Patrick Clancy, the Massachusetts father whose wife strangled their three young children in January 2023, said in a new “60 Minutes” interview that his wife never asked for his forgiveness — even though he granted it anyway.
According to a Daily Wire column published after the segment aired, the exchange with interviewer Ross Douthat produced the interview’s most searing moment. Asked whether his ex-wife had ever sought his pardon, Clancy paused, his eyes drifting, and then shook his head in what the column described as a gallows-worn weariness. “No,” he said. “But I gave it to her.”
The Case That Gripped the Country
Lindsay Clancy was accused of strangling the couple’s three children — Cora, Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan — with exercise bands at the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts home before attempting to take her own life. The children’s father was out of the house on an errand when the killings occurred.
What followed became one of the most bitterly contested online storylines in recent years, with a vocal contingent of social media users casting doubt on Patrick Clancy’s account and, in some cases, openly blaming him for the deaths. The Daily Wire column, written from a sharply critical perspective, characterizes that contingent as “the pro-Clancy party of girl power” gone silent since the interview aired — “crickets,” in the outlet’s phrasing, from the “social media sleuths, peevish personalities, and malcontent mothers” who spent months “deriding, denouncing, and dragging a grieving father.”
The column argues that those critics are now being forced to reckon with the reality of a man who lost everything and still refuses to condemn his wife publicly, describing her instead as a woman suffering from severe mental illness rather than a “killer mom.”
The Four Days Callan Held On
Perhaps the most wrenching detail revisited in the piece concerns the youngest child. In the four days after the attack, while Lindsay Clancy was hospitalized following a suicide attempt, Callan remained alive and fighting for his life. Patrick Clancy reportedly pleaded for the survival of his only remaining child — telling doctors, in effect, to give him just one, and he would give that child the best life he possibly could. He held the baby, lay beside him, and told him he was sorry. Callan died in his arms.
The column notes that Lindsay Clancy was aware Callan was still alive during those four days. According to the account, she never asked to see him. She did, however, ask whether her legs were straight and whether she could have an attorney.
On what would have been Callan’s first birthday — May 26, 2023 — Patrick Clancy marked the day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, lighting a candle, telling his “buddy” he loved him, and then walking out onto Fifth Avenue and crying.
A Mistrial, Then the ’60 Minutes’ Segment
Three years on, Lindsay Clancy’s case has ended in a mistrial after a jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. Patrick Clancy, meanwhile, is learning to live without his children. He keeps the baby sloth that Cora carried everywhere, a photo of Callan swallowed by an oversized bow tie, and Dawson’s cherished toy helicopter, according to the column. He dreams about the children constantly — in one dream, Cora walks into the kitchen, he asks her where she has been, and she wraps him in a hug.
The piece also recalls that Patrick Clancy had to be taken out in an ambulance during his own testimony after a panic attack seized him before the courtroom playback of the 911 call — forcing him to relive the worst day of his life in front of a jury.
That is the man, the column argues, whom a corner of the internet spent the summer calling the true murderer.
The Wider Argument
The Daily Wire piece frames the Clancy episode as a case study in how online ecosystems consume and reshape private tragedy. Its central claim is not about the courtroom but about the audience: that a story of this kind — human, delicate, and difficult to comprehend — gets flattened into a tribal argument, sorted into tidy boxes, and assigned villains and heroes on the basis of preexisting grievances.
The column points specifically to the viral slogan “Same, Lindsay,” which it says caught on not because hundreds of thousands of women have experienced postpartum psychosis, but because the phrase manufactured an intimacy the responders had not actually earned. A companion refrain — “Patrick did it” — spread, in the column’s account, because of an underlying assumption that most men are dangerous and children are a burden.
The author’s criticism extends beyond the internet mob to the broader culture, arguing that a loss of religious faith and declining respect for one another have left people quicker to convict, slower to forgive, and hungrier for a community built around shared outrage rather than shared obligation.
The piece closes on a note of appeal rather than argument: a reminder that the subjects of the week on social media are not fictional characters but real people with real lives, and that their tragedy — in this case, as the column puts it, a father left with three toys and a lifetime of dreams about his children — does not need to become anyone else’s trend.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-leftist-women-hollowed-out-the-goodness-of-patrick-clancy