—
The Lindsay Clancy case has brought the dark side of TikTok to the forefront. As it turns out, the dark side of TikTok is just TikTok. There is no light side, no good side.
At least not one significant or counterbalancing enough that it should dissuade us from launching the entire platform, and most of the people who use it, directly into the Sun. But it isn’t just that platform.
The case has shown the dark side of the culture more broadly. And there are those who would argue that the culture and many of the people in it also belong on the same one-way flight into the Sun.
Over the last few weeks we’ve said a lot about Clancy’s fan club — a group of women all as repulsive on the inside as they are on the outside, and unanimously deserving of having their custody and voting rights rescinded.
These goblins have come forward loudly and proudly to outright defend a murderer who brutally slaughtered all three of her children. In the process, they have unmistakably demonstrated that they, like their hero, have roughly the intelligence and moral reasoning of Komodo dragons. I choose that comparison intentionally, by the way.
Young Komodo dragons have to spend the first few years of their lives hiding high up in the trees so that they aren’t killed and eaten by older Komodo dragons — including their own mothers. I’ve found that it’s a very bad idea to use any species of lizard, least of all this species, as a parenting model, and yet that’s exactly what feminists have been doing for many decades now.
We’ve directed plenty of richly deserved scorn at the women who’ve invented outlandish conspiracy theories around the case, often pinning the blame on the husband — who is, in reality, the primary living victim of this crime. Far more troubling are the women who defend Clancy not because they think she didn’t do it, but because they know she did. They understand her, they say. They relate to her.
By their own admission, that means they loathe and resent their own children, and have considered, or would consider, murder as a potential remedy. That is the only thing a mother can mean when she says she sees herself in a woman who systematically executed her family.
There have been, at least, a few moments that almost rise to unintentional humor in the middle of this profoundly unsettling saga. This GB News clip went viral yesterday. The female commentator is thrown into paroxysms of rage at her male colleague for daring to criticize a child killer, God forbid.
Watch:
FEMINIST MELTDOWN & STORMS OFF!
Why are so many women defending Lindsay Clancy!?
They’ve lost their minds! pic.twitter.com/7B8tZg8b1s
— Thomas Corbett-Dillon (@TCorbettDillon) August 25, 2026
The star of that clip is the woman on camera, boiling, seething, nearly volcanic. But don’t forget the assist from the female anchor off camera, who insists we should have “empathy for what she went through.”
The thing Clancy “went through,” to be clear, is the slaughter of her children, carried out by her own hands. I don’t know if the women in that clip have kids, but if they do, I grieve for those children — and worry for them.
Beyond this especially loathsome group of Lindsay Clancy groupies, there has been a deluge of videos — some recent, some not — from female influencers of every size, in both BMI and follower count, who spend their ample free time bitterly complaining about their children online. This is a thriving genre.
The overlap between Clancy’s defenders and the fans of this content is, we can assume, something like 100%. It works like this: the influencer posts her complaints on TikTok so other women — also bitter, also with too much free time — can watch and validate her. Except they are not really validating her. They are validating themselves through her. The whole thing is an orgy of self-pity.
The comments say “You’re so brave” and “Thank you for your honesty,” but those are affirmations the commenters mean more for themselves. The influencer takes it as encouragement and posts more. The echo chamber grows ever louder, the whimpering and whining rise and swell, and the pity party runs on forever, a perpetual motion machine fueled by b*tching.
Keep in mind this is not a phenomenon confined to TikTok, or only to women. Parents openly hating their children is something of a trend, and not a recent one. Plenty of adults today know the concept from their own childhoods.
Time magazine recently published a lengthy essay about “the parents who regret having children.” Canada’s state media organ, the CBC, followed with its own report a few months later, as did BuzzFeed.
A Facebook group for parents who regret having children has tens of thousands of members. The “regretful parents” subreddit has hundreds of thousands of active users and 70,000 weekly visitors. We’ve covered this forum before. It is perhaps, as a piece last week in Futurism dubbed it, the darkest place on the internet. time
Here’s a representative sample, picked basically at random. Someone posted this yesterday. Title: “I hate being a mother.” This woman echoes many of the sentiments of those moms on TikTok. She hates being a mother. She hates being home with her kids. She hates “everyone.” She especially hates her husband now, she says, and wants to leave. Therapy, she reports, has been no help. These are two persistent themes on this forum: hating the husband, and therapy not working.
Other posts are even more depressing. One woman brags that she just gave up custody of her five-year-old son and is so relieved that she’s finally “free.” Another describes her life with a seven-year-old son and the fairly run-of-the-mill challenges she’s faced with him — he’s impatient, asks for snacks a lot, yells when he doesn’t get his way — and she says that it’s “hell on earth,” that she hates her life and resents her son. She hates parenting the boy “more than anything,” she says. These are just a few posts from this week, and I chose the more cheerful varieties. It gets much worse.
The point is that this kind of noxious material is all over the place these days, which means parents who harbor these dark feelings have no shortage of outlets. They have no scarcity of pots to stew in, where they can join each other in their shared hatreds, resentments, and persecution complexes.
They marinate like chicken breasts in ziplock bags in the fridge, soaking in the spite and venom they then direct toward their families. The cultural effect of all this is horrendous. Young people encounter this content and become as demoralized and hopeless as the people posting it want them to be. Marriage rates continue to plummet as a result.
On a personal level, the effect is cataclysmic, even potentially fatal. I would bet every dollar in my possession that Lindsay Clancy spent plenty of time on these Reddit forums, or forums like them, and watched countless “I hate motherhood” videos. This spectacle does not merely describe the misery these people are feeling. It encourages it and spreads it like a virus.
If I were inclined to be sympathetic to some of these people — and I’m not — they would forfeit that sympathy the moment they published their complaints online.
Here’s what to do with your resentment toward your children. First: don’t talk about it in public, especially not in a forum that puts your feelings on the permanent record, immortalized so that anyone — including y
