September 3, 2026

KURT SCHLICHTER: All This ‘Feelings’ Nonsense Should Make You Feel Sick.

I watched some of the closing arguments in the Clancy case, and I did it through the eyes of a 30-year trial lawyer. The defense was in the toughest position because the facts are all against the defendant – she killed her children, one by one, after tricking her husband into leaving her alone so she could strangle them without him stopping her. She then tried to kill herself. All of this is indisputable evidence that she knew what she was doing was wrong when she did it, thereby meaning she was not insane under the law. Understand that merely having a mental illness diagnosis – and about half of young liberal women are diagnosed with some form of mental illness – is not, in itself, a golden ticket to escape from criminal liability. The test is right and wrong – can you tell the difference? And with the facts clearly showing that she could, the defense needed to find an alternative villain. Oh, it was the doctors. It was people in her life who didn’t care enough about her. Someone else was to blame, anyone else. And the defense had to exempt her from responsibility. Oh, she was a good mother – yeah, he actually said that. I’m still trying to figure out why a lawyer would start an argument in the heads of the jurors, most of whom would respond to that with, “How can she be a good mother when she killed her own kids?”

But that’s most of the jurors. Not all of them. Not the feelzocentric ones.

And I listened to the prosecution’s closing argument. When you’re doing a closing argument, you want to sum up the evidence, tie it to the law as instructed by the judge, and hand it over, wrapped up in a little bow, to the jury so it has no choice but to rule for your client. And the district attorney here was, I thought, fantastic in the parts I saw. Very calm, very methodical, highlighting bits of evidence, comparing them to the law, and telling the jury what they all meant. It was cool, rational, and logical, and that was probably the problem.

The facts, the evidence, and the law all told the jury that it had no choice but to find her guilty of three cruel and atrocious murders. But all that was outweighed by the feelz.

See, my mistake in appreciating the job the prosecutor did was that I assumed that if you made a rational argument supported by evidence, people would nod along. I should’ve known better. After all, I’m on X enough to know better. A significant number of people no longer respond to rational arguments. They choose the result they want and work backward to get it. That’s why you have morons asserting that the husband did it even though Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers don’t dispute that it was her hands that choked the life out of her children. That’s the power of feelz. Feelz let you ignore evidence that undermines what you want and let you manufacture evidence that doesn’t exist in your head. It’s OK to assume facts not in evidence if it gets you to the result you want.

Meanwhile, at Middle Earth’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll