Ep. 2488 - The Lindsay Clancy Case: Everyone, Please Stop Saying Stupid S***

August 18, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

"One in a thousand new births." That is the statistical difference between postpartum depression, which affects about 13% of new mothers, and postpartum psychosis, the rare psychiatric emergency at the center of the Lindsay Clancy case. Clancy, a 32-year-old labor and delivery nurse, strangled her three children—ages five, three, and eight months—in January 2023 before attempting suicide and surviving paralyzed from the waist down. The facts of what happened are not in dispute. The question that organizes the entire episode is whether Clancy was a cold-blooded murderer or a person so overtaken by severe mental illness that she was not legally responsible for her actions. The host argues that nearly every hot take circulating online—whether from women conflating their own postpartum depression with psychosis, or from men dismissing mental illness as weakness—is wrong, and that the case exposes how rudimentary psychiatric medicine actually is.

The Medical Distinction That Matters

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What you'll learn

1 (02:42) **The Core Question of the Clancy Case** - Ben Shapiro frames the Lindsay Clancy case, arguing the internet's hot takes are mostly garbage and the only relevant question is whether she was a cold-blooded murderer or suffering from postpartum psychosis.
2 (05:00) **The Medical Distinction: Depression vs. Psychosis** - Shapiro explains the biological and symptomatic differences between postpartum depression (13% of women) and postpartum psychosis (0.1% of women), arguing that conflating them is "stupid."
3 (09:09) **The Legal Framework: The Insanity Defense** - Shapiro explains the Massachusetts insanity defense (based on the McCool/McNaughton standard), which requires the prosecution to prove the defendant knew right from wrong and could control her behavior.
4 (12:14) **Timeline of the Tragedy (Interview with Lyndon Blake)** - Lyndon Blake (host of "That So Criminal") walks through the factual timeline of Lindsay Clancy's decline from October 2022 to the murders in January 2023.
5 (16:14) **The Prosecution's Uphill Battle** - Shapiro and Blake analyze the legal difficulty for the prosecution, given the evidence of psychosis and the high burden of proof.
6 (21:56) **The "Black Box" of Psychiatric Medicine** - Shapiro returns to the medical complexity, highlighting the experimental nature of psychiatric drugs and the possibility that the drug cocktail itself contributed to her psychotic break.
7 (24:38) **The Defendant's Own Words and the Horrific Aftermath** - Shapiro presents evidence of Lindsay's suffering, including a text message begging for help and audio of her breaking down in court as the medical examiner described the children's injuries.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

The Lindsay Clancy murder case absorbs the nation – and we go through all the facts, and all the dumbest hot takes; we discuss the untimely death of Hayden Panettiere; and we tell the tragic tale of Bumble, a dating app predicated on denying everything we know about both women and men.

Ep. 2488

Listen to the latest episode of "That's So Criminal" on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and DailyWire: https://www.dailywire.com/show/thats-so-criminal

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