Rogan Challenges Double Standard in Clancy Case Support, Questions Gender Bias

On a Tuesday episode of his podcast, Joe Rogan trained his attention on a phenomenon unfolding across social media: women organizing in support of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, who stands trial for killing her three children. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They died on January 24, 2023, at the family home. Clancy does not dispute that she killed them. She argues instead that postpartum psychosis rendered her not criminally responsible, and she faces three counts of first-degree murder.

Rogan's complaint was not about the legal defense itself but about the social media machinery surrounding it—the rallies, the support groups, the conspiracy theories that had begun to orbit the case. He posed a counterfactual: if a single father had killed his children, would other men show up online to say they understood, that sadness was a reasonable explanation? He answered his own question. "This lady killed her kids and everyone's like, 'Oh my God, she needed help.' Imagine if a single father killed his kids. Do you think there'd be any dads out there? 'We get it. We understand. I also get sad!'" Rogan went further, describing what he imagined the crime scene contained—the children's vacant eyes, their mother's hands around their necks—and suggested that if Clancy's supporters truly confronted that image, their sympathy would evaporate.

He framed the broader phenomenon as symptomatic of a world spinning out of rational orbit. "People are out of their f---ing mind right now," he said, lumping together the case, the social media response, and modern politics as evidence of collective delusion. The specific grievance was that women were organizing around a person who had killed children, which Rogan treated as self-evidently indefensible regardless of the circumstances that preceded it.

Later in the conversation, Rogan moved toward a sociological claim. He suggested that childless liberal women were channeling parental instinct into political and moral crusades—scolding the world, worrying about the environment, voting, defending rights, fretting over immigrants. They were, in his formulation, mothering the planet because they had no children to mother. He acknowledged the generalization but pressed forward anyway.

When Fox News sought expert commentary, the responses split along predictable lines. Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a board-certified psychiatrist, acknowledged that Rogan had identified something real: social media does transform criminal cases into team sports, and that is corrosive. But he pushed back on the framing. Most women supporting Clancy, he argued, were not saying her actions were acceptable. They were pointing to the postpartum period as genuinely harrowing—the sleep deprivation, the financial pressure, the expectation to return to work, the psychiatric system's reliance on medication. Clancy had been prescribed thirteen different psychiatric drugs in the months before the deaths, and evidence suggested those medications may have worsened her condition. Witt-Doerring asked whether a father in similar circumstances—depressed after war, prescribed drugs that induced psychosis, unable to understand his own actions—would receive the same scrutiny. Probably not, he said, but the argument for compassion would be identical.

Mary Marslender, a former Republican consultant, sided with Rogan's core claim. She agreed that a father who had planned his wife's absence, lured her out for takeout, and then strangled his children in the basement would face no GoFundMe campaigns, no rallies in pink, no online declarations of solidarity. He would be called a monster. The double standard, she argued, was not surprising but rather a symptom of what she called feminist hypocrisy. Yet even Marslender allowed for a narrower position: it was possible to acknowledge Clancy's illness and the psychiatric system's failures while refusing to idolize someone who killed her own children. The children—a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a baby—deserved to be remembered as human beings, not as talking points in a debate about gender and justice.

The trial continues, and the question of whether Clancy's supporters represent legitimate concern about mental health and gender bias in the criminal justice system, or whether they exemplify the way social media transforms tragedy into spectacle and symbol, remains unresolved. What is clear is that the case has become a mirror in which different observers see different things: a failure of the psychiatric system, a failure of social media discourse, a failure of gender equality, or some combination of all three.