There was a time in America when murder was one of those wonderfully uncomplicated subjects.
Murderer bad. Victim dead. Society horrified.
Apparently, that was too judgmental.
Welcome to modern America, where even murder needs a public-relations department, a social-media strategy, a fashionable grievance, and preferably matching T-shirts.
Consider Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk. Instead of universal revulsion, Mangione developed something resembling a fan club. People made memes. People swooned over him. People treated an alleged assassination like the opening scene of a revolutionary movie because the victim happened to represent an industry they despised.
Apparently, if you hate someone’s employer enough, the Sixth Commandment comes with an asterisk.
Then we move to Massachusetts and Lindsay Clancy.
Three children are dead: Cora, Dawson, and Callan. Their mother does not dispute that she killed them. Her defense is arguing that postpartum mental illness left her without criminal responsibility, an important legal question that a jury must decide.
But outside the courthouse, hundreds of supporters—overwhelmingly women—showed up wearing pink and carrying signs supporting Lindsay.
Pink.
For the woman who killed three children.
At some point you have to wonder whether America has misplaced its moral compass or simply thrown the thing away because it kept pointing somewhere inconvenient.
Before the outrage machine starts smoking, postpartum psychosis is real. Mental illness is real. Criminal responsibility is a legitimate legal question. A civilized society should have compassion for mentally ill defendants and should carefully determine whether someone actually possessed the capacity required for criminal guilt.
But compassion and moral clarity are not mutually exclusive.
We can have compassion for Lindsay Clancy without turning the courthouse lawn into Lindsaypalooza.
Where are Cora’s shirts?
Where are Dawson’s signs?
Where is Callan’s crowd?
Those three children didn’t get psychiatrists, lawyers, supporters, rallies, interviews, hashtags, or another chance at life. They got graves.
And that’s what bothers me about what we’re watching.
These two cases are completely different legally, but culturally they expose the same sickness: increasingly, Americans seem to decide whether something is wrong only after determining whether they sympathize with the person who did it.
CEO?
Well, we hate insurance companies, so let’s hear the murderer out.
Mother suffering from mental illness?
Well, that’s tragic, so let’s make the killer the emotional center of the story.
No.
Civilization doesn’t work that way.
Moral principles aren’t supposed to function like Facebook privacy settings. You don’t change them depending upon who is looking.
Murder doesn’t become more acceptable because the victim was wealthy. Innocent children don’t become less important because their killer suffered terribly herself. Justice doesn’t become hatred simply because we feel sympathy for the accused.
This is bigger than two criminal cases.
America is becoming frighteningly good at sorting human beings into categories of deserving and undeserving sympathy. We don’t ask, “What happened?” We ask, “Whose side am I supposed to be on?”
Then we reverse-engineer our morality from there.
That’s tribalism wearing a graduation gown.
And social media has industrialized it.
The algorithm doesn’t reward the person who says, “This is complicated, let’s examine the evidence.”
Boring.
The algorithm wants heroes and villains.
It wants rage.
It wants the handsome revolutionary accused of shooting the hated CEO.
It wants the tragic mother surrounded by supporters in pink.
It wants everybody emotionally committed before they’ve finished reading paragraph three.
Because anger generates clicks, clicks generate money, and apparently civilization is now being moderated by an electronic carnival barker screaming, “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHO THE GOOD GUY IS THIS WEEK!”
The Bible warned about something remarkably similar long before smartphones.
Isaiah 5:20 says:
> “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil…”
Notice the warning isn’t merely that evil exists.
Of course evil exists. It always has.
The frightening stage comes when a culture begins rearranging the labels.
When wrongdoing becomes resistance.
When accountability becomes oppression.
When criminals become celebrities.
When victims become inconvenient complications in somebody else’s political narrative.
When compassion becomes indistinguishable from absolution.
That’s moral decay.
And moral decay doesn’t necessarily arrive wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. Sometimes it arrives wearing a fashionable shirt, holding a clever sign, absolutely convinced that its compassion makes it righteous.
America desperately needs to rediscover something our grandparents understood without a graduate seminar:
You can understand someone without excusing them.
You can have compassion without abandoning justice.
You can recognize mental illness without forgetting three dead children.
You can despise an insurance company without celebrating the murder of its CEO.
And you can demand that the same moral standard apply to people you love, people you hate, people you identify with, and people whose politics make your blood pressure rise.
Because once morality depends upon who committed the act, morality isn’t morality anymore.
It’s tribal permission.
Maybe Isaiah wasn’t describing twenty-first-century America.
But scrolling through social media lately, you have to admit:
We certainly seem determined to audition for the part.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
_________________________________
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA