Kevin Reddington did not wait long. Four days after a Plymouth jury deadlocked on whether Lindsay Clancy should answer for strangling her three children, her lawyer went on Good Morning America and asked the President of the United States to wipe the slate clean.
I’d like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case. Mr President, I hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what’s been through, and consider a pardon.
That is not a legal argument. That is a publicity stunt dressed as humility. And it treats three dead children as a footnote to a lawyer’s affection for his client. It also gets Reddington the additional headlines he seems to crave, keeping himself in the news with an ask he knows won’t work.
Trump Already Answered Him
Reddington acted as if the White House had not already spoken. On Friday, after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial, President Trump told reporters he had been following the case because it was hard not to.
It’s a shame. It’s a horrible tragedy. Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse. But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something, but I guess they’re going to go through another trial.
Just the News carried the same remarks. Trump did not call Clancy a wonderful person. He did not float clemency. He said there would be a price. That is the moral floor this case never should have been allowed to sink beneath.
There is a second problem Reddington skipped on national television. A presidential pardon reaches federal offenses. Clancy faces Massachusetts first-degree murder counts in Plymouth Superior Court. Article II does not let a president erase a state killing. Reddington has practiced law in Massachusetts since 1975. He knows that. The cameras did not care.
He’s not an idiot. He’s just feeding his own narcissism in hopes of being the main character in this story, even if it means pushing the memories of three murdered children aside.
What the Jury Could Not Finish
The facts were never the mystery. On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Clancy strangled Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and eight-month-old Callan with exercise bands. She sent her then-husband, Patrick, out for a CVS run and takeout. Then she jumped from an upstairs window. She lived. The children did not. She is paralyzed and held at Tewksbury State Hospital.
She admitted the act. The trial was about criminal responsibility. Reddington sold postpartum psychosis and a cocktail of prescriptions. Prosecutors pointed to planning, timing, and a voice she described only after the killings. After more than 37 hours over seven days, the panel of nine women and three men could not agree. Reddington says eleven were ready to find her not guilty by reason of insanity and one would not move. He called that juror a thief of seven weeks and hoped the juror could sleep at night.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused his last-hour attempt to keep the jury sitting. Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. A status hearing is set for September 29.
Fox News reported Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not announced a retrial. Cruz said his job is to keep the victims from becoming invisible. Reddington, who has known Cruz for three decades, spent Friday crowing that Cruz was “crushed,” then told the Daily Mail he would listen to a deal so Clancy does not have to sit through another trial.
First he wants a pardon. Then he wants a bargain. Anything but a verdict that names the act for what it was.
The Cult Around a Confession
Reddington told America he feels a “very strong bond” with Clancy because she is intelligent, hardworking, and a “wonderful, wonderful person.” That is the language of a defense table, not a graveside. It is also the language that has followed this case from the first pink-clad courthouse vigils to the TikTok chorus of “Same Lindsay” to a GoFundMe for her parents that blew past $830,000. Women carried infants to the sidewalk and asked the public to see a patient instead of three small bodies.
Mental illness is real. Postpartum collapse is real. None of that turns a strangling into an administrative error. Days after this jury hung, another mother, Corie Walsh of Illinois, was charged with murdering her two-year-old son. She had been texting about the Clancy trial that same afternoon. When a culture baptizes one child-killing as a mental-health parable, copycats do not need a subpoena to get the message.
Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan are not exhibits in a campaign against “stigma.” They are the case. A lawyer may love his client. A president may pity a broken woman in a wheelchair. Neither assignment includes pretending a pardon, or an 11-1 shrug, can wash innocent blood off the floor of a Massachusetts basement.
Cruz still has to decide whether those children get another day in court. That is the only question that matters. The rest is television.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
