…The Case of Lindsay Clancy
Days of Noah: Why America Is Beginning to Identify with the Perpetrator
Something deeply disturbing is happening in American culture. We are witnessing a moral inversion in which sympathy increasingly migrates away from the victim and toward the person who harmed the victim.
To me, the Days of Noah warning from the Messiah is here. The perpetrator becomes the person society is asked to understand, explain, defend, fund, and sometimes even celebrate, while the actual victim slowly disappears from the story. We are told about the offender’s trauma, mental illness, oppression, fear, diagnosis, upbringing, medications, identity, or circumstances. Some of those things may be completely real and deserve serious consideration. But somewhere in the process, explanation has begun replacing accountability.
The Children Are Dead—So Why Is Lindsay the Center of the Story?
The Lindsay Clancy case has brought this cultural shift into sharp focus. Clancy is accused of murdering her three children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan. Her attorneys maintain that she had postpartum psychosis and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Two witnesses said that Clancy told them a male voice told her she needed to kill her children and herself. Sounds like demonic oppression to me.
The prosecution argues that she understood what she was doing, and I agree. She acted like a cold-calculated, methodical killer when she killed her three children before attempting to take her own life. Mental illness is real, postpartum psychosis is real, but there is another truth that must not disappear: three children were brutally and tragically killed, and no one is discussing this or cares.
Yet look where so much public sympathy has gone. Supporters have appeared outside the courthouse wearing pink and holding heart signs for Lindsay. They even recited the Lord’s prayer outside the courthouse. Wow! Social media campaigns have identified with Lindsay. People have organized rallies and raised enormous amounts of money for her family. The emotional center of the story has increasingly become Lindsay—her illness, her treatment, her medications, her suffering, and whether the mental-health system failed her.
But where are Cora, Dawson, and Callan in this discussion? They were not abstractions. They were children who were strangled by an exercise rope one by one. They were the ones who lost everything. Testimony from a state psychiatrist indicated that she said, “Go to God” repeatedly as she strangled her 3-year-old son, Dawson. Also worth noting, according to testimony, her Apple Watch recorded Clancy’s heart rate of just 57 beats per minute just before she strangled her three kids, clearly showing her physiological state.
We Have Confused Explanation with Moral Innocence
That does not mean we cannot have compassion for Lindsay Clancy. Christianity allows us to hold truths together that our culture increasingly insists must be separated. A person can have a mental illness and still commit an objectively evil act that deserves justice. We can demand better treatment for postpartum mental illness without redefining the killing of children. Compassion for the perpetrator does not require moral confusion about the act they commit.
This distinction is becoming increasingly difficult for our society to maintain due to the loss of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Mental illness, trauma, or drugs can help explain behavior. But explanation and moral justification are not the same thing. Depression does not make murder good. Psychosis does not make the victim less valuable. Drug addiction does not make violence righteous. Trauma does not magically transfer victimhood from the person who was attacked to the person who attacked him.
The Noahic Covenant Begins with the Victim
From a biblical worldview, human life possesses unique value because humanity was created in the image of God. After the Flood, God established this principle in the Noahic Covenant: “Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God, He made man” (Genesis 9:6). The foundation is not the emotional condition of the murderer. The foundation is the sacred value of life that was taken.
Scripture does not contain an exception declaring innocent life less valuable because the perpetrator was intoxicated, traumatized, depressed, mentally disturbed, or experiencing some other crisis. Those circumstances may affect how we understand the perpetrator, but they do not change the value of the person who was killed, the moral nature of innocent bloodshed, and justice that must be served.
Abortion Trained Us to Move the Moral Center
I think a lot of this stems from decades of how people view abortion. Since 1973, Americans have been conditioned to sympathize with the circumstances of the mother who commits the act of murdering her baby with no thought of the baby who was murdered. How old is she? Does this hinder her education or career? Is she scared? Can she afford the baby? Where is the father? Does she feel capable of raising a baby? Was the pregnancy planned? So, the woman who committed the fornication is now the victim, and the baby is an afterthought.
Abortion culture taught generations of Americans to shift the moral center of the story from the baby being murdered to the person experiencing a crisis because of fornication. Compassion is extended to the woman, but then that compassion is allowed to move beyond the boundaries of truth. Biblical compassion is always governed by truth; truth establishes the boundaries within which compassion operates. When compassion is detached from truth, it becomes unbiblical. It can reach the point where the killing of an innocent child is itself presented as an act of compassion toward the woman.
Once this unbridled compassion becomes a cultural reflex, it does not remain confined to abortion. It begins spreading into other moral issues, which is exactly what we are witnessing today. The same logic recurs: begin with the perpetrator’s suffering, magnify the circumstances surrounding the perpetrator, redefine accountability as cruelty, and, eventually, the actual victim becomes a secondary character in the story.
From Luigi Mangione to Karmelo Anthony
That pattern extends beyond Lindsay Clancy. We have seen enormous public sympathy and fundraising emerge around people accused or convicted of horrific acts. In the Karmelo Anthony case, sympathy and financial support flowed toward Anthony and his family after the killing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf. Luigi Mangione became a cultural celebrity to some after being accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Rather than simply debating health-care policy, some people romanticized the alleged killer because the victim symbolized an institution they despised. Once again, the identity or grievance of the perpetrator became morally more important than the life of the victim.
Iryna Zarutska and the Difference Between Competency and Innocence
The murder of Iryna Zarutska exposed another dimension of the problem. Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed aboard a Charlotte light-rail train in 2025. The accused killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., had an extensive history of encounters with the criminal-justice system and was subsequently found incompetent to stand trial. Mental illness is real, but the broader cultural question remains: how many times must society encounter violent individuals, explain their behavior through pathology or social circumstances, return them to the public, and then express shock when an innocent person pays the price? It’s sickening.
Compassion Without Truth Becomes Destructive
The common thread is not that mental illness is imaginary. It is that compassion has become detached from truth. Once compassion is separated from moral boundaries, it can become what I would call unbiblical compassion—compassion that excuses, enables, or normalizes what Scripture identifies as evil. Biblical compassion moves toward suffering without redefining sin. Unbiblical compassion requires us to alter our moral judgment because someone suffers.
The WNBA Is a Microcosm of the Same Cultural Disorder: Enes Kanter Freedom Situation
The WNBA has increasingly become a cultural microcosm of this larger phenomenon. Arguments that should involve basic biological realities become ideological loyalty tests. Players and activists speak of inclusion, compassion, protection, and belonging while women who object to biological males competing in women’s athletics can be treated as though they are the aggressors. The very category the league exists to represent—women—becomes difficult to define without controversy.
When Enes Kanter Freedom attended a WNBA game wearing a shirt stating the ordinary biological definition, “Woman — adult human female,” he was ultimately removed from the arena after WOKE and toxic Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud, who got in Enes’ face, screaming, yelling, cussing, and saying, “She’s not gonna sleep with you.” Huh? What does that have to do with his shirt? So, I guess that’s her way of defending men playing in women’s sports. Nuts… absolutely nuts.
The resulting rage from Cloud and getting Enes kicked out illustrated just how far this debate has moved beyond sports. The controversy is ultimately about whether objective reality must yield to subjective identity and whether disagreement itself is treated as harm.
Why Are People Identifying with the Perpetrator?
That is why these stories belong together. They are manifestations of the same underlying moral revolution. Truth is increasingly determined by identity, tribe, grievance, and emotional identification rather than by an objective moral standard. If someone belongs to the approved victim category, their actions are interpreted in light of the circumstances. If someone belongs to the disfavored category, circumstances suddenly become irrelevant. Justice stops asking, “What happened, who did it, and what is right?” and begins asking, “Which person represents the group with whom I sympathize?”
This helps explain why some highly educated, leftist, white women identify so intensely with Lindsay Clancy, as we saw them cheering for her and making heart signs for her outside the courtroom. Please understand, I’m not turning this into an indictment of all white women or women in general. But there is a significant demographic trend we all need to pay attention to, as numerous studies, including an NBC News poll and Gallup, point out.
It has to do with college education, not biology. These affluent women went to our so-called “elite” colleges and were brainwashed by WOKE ideology. Modern therapeutic culture and education have increasingly taught people to understand human behavior primarily through trauma, diagnosis, oppression, systems, and victimhood. University culture has reinforced identity-based frameworks in which power relationships can become more important than individual moral responsibility. Social media then intensifies the process by rewarding emotional identification, tribal solidarity, and public demonstrations of compassion. This has affected this demographic.
Put those forces together, and compassion, detached from truth itself, can become a badge of WOKE moral superiority. The question is no longer simply whether someone deserves compassion. The question becomes whether I can publicly demonstrate that I am more compassionate than you. And one of the easiest ways to demonstrate that compassion is to identify with the person that truth considers guilty. The more shocking the offender is, the more radical the demonstration of empathy appears.
These Are the Days of Noah
There is also a profound spiritual dimension to this. Isaiah warned, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20). Paul described the last days as a period in which people would be “lovers of themselves,” “without self-control,” “brutal,” and “despisers of good” (2 Timothy 3:1–5). Jesus compared the circumstances surrounding His future coming with “the days of Noah” (Matthew 24:37). Genesis tells us exactly what characterized Noah’s generation: “The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11).
The connection to the days of Noah is therefore not merely that violence exists. Violence has existed throughout human history. The deeper parallel is a civilization becoming saturated with corruption while losing its ability to recognize the seriousness of that corruption. Violence becomes normalized. Human life becomes cheap. Evil becomes explainable, excusable, entertaining, political, or even heroic. Eventually, society does not merely tolerate violence; portions of society begin sympathizing with, funding, romanticizing, or celebrating those responsible for it.
Judges 21:25 describes the spiritual condition perfectly: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” When there is no transcendent moral authority above humanity, morality inevitably becomes subjective. If God does not define good and evil, then individuals, institutions, political movements, universities, social-media mobs, therapists, celebrities, and governments will attempt to define it themselves. And once morality becomes subjective, whoever possesses the greatest cultural power gets to decide who is the victim and who is the villain.
Romans 1 describes the final stage of this rebellion in frightening terms. Paul does not merely describe people practicing evil. He describes people who “approve of those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). That is an enormously important distinction. A civilization reaches another level of moral decay when it moves from sinning to celebrating, defending, and applauding it. That is what should concern Christians about what we are witnessing.
Remember the Victims
Before discussing diagnoses, systems, oppression, medications, politics, race, gender, or ideology, Christians should remember the people who cannot give interviews, organize rallies, create hashtags, hire attorneys, or tell their side of the story because their lives were taken from them.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
Austin Metcalf was seventeen.
Iryna Zarutska was twenty-three.
Charlie Kirk was thirty-one.
Brian Thompson was fifty.
We as Christians must expose this evil, and above all, we must recover the ability to see the forgotten victims.
God Is Demonstrating Why the 7-Year Tribulation Judgment Is Necessary
I believe what we are witnessing is God revealing why humanity deserves the Tribulation. For thousands of years, God has held out His hand to offer His grace and mercy, but that offer will be rescinded as humanity continues to reject it.
The coming 7-Year Tribulation demonstrates the righteousness of God’s judgment upon a rebellious world—a world that lionizes murderers and ignores victims; a world that celebrates murderers and claims that victims like Charlie Kirk or Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered because of a demonic hatred of the truth. This is demonization, plain and simple, and it shows us that we do not have long before God intervenes with the 7 -Year Tribulation.
When a civilization begins making celebrities out of alleged killers, transferring sympathy from murdered children to the adult who killed them, excusing violence through identity and grievance, and calling objective reality hateful, something much deeper than politics is happening.
We are watching a civilization lose its moral categories.
The days of Noah were characterized by corruption and violence. The days described by Paul are characterized by self-love, brutality, rebellion, and eventually approval of evil. That should make every believer recognize the spiritual significance of the moment.
God is not obligated to give humanity endless mercy. Judgment is real. The Tribulation will demonstrate both the depth of human rebellion and the righteousness of God’s judgment. Yet until that judgment comes, the Church has a mission. We do not celebrate destruction or rage at the darkness. We expose darkness, defend innocent life, proclaim truth, call evil what God calls evil, extend genuine compassion to suffering people, and preach the Gospel. At the same time, the door of grace remains open.
Because the answer to a culture that has lost the distinction between victim and perpetrator is not less truth and it is not less compassion.
It is biblical truth and biblical compassion—together.
The post When Compassion Becomes Moral Confusion… :: By Brandon Holthaus appeared first on Rapture Ready.
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