remain silent (and take more abuse). It is howlingly, outrageously wrong — a complete inversion of all accepted principle.

 

Armour dashed off an apology yesterday morning for her “inartful comparison,” but she didn’t apologize for her moral logic. I don’t expect her to. I would like to know why the media participates in these deranged attacks against the league’s most popular player. I already know why the players dislike Clark: everybody understands the phenomenon of crabs in a bucket. But why on earth would the media join them in that? I could go into a lengthy disquisition here about the fundamental sociological differences between groups of women and groups of men, but that would probably get me dismissed from polite society altogether — and I’m barely allowed in here in the first place.