Both sides are running the operations I helped build.
I know the work because I built it. In the cable years I drafted message-discipline memos that told operators what to say and what not to say. I sat in rooms where “killer mom” got tested as a frame and “mother in crisis” got tested as its inverse. I watched focus groups decide which construction moved which audience, and which audience was the target. I am telling you what I know.
The trial of Lindsay Clancy — the 36-year-old Massachusetts woman who strangled her three children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan, then jumped from a second-story window and survived paralyzed from the waist down — has been captured. Not by the prosecution or the defense. By the apparatus that turns every American tragedy into audience-segmentation fuel. Both sides are running it. Neither side knows they are running the same operation.
Outside the courthouse, a small mob of women in bright pink T-shirts proclaim that Ms. Clancy “Needed Help” and demand that others “Stand in Peace for Lindsay.” On the other side, voices like blogger Matt Walsh — who wrote that the only debate worth having is “what method of execution to use, and whether or not it should be done publicly (it should)” — demand her head. Look at those two positions and tell me they are not the same operation. One captures its audience with sympathy. The other captures its audience with contempt. Both are designed to move the reader past the question.
The sympathy-capture operation is the one I am most familiar with. It is the same apparatus that converted school shooters into “troubled youth,” that converted mass shooters into “lone wolves” when the ideological infrastructure was inconvenient, that converted the opioid crisis into a story about pharmaceutical supply rather than about the demand-side collapse the supply was meeting. I know the technique by its working name: frame-engineered relabeling — the substitution of one frame for another to shift the cognitive ground on which the issue is processed. Here the substitution is “patient” for “killer,” “mental health crisis” for “strangulation,” “failed by the system” for “killed three children.” The effect is to relocate moral agency from the actor to the structure, which serves the audience that wants the structure indicted and does not want to engage with what the actor did.
The execution-demanding operation is the other apparatus I built versions of. It is cruder and more honest — Mr. Walsh’s tweet is the operation stated baldly, which is why it works. Bandura’s framework names it mechanism seven: dehumanization. Strip the target of the markers that produce empathy. “Killer mom” is the frame; the children become the “real victims” and the mother becomes the object. The apparatus’s audience wants the structure defended and does not want to engage with the medical evidence that might complicate the defense. Both operations serve their respective coalitions. Neither operation serves the dead children.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington stood before the jury and held up two photographs: one of the Clancy family smiling, one of Ms. Clancy in her hospital bed. “How does this turn into this?” he asked. “How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.” This is the defense’s entire case, and it is the sympathy-capture operation in its purest form: three dead children are the fault of bad doctors. Ms. Clancy was a vessel through which a broken system acted. The strangulation of an 8-month-old is a side effect of an inadequate prescription. I have watched this exact construction get deployed on cable segments a hundred times. I know what it is for. The surface the operation is selling: a mother failed by bad medicine. The substance under it: three children dead because their mother strangled them, and the medical evidence the defense invokes is also the evidence the defense prefers you do not examine.
On the other side, the same construction runs in reverse: Ms. Clancy is a monster, the medical system is irrelevant, the only question is the method of execution. There is no postpartum psychosis that lifts a mother’s responsibility for strangling her infants. There is no “lousy medical care” that puts a rope around an 8-month-old’s neck. I have watched this construction get deployed too — on cable segments, on op-ed pages, on social media — by the operation that does not want to engage with what the medical evidence would show if the medical evidence were permitted to speak.
The cui bono is clear. The sympathy-capture operation serves the coalition that wants to demonstrate the medical establishment’s inadequacy. The execution-demanding operation serves the coalition that wants to demonstrate the medical establishment’s corruption by showing what happens when it is “too soft.” Both coalitions benefit from the case being processed as a culture-war exhibit rather than as a legal proceeding with a medical question embedded in it. Neither coalition benefits from the actual question: what does the law say about postpartum psychosis, what does the medical evidence show about Ms. Clancy’s mental state at the time of the killings, and what responsibility does the system that discharged her bear?
Here is what neither operation wants you to read. The mental-health experts disagree — they disagree on the voice Ms. Clancy claims told her to kill, and they disagree on whether she suffered from postpartum psychosis at all. The prosecution concedes Ms. Clancy “was suffering from mental illness.” The husband divorced her and remarried while she was still recovering — an abandonment that tells you more about the man than about the trial now consuming his wife’s name. The jurors — nine women and three men — have sat through nearly five weeks of testimony that the lynch mob on either side has made no effort to hear. They are applying the law to the facts. The prosecution put the question cleanly: “The issue is whether at the time she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan, she knew the difference between right and wrong, and whether she could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law.” That is the question. Not the method.
I drafted memos of this kind. I sat in rooms where the “killer mom” frame got A/B tested against the “mother in crisis” frame and where the audience-segmentation map dictated which construction ran in which venue. I am telling you this because I helped build what you are watching. The sympathy-capture operation and the execution-demanding operation are two versions of the same machine, designed by the same kind of operator for the same kind of audience, and they are running this case because the case serves both audiences and serves neither dead child.
No verdict will satisfy either side. That is the point. The verdict was rendered long ago — by the apparatus that decided three dead children were raw material for two propaganda operations, each designed to capture its audience and avoid the question. The dead children remain in the ground. The propaganda operations remain on the screen. And the operators — the ones I used to sit with, the ones I used to be — are running them still.