Hello and welcome to Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. Hawaiian shirts, spumoni, and senior citizens are all sharing the calendar today, and somehow that combination works.
My calendar says it's Senior Citizens Day, Spumoni Day, Brazilian Blowout Day, Fantasy Football Draft Day, Internet Self-Care Day, Hawaiian Shirt Day, and Poet's Day. Call a senior citizen you love, dig out the loudest Hawaiian shirt in your closet, draft your fantasy team, and maybe write a bad poem while you're at it — today's got room for all of it.
Today in History:
1770: Captain James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming the territory New South Wales.
1831: Nat Turner leads an uprising of enslaved and free black Virginians in Southampton County, killing approximately 55 people before being captured and executed weeks later.
1883: Dr. William Worrall Mayo begins practicing medicine in Rochester, Minn., in the aftermath of a devastating tornado — the modest start of what becomes the Mayo Clinic.
1888: William Seward Burroughs patents the first practical adding machine, laying the groundwork for the modern calculator industry.
1911: Thieves steal the Mona Lisa directly off the wall of the Louvre in Paris; the painting isn't recovered for more than two years.
1959: Hawaii officially becomes the 50th state admitted to the Union.
1983: Filipino opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. is assassinated at Manila International Airport moments after stepping off a plane returning from exile, an event still commemorated today as Ninoy Aquino Day.
1986: A massive cloud of toxic gas erupts without warning from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing more than 1,700 people in nearby villages overnight.
1993: NASA loses all contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft just three days before it was scheduled to enter orbit around the planet.
2017: A total solar eclipse crosses the continental United States coast to coast for the first time in nearly a century, drawing millions of viewers along its path.
Birthdays Today include: Wilt Chamberlain, NBA Hall of Famer; Kenny Rogers, singer ("The Gambler"); Usain Bolt, Olympic sprinter; Hayden Panettiere, actor (Heroes); and Kacey Musgraves, singer-songwriter (Golden Hour).
If today's your birthday, too, have a happy one.
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I’ll be right up front with you; This one is genuinely painful for me to write. So, if you notice a different tone in my writing today, you'll understand why, I hope.
I've been watching the Lindsay Clancy trial with a genuinely jaundiced eye, and I want to be careful here, because there isn't a single part of this story that doesn't qualify as tragedy. Three children are dead. A mother sits in a Massachusetts courtroom facing first-degree murder charges. A father had to take the stand and watch through his tears as photos of a family vacation flashed on a screen, a family that doesn't exist anymore. There's no version of this where anybody gets to feel good about any of it.
I was not planning on commenting on the case at all. I mean, other than identifying it as a tragic thing, what could I possibly say? Let's be clear about this: The purpose of this column is not to judge the actions of Lindsay Clancy. That is the domain of the jury and of God at this point. I don't envy them their task. I won't touch it.
So where, then, am I going with this? What has caused me to break my intentional silence and write this column? It is this:
DISGUSTING: Hundreds PSYCHOTIC mostly women in pink are rallying outside the Massachusetts courthouse to support an alleged mu*derer, Lindsay Clancy—the mother accused of strangling her three young children to death.
— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) August 20, 2026
Fox & Friends: “They are here for the ‘Stand in Peace’ in… pic.twitter.com/SpDtk0tamy
This is where my silence breaks. It is here where my anger lives.
Let's address the sadness first. I’ll admit I’m a bit out of my element. The seriousness of this does not mesh well with my usual snarky attitude. Frankly, I’m angry, but there’s very little to direct the anger at. There are no reasonable targets for it, at least as far as the people directly involved with the case.
I'm having difficulty putting that anger into words. Frankly, what I see out in front of that courthouse frightens me as regards our country and our culture’s future, and I'm not a man who frightens easily.
Make no mistake — postpartum psychosis is real. It's rare: roughly 1 in 1,000 deliveries, per researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina. When it hits, it hits like a freight train nobody saw coming, and it has driven mothers to unthinkable acts throughout history, in this country and every other one. According to reports I’ve seen, Clancy's defense is leaning hard on that condition. The prosecution says otherwise — that this was planned, not a sudden break from reality. A jury is going to have to sort that out, and none of us watching from the cheap seats actually knows the answer yet, whatever the true-crime podcast circuit and the clothesline crows would have you believe.
Compassion for Lindsay Clancy is entirely reasonable. I'll say that plainly, and I mean it. A woman who sought help repeatedly in the months before this happened — psychiatrists, an outpatient program, five days of inpatient care at McLean Hospital — and yet still ended up here deserves a measure of grace, and she deserves a legal system that actually determines what happened to her mind rather than rushing to a verdict on Twitter and Facebook, etc. And frankly, I would encourage looking into the system that didn’t give her the help she needed because, to my mind, it deserves at least some of the blame. However you measure its failure to provide the help she needed — help that would have allowed her children to remain alive — the system most certainly deserves a large share of the blame for those three deaths. If you wanted an argument against Government healthcare, this certainly qualifies as one, in my view. And as such, I don't see any penalties for this failure. There, again, lies another topic, and I won't go too far down that rabbit hole just now.
As I say, compassion for the mother is reasonable and right. But does compassion for the mother, of itself, mean that we as a society shouldn’t be responding with the appropriate penalties? Therein lies the biggest question for the jury, far as I can see.
All that aside, here's where the sadness curdles into something genuinely infuriating. This is what’s got me writing this today. People are showing up outside the courthouse in pink, rallying, chanting, campaigning — for Lindsay. Not for Cora. Not for Dawson. Not for Callan, an eight-month-old baby who never got the chance to develop a single memory of his own life before it ended. Just her.
I'm sorry, but there is something badly, structurally broken about a support rally for the accused that can't spare a single pink shirt, a single sign, a single moment of silence, for three dead children and the father left standing in a courtroom, staring through tears at vacation photos of a family that no longer exists in any sense. And yes, I know I repeated myself there. Sorry. I can't shake that mental image.
I gather the father has since remarried and lives in New York City with his new wife, and the both of them are trying to rebuild his life. Trying to rebuild a life after a divorce is hard enough in itself, but under these conditions? Yikes.
Look, gang, you can hold compassion for Lindsay Clancy's mental state and still manage to remember whose lives actually ended at her hands. Those aren't competing feelings. They're not even hard to hold at the same time. Somehow, a rally full of physically grown adults keeps managing to drop one of the two entirely. Guess which one. I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t part of a society that has spent the last five decades encouraging ripping children out of the womb. I note that the Babylon Bee has apparently come to that conclusion, but I won't link that particular spoof here.
One might also draw a comparison to just about any random murder, such as the mass shootings at the hands of self-described trans people. It strikes me that a lot of murders occur by means of mental illness. The difference, of course, is the manner of death. Kinda hard to blame the gun here, as we've seen so often in the other cases.
And this isn't an isolated phenomenon, is it? I mean, as an example, we've watched something eerily similar unfold around Luigi Mangione, a premeditated murderer cheered on by a genuinely uncomfortable number of people who've decided a killing spree makes for a compelling personal brand. Fan accounts. Merchandise. A folk-hero glow slapped over an actual homicide. We’ve seen similar reactions to other cases. The issue of abortion is one aspect of the Clancy case, but also consider how many people we saw cheering for the many attempts on Donald Trump's life? On that of Steve Scalise? The grave dancing surrounding the passing of Lindsey Graham?
Ostensibly, the protestors supporting Clancy are rising in sympathy for the accused as if there is some justification for the deaths of this woman’s children. But overall, is it just my imagination, or are such responses in support of accused killers getting louder of late, as if there is some kind of virtue signaling going on?
To the mental illness point, I add a bonus question: Would compassion for the killer’s mental anguish be on the table for a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao, a Pol Pot, a Che? I would argue that, in each case, there was a level of mental illness involved. Given the scope of each situation, can it possibly be otherwise? If you want to argue against that point, ask yourself a second question: Where does the line get drawn?
Anyway, here's the question I can't shake, and I don't think it's an unreasonable one to ask out loud: If we're willing to entertain, even generously, that people like Clancy or Mangione or anyone else working that side of the street were in some way not operating with a clear or stable grip on reality when these things happened — genuinely, seriously unwell, not just having a bad week — then what exactly do we call the supposedly healthy, presumably clear-headed strangers standing outside in matching pink shirts, cheering them on?
Because whatever that impulse is, every fiber in my being says it isn't compassion. Compassion doesn't require erasing the victims to make room for the defendant. It's something else, something closer to a culture that's forgotten how to hold two true things in its head at once: that a person can be sick, and that a person can also have killed three children, and that neither fact cancels the other out.
Sigh.
Rest in peace, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. You deserved better than the family tragedy that took you, and you deserve better than being a mere afterthought at your own mother's trial.
Recommended: A Women's League That Can't Define a Woman?
Thought of the Day: If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm or postpartum mental health concerns, help exists and reaching out matters — the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any time.
VIP members: The floor, as always at this point, is yours. Let's hear from you.
Take care, gang. I promise, I'll be my usual snarky self tomorrow. See you then.
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