Lindsay Clancy Trial & Canada Pivots to EU

Drew Mariani (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

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Paula Devlin (0:09)

So Paula Devlin tells me those deliberations didn't start as an 11 to one split. At first, eight jurors wanted to see Lindsay Clancy found not criminally responsible. Two were undecided, and two wanted her to be found guilty. But after deliberating for almost 40 hours, all but one agreed, that Clancy was not criminally responsible.

Drew Mariani (0:31)

It's The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

Drew Mariani (0:35)

Now that was a huge case, and that was CBS News reporting on the ongoing controversy with the Lindsay Clancy trial.

I came across an article by Dr. Gavin Ashenden. You may remember him. He's been on the program in the past. He was the former Anglican bishop, who was also the chaplain of Queen Elizabeth II. And he converted to the Catholic faith around 2019, and became just a critical voice in a lot of social and religious issues. And he wrote a piece. I'll get you plugged into a sub stack. You can read that there. We're also going to link over to it as well. But what struck me is kind of the observation, what happens to a culture when suffering becomes something you simply refuse to accept, right? When pain no longer leads to God, instead it becomes justification for anger, for power, maybe even vengeance, right? It's a provocative new essay by Dr. Ashenden. He looks at the Lindsay Clancy tragedy, and he sees something much larger happening beneath the surface.

The return to witchcraft, the cult of victimhood, and a culture that has forgotten what Christianity teaches you to do with suffering. And that's what we want to explore with him today. And the big takeaway for me, and we'll get to Dr. Ashenden about this, I mean, there were three beautiful little children who were choked to death by their mother, right? Cora and Dawson and Callan, Callan, I think, was the other name, and, you know, and again, I don't know, I wasn't in the, I didn't sit in the jury. I didn't hear all the evidence.

Clearly, this mother was sick. She then attempted to answer to choking her children to death and sending her husband away. She then attempted to take her own life. And at her trial, the central question was whether she killed her children. Anyway, I should say it wasn't whether she killed her children. It was whether severe mental illness, specifically postpartum psychosis, was the driver behind this. That was the defense. And that left her, you know, did leave her criminally responsible for what she did or not. The prosecution said, you know, her actions demonstrated planning and awareness. She knew what she was doing, right? She threw herself out of window afterwards. The jury couldn't agree. And the judge declared a mistrial. So we'll probably see this go back to court. But then I came across Dr. Ashenden's article, and he was struck by the reaction. And you know, for some people, there was all it was virtually all compassion directed towards Clancy and her mental suffering. Others, it was centered towards the children. And he saw this division in camps, but he connects the controversy to the growing cultural fascination with witchcraft and occult spirituality. And I thought I'd bring him in today to talk a little bit about that. What is he saying? Maybe better than that, what are we missing? And it's a delight to have him joining us today. Dr. Ashenden, welcome. Thank you for joining us once again.

Gavin Ashenden (3:35)

Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Drew Mariani (3:37)

A provocative article, to say the least. It made me think. Your title was deliberately, I'm assuming, provocative, Lindsay Clancy and the Return of Witchcraft. Walk us through, what connections are you making between this tragic case and maybe the reassurgence of witchcraft and the spirit of victimhood that we've seen present in the culture today?

Gavin Ashenden (4:01)

Well, can I start by saying what I'm not doing? I'm not really commenting on the legal trial, partly because in English law, we have a rather softer middle concept, which is diminished responsibility. So instead of having to prove psychosis, which is a very difficult thing to prove, because the psychiatric community aren't sure what it actually is, under English law, she'd be found guilty of diminished responsibility and so manslaughter. So in the sense that the American legal system, or rather the state legal system, has given people a very stark choice that they're finding it hard to bridge. But that's a legal question and a procedural question. And people keep on writing, and people say, so you think she's guilty or you think she's not guilty? And the answer is, no, I haven't really talked about that. What I'm interested in is the way in which the public reaction has split men and women, split different communities, and people seem unable to hear each other. And I think one of the reasons this came to me is that I've been asked to talk about neo-paganism in the last couple of years. There's a very good book by John Davidson, who's editor of The Federalist, I think, who has written about the return of paganism to America. The reason why I mention it is that that, along with a growing interest in Guadeloupe for me, is the way in which human culture has universally been brutal in terms of child sacrifice. And John Davidson gives the example of an archaeological site in Scandinavia where they stopped digging, because what they found was a 10th century pagan site where it was quite clear they'd sacrificed children. And the woke academics didn't want to find that, because paganism in our culture has all been about being friendly with Mother Earth and being in tune with the seasons and being economically, sorry, not economically, ecologically literate and so on. But we're so used to Christianity that we don't understand, if you like, what the natural reflexes of humanity are. And they've always been cruel and willing, the willingness to sacrifice other human beings and people. And you could say that we're returning to this through abortion in the way in which we've managed it on the industrial scale we have. But be that as it may, what lies behind this is the sense of what on earth we do with suffering and the relationship between love and power. So Christianity, most unusually amongst religions, deals with the primacy of compassion. But most other religions, most other philosophers don't.