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repulsive on the inside as they are on the outside, and unanimously deserving of having their custody and voting rights rescinded.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 your children, sooner than you think — can read them. If you’re struggling, know this: no stranger on the internet can help you. Even if your struggle is real, which it often isn’t. Even if your feelings are justified, which they often aren’t. A stranger watching your video can do nothing for you.
Supportive comments on the internet are an emotional Band-Aid at best. Worse, actually — more like a prescription painkiller whose effect fades as fast as it becomes addictive. You’ll need ever more comments and encouraging emojis, and none of it will ever be enough. Meanwhile, by offering your psychological state for public discussion, you’ve invited the mean and rude comments too. An infamous quirk of human nature is that the rude ones land about a hundred times harder than the supportive ones. That leaves you more desperate for reassurance, which invites even ruder feedback. Before you know it, you’re being clipped and featured on podcasts by notorious right-wing bullies like me.
This kind of stuff — the public vomiting of your personal anxieties and grievances — is, in effect, a sort of emotional exhibitionism. It’s not so different from some weird nudist traipsing around in public with his grotesque and malformed body on full display and various parts of himself dangling and flopping in the breeze. So I will say to you what I would say to him. Keep it to yourself. Have some dignity. Practice some basic level of decorum. In other words, whether literally or metaphorically, put your damned clothes on.
But at least the women simply complaining about their kids aren’t quite as bad as the women who stage emotional meltdowns for the camera and use their children as props in the performance.
Watch:
This woman is in the verge of strangling a toddler for spilling an iced coffee she left on the floor.🤬 pic.twitter.com/djTYgeGghQ
— David Santa Carla 🦇 (@TheOnlyDSC) August 25, 2026
This is all staged for the camera, of course. The child doesn’t understand that it’s fake, or why mommy is pretending to have a nervous breakdown over a little liquid spilled on an uncarpeted floor. The point of the charade is for the woman to brag that she didn’t hit her daughter or scream at her over a minor accident — though she did growl like a werewolf and clutch her head in agony. This is supposed to be good mothering on TikTok. If these are the good mothers, you hate to see the bad ones. We have seen them, in fact. One is on trial right now in Massachusetts.
Now let’s get to the part of this mansplaining lecture that might — just might, however slim the chance — be helpful to these women, or any other parent who relates to them. If you genuinely hate being a parent, here’s what you need to know. I say this with all sincerity: there’s something wrong with you. Nobody will tell you that. Probably nobody ever has.
In our culture, you’re never supposed to inform anyone that there’s something wrong with them, even — especially — if there obviously is. Well, I’m breaking that rule. There is something wrong with you.
You should enjoy being a parent. Not all the time. Not every second of every day. I’m not saying you should live in a state of constant maternal euphoria, or that you should never be frustrated, angry, sad, or irritated. But generally, as a rule, you should enjoy being a parent.
It’s not hard to enjoy. Opportunities for enjoyment present themselves every day. A couple of nights ago, to take one random example, I took my kids out to dinner and then to a bookstore. That’s our idea of a night out on the town. It was fun — not just for them, but for me.
The time I spent with my kids was not some great “sacrifice.” It was not a burden I heroically shouldered for their sake. I actually like hanging out with them. They’re smart, funny, and fun to be around.
Sure, they can annoy me sometimes. But anyone can annoy me. I have never spent considerable time around another human being without being annoyed by them on occasion, and I have never spent considerable time around another human being without causing them annoyance in return. That’s life.
Generally, though — and I definitely can’t say this about everyone I’ve known — I like spending time with my kids. This is how you should feel about your kids. It doesn’t take a great saint or a person of exceptional virtue to feel this way. If it did, I wouldn’t. But I do. If I can enjoy being a parent, so can you.
If you find that you hate parenthood and resent your kids and wish for nothing more than to be “free” of the responsibilities of caring for the children you brought into this world, there are two potential causes of this dysfunction. You aren’t going to like hearing about either of them. Both are unflattering. But someone in your life needs to tell you the unflattering thing, and I suspect nobody ever has. So here it is.
One potential reason you hate being a parent is that you are so stuck in your own head, so consumed by your own ego, that you have never put in the minimal effort required to develop a real relationship with your children.
You despise being around your kids because you despise being around anyone who makes any demands on your attention or time. This is called narcissism.
Narcissists can’t enjoy the company of any other human for very long, because other humans are other — they are outside of you, different from you — and they are useful to you, or sources of delight or satisfaction, only as long as they serve your own needs. The moment they commit the sin of having needs that differ from yours, they have overstayed their welcome.
I would surmise that the vast majority of parents who hate their kids, or at least hate being around them (and the distinction, if there even is one, is quite fragile), hate it for this reason. The Lindsay Clancy Moms of America — LCMA, we’ll call their unofficial organization — certainly fall into this category.
They feel about their kids the way Clancy felt about hers because they, like her, place themselves at the center of the universe and automatically despise anyone or anything that would try to jostle them from that central position.
The other possible reason you find your children tough to be around — related to the first, and not necessarily mutually exclusive — is that your kids actually are tough to be around. They really are needy, miserable, obnoxious, and grating to a degree that even the most patient person would struggle to endure. It’s possible your kids would have Mother Teresa silently rolling her eyes and plotting the politest possible exit. If that’s the case, and maybe it is, the reason they have turned out this way, so far, is that you have done an extremely poor job of raising them.
It would not be an oversimplification — or at least only a very slight one — to say that your whole job as a parent is to help your kids become the kind of people other people like to be around. Jordan Peterson has often made this point. If you don’t even like being around them, imagine how other people — potential friends, potential employers, potential spouses — will feel about them in the future. You have failed. That’s something I’m guessing you already know, at least at some level, and it makes you hate parenthood and your children even more.
These are the two options. You hate being around your kids either because you’re a raging narcissist, or because you’ve failed as a parent, or both. Either way, this is what we call a “you” problem. It’s your fault. Not theirs. This falls on you. It’s important that you face that reality and accept it. After all, acceptance, as they say in AA, is the first step.
So what should you do next? Now that we’ve established why precisely you abhor parenthood so much, what can you do about it? Well, here’s the good news. All is not lost.
There is one very simple and effective thing you can do to fix everything. And if not everything, then a lot of things. It’s the method that will solve a surprisingly large number of your personal problems. I’ll tell you what it is: pretend.
If you hate being a parent and it’s all your fault — which it is — then what you need to do is pretend that you don’t hate it. Yes, pretend. Yes, suppress your true feelings. Yes, put on an act. Don’t be “genuine.” Don’t be “authentic.” Don’t be “honest about how you feel.” Pretend. Fake it.
Put on a facade and maintain that facade at all times and at all costs.
Do this for the sake of your kids, because it’s deeply scarring and unfair to saddle them with your issues. And this, as we’ve established, is your issue.
Your kids should not have to cope with the reality that their mother, or their father, is a miserable narcissistic jerk who resents them for existing. There’s nothing a child can do with that information. He can’t fix it or you. That’s not his job. Your child is not your parent or your therapist or your priest. He’s not here to be the lighthouse in your emotional storm, guiding you to a safe harbor.
You’re supposed to be his lighthouse. So even if you don’t feel like it, even if you aren’t into it, even if it’s really hard and it really sucks, and you’re really sad or whatever, you need to turn that light on for his sake.
You should also maintain the facade for the public. Your kids shouldn’t have to deal with your emotional fragility and vanity and egotism, and neither should any of the rest of us. We don’t want to see your “true self,” either, because it’s unsightly and off-putting. Nobody should be forced to bear witness to it.
I refer back to the nudist analogy. I don’t want to see your exposed ass or your exposed emotions. I don’t want to see any of that for the same reason that I don’t want to smell your body odor. Sure, your stench after failing to bathe for a week might be more “authentic.” It might give me a more accurate whiff of your “true self.” But if your true authentic self is repulsive, then why should anyone be forced to be in close proximity to it? Why would there be any virtue in inflicting a repugnant personality on the public, much less onto your family, just because it’s “true”?
There are two very popular, modern — and bad — ideas at work here, both of them originating from or heavily pushed by therapists and psychologists — as very popular and modern and bad ideas so often are.
One is the notion that your most self-serving and antisocial impulses are, somehow, your “true self,” and that the height of authenticity is to act according to those impulses. As though “authenticity” means nothing more than enslaving yourself to your own emotions.
The other is what has been dubbed the hydraulic psychological model, pioneered by guys like Freud, which teaches that your inner emotions and desires are like steam building up inside the pressure cooker of your mind and you have to let them out — vent them — so that you don’t somehow mysteriously combust.
Both of these ideas have led, in their most absurd and cartoonish manifestations, to things like “rage rituals” where women get together and scream and beat sticks on the ground as a form of catharsis.
Watch:
Liberal women spend $4,000 to bash sticks on the ground and scream at a ‘Rage Ritual Retreat.’
The bizarre wellness retreat is designed to help women deal with anger. pic.twitter.com/xl6XYeRfyb
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 20, 2024
Now you might think that impotent rage can’t get any more preposterous and embarrassing than that. But a popular version of this ritual, somehow even more inane, involves women gathering ice cubes from the freezer, locking themselves in the bathroom, and throwing the cubes at the bathtub — often while their kids are crying on the other side of the door, understandably confused and alarmed.
The problem with this approach, aside from the fact that it makes you look retarded, is that it doesn’t actually release the steam or relieve the tension. All you have done, by indulging the most ridiculous parts of yourself in the most obnoxious way imaginable, is work yourself up even more and condition yourself to behave even worse in the future.
A temper tantrum is an unacceptable and unhealthy coping mechanism for a nine-year-old. For a 35-year-old, it’s genuinely insane. Despite what Freud and his disciples have said for the past century, the truth is that suppression and repression are generally good things.
Being a civilized adult — someone who observes the most basic codes of etiquette and decorum, and who is not an antisocial freak or a raging selfish brat — means spending a huge chunk of every day presenting a version of yourself that is more tolerable, more appealing, more composed, and more attractive than the self buried in the most indulgent and egotistical parts of your mind. That’s the only way to be a functional person — and, bringing it back to the matter at hand, the only way to be a functional parent.
“Fake it till you make it” — maybe the wisest and most useful cliché in the whole history of clichés. It’s the best parenting advice you’ll ever get. Act like the kind of parent you should be. Identify all of the parenting traits you wish you had, and pretend that you have them. Put on a performance. It doesn’t have to be an Oscar-winning production. You don’t need to be a Philip Seymour Hoffman-level thespian to pull it off. Your kids won’t notice. Pretend to be the sort of parent you ought to be.
Shoulder the burden of your own narcissism silently and with dignity. Wear a mask and keep it on until your true face takes the shape of the mask, conforms to it like a mold, until the mask and you are the same.
You can, in fact, become something by pretending you are that thing. It may not work that way in all areas of life — it doesn’t work that way, for example, with biological sex — but in this area it does. Because if you suppress your narcissistic feelings and tendencies, and pretend to be something other than the self-involved, whiny, emotional toddler that you are deep inside, after a while, by definition, you will no longer be that self-involved, whiny, emotional toddler.
The very act of assuming the burden of your own weaknesses and failures, and choosing not to inflict them on those around you, turns you by force of will into precisely the unselfish, mature person you’re pretending to be.
There is no such thing as a selfish, immature person who typically acts unselfish and mature around other people. That would be a contradiction in terms, like a married bachelor. Unselfish, mature people are people who act unselfish and mature. Feeling otherwise and still acting that way only makes you all the more unselfish and mature.
That’s the funny thing about virtue. To act as though you have it is to have it. A person who feels like a great coward, but pretends to be courageous by rushing into a burning building to save a child trapped inside, is exactly what he pretends to be. A courageous man, by definition, is a man who is scared to do a thing but does it anyway.
Courage is a thing you do. Good parenting is a thing you do. You, yourself, are what you do. Your feelings and insecurities and selfish instincts may also be a part of who you are, but they are the least important, most fleeting, most tangential, and certainly least interesting part. They can change on a minute-to-minute basis. They don’t exist in any kind of real, physical sense. Nobody even knows about them unless you make a public announcement.
When you die, the whole hazy cloud of emotions and sentiments in your head dies with you. But what you did, what you said — the person you presented yourself to be through your actions and words — will be remembered. That will be your legacy. That will be the thing that outlives you. It will be who you were. It is now who you are.
The other thing about your feelings is that they are easily influenced. They can be fooled, duped, manipulated. Not just by other people, but by you. You can condition your feelings through your actions.
So if you pretend to be a good parent, and act as though you love your children and enjoy being around them, the chances are very good that one day you’ll look up and realize that you’re actually not faking it anymore.
You genuinely do enjoy giving your time and yourself to those you love. This is a process that will play out in small ways again and again. “Fake it til you make it” is not just a one-time fix. You’ll have to continually act in ways other than how you feel. And you’ll find that often your feelings follow. Your feelings are the freight car, not the locomotive. They will go where you take them.
I mentioned earlier the wild night out on the town with my kids a few days ago, eating hamburgers and visiting a bookstore. Well, the dark and terrible secret is that at first I really didn’t feel like doing any of that. I was in kind of a bad mood for no particular reason, because that’s how moods tend to work. Moods — especially bad ones — don’t need a reason to be what they are.
What I wanted that night was for my kids to go to bed so I could “have a break.” Never mind that my day really had not been difficult. Nothing especially stressful had occurred. It was a fine day. It was a normal day. Yet here I was, after a fine, normal day, needing a “break.” A break from what? Who knows. Fine, normal stuff, I guess. But then I realized that I’d rather be the kind of dad who spends time with his kids instead of one who sulks off in a huff because he’s moody.
So I pretended to be that better dad in that moment. I said this little trip was no great sacrifice, and it wasn’t. It was instead the tiniest little microscopic sacrifice. Many of the sacrifices you have to make as a parent, or as a person in general, are roughly this size and scope.
Sacrifices so small that it’s embarrassing to even describe them as such. And what do you know? Within about 10 minutes, I was enjoying myself. I became the dad that I had so “inauthentically” portrayed myself to be.
This is the magic of pretending. It works like a charm most of the time.
Joe Rigney on X reminds me of one of the many great C.S. Lewis quotes, where he summarizes the point more insightfully and succinctly than I have managed to do.
He wrote:
As practical imperatives for here and now, the two great commandments have to be translated ‘Behave as if you loved God and man.’ Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
The inverse is also true. The more you act in an unloving way toward someone, the less you will actually love them. That process plays out in families — and destroys them — all the time.
So act as if you love your family, your children, and your station in life. Let the feelings follow, as they probably will. Put on the act, and never tell anyone that it is an act.
Keep it a secret known only to you. Until maybe — maybe — one day, long in the future, when your child has a child of their own and seems to be struggling as you once did, you can sit them down and tell them about the war you waged successfully and quietly against your own selfish, resentful nature.
When they hear that after all those years, they will not think, “Wow, my mom didn’t really love me — it was all an act.” Rather, they will think, “Wow, my mom loved me even more than I ever realized.” And that will be the truth.