A woman who ran into a burning house three times to save her kids raised $50,000 to cover the third-degree burns it left her with. A woman who strangled her own three kids to death has raised over $1 million to keep herself out of prison. If that split doesn’t make you angry, check your pulse.
This isn’t even new. Do something brave and the town used to show up for you. Do something monstrous and the town strung you up by the neck in the square for everyone to see, unless you had the money to make it go away. Democracy was supposed to fix that but it never really stuck. These days the noose just has a price tag again. All it takes is enough strangers willing to cover it.
In 2019 Emma Scholten went back into a burning house because her kids were still inside it. She didn’t weigh the odds. She didn’t wait for the fire department to show up and do the job for her. She went back in once, then again, then a third time and came out the other side with third-degree burns across 93 percent of her body. That’s a number that leaves almost no patch of skin the fire didn’t reach. She raised $50,000 for medical care. That money helped her survive it. It’s also less than a rounding error for the kind of people who usually get GoFundMe attention. The news cycle gave her a day and moved on to something with better vibes.
Millionaire, private school education, the kind of life most people reading this on a cracked phone screen will never sniff. What she CHOSE to do with all of that was take exercise bands into her own home and strangle her three toddlers to death one after another. She even confessed.
There’s no confusion here, no mystery left to solve, just a mother who killed her own babies with her bare hands and told police exactly how she did it.
That woman isn’t sitting in a cell contemplating what she’s done. She’s a celebrity with a GoFundMe pulling in over $1 million. The people filling it up aren’t trolls or bots. They’re people who will tell you with a straight face that they care deeply about women and children. Then in the same breath they’ll tell you Clancy is the real victim, that ‘stress’ made her do it, that the patriarchy or the world itself failed her long before she failed her own kids.
We’ve got a question for the people funding that account. What exactly did you think you were donating to? A murder isn’t a mental health awareness campaign with a body count attached. Dressing it up as one doesn’t make you compassionate. It makes you complicit in it. Turn three dead toddlers into a fundraiser for their mother and that’s not compassion.
You’re telling every parent who’s ever sacrificed something real for their kid that the sacrifice was optional and the murder was ‘understandable’.
Compare that to Emma Scholten, who spent weeks in a hospital bed while her charred body tried to rebuild itself and needed every cent of that $50,000 just to survive. Clancy didn’t need any of it. She was already a millionaire raising money to fight a prosecutor, not to survive third-degree burns. People lined up to give it to her anyway.
One woman ran into fire for her kids. Another used her own hands to end theirs. Somehow only the second one went viral.
This isn’t a nuance story, whatever the donors want to tell themselves. It’s a story about a culture that stopped caring about intent. All you need now is a sympathetic enough backstory. Somewhere along the way ‘she was struggling’ turned into a full legal defense in the court of public opinion. ‘She ran into a burning house and nearly died saving her kids’ turned into a footnote. We’re not here to relitigate what mental illness can and can’t explain. Lindsay Clancy strangled three children. Right now she gets more love than the woman who burned nearly her entire body trying to save hers. If your gut reaction to those two facts is to reach for a caveat on Clancy’s behalf, that reflex is the delusion this piece is named after.
I graduated with a journalism degree this year. Right now I am at a summer camp for kids that want to get into journalism. I’d rather be explaining to thirteen year olds why they can’t have four s’mores in a row than writing a paragraph defending the idea that murdering toddlers is bad. But here we are. We lost ten paid subscribers after the Clancy piece ran the other day, the one where we said that a woman who strangles her own children belongs in prison or a locked psychiatric facility.
Ten people read that sentence, decided it was the one that finally crossed a line for them, and canceled. Judging by the emails, most of them were women who call themselves feminists and didn’t sound especially stable about it. We could be wrong about that read. We’re not losing sleep over it either way.
That’s on top of the roughly 30 paid subscribers we lost writing about ICE locking children in detention. We saw that one coming from a mile off. If you think there’s ever a good reason to cage kids, this was never going to be your newsletter. Honestly, we’d rather you find that out now than keep paying us to make you angry every week.
Forty fewer subscribers is real money in an operation that runs on subscriber dollars instead of ad reps or a hedge fund. It funds the two of us, an outlet that isn’t cheap to keep running, and someday an actual newsvan. Then field reporting stops depending on whatever bus happens to be running that day. The last two articles cost us readers who couldn’t stomach calling a murderer a murderer or a cage a cage. That’s a trade we’ll make every single time.
If you’re still here, thank you for being able to hold ‘this is genuinely sad’ and ‘this is still wrong’ in your head at once. Apparently that’s rarer than it should be.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
HA! Lily I found a grammatical error in your title! You must have had a rough week because I have yet to see you submit anything that wasn't overly 'perfect' compared to my chicken-scratchings. (I fixed the error by the way.)
We live in a scary and demonic world. Welcome to 1984 where Right is Wrong, , War is Peace and Slavery is Freedom.