Ep. 2064 - Patrick Clancy's 60 Minutes Interview Recap

The Michael Knowles Show

Michael Knowles discusses the emotional weight of Patrick Clancy's recent interview on 60 Minutes regarding the Lindsay Clancy case. The epi

Key takeaways

• Patrick Clancy revealed he has forgiven his wife Lindsay Clancy despite her never asking for forgiveness.
• Ed Sheeran addressed the Israel-Palestine conflict by stating his desire to focus on music rather than political commentary.

Main topics

• Patrick Clancy 60 Minutes Interview
• Ed Sheeran and political activism

Notable quotes

I have forgiven her. She has never asked forgiveness.

Conclusion

The episode argues that modern cultural and medical shifts often rely

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Okay, fellas, since Hollywood can't do anything right anymore, we did their job for them. The Daily Wire's newest movie is an ode to the great funny action films of the 80s and 90s. Good guys win, bad guys lose. No one apologizes for it. Check out Run, Hide, Fight Infidels, now streaming only on The Daily Wire. This episode is brought to you by Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender with over 12 billion funded since 2004. Apply in under three minutes for same-day funding up to $500,000 at cardiff.co slash Knowles. Patrick Clancy sits down with 60 Minutes. It is one of the most important interviews to air in decades. And the most important stuff in it has absolutely nothing to do with the Lindsay Clancy trial or the circumstances of her crime. Then President Trump finally scores a deal for Greenland. Ed Sheeran caves to the activists and talks on stage about Israel-Palestine. I feel like we haven't heard enough about that. I just need one more artist to weigh in. on the intractable geopolitical problem. Also, an IVF clinic in Jacksonville accidentally makes a baby with the wrong father. Oops. I mean, that's choice, right? You know, freedom. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Speaker 2 (1:25) Welcome back to the show. You know what movie's out right now? It's called Run, Hide, Fight Infidels. Many, many of you have subscribed to Daily Wire in order to watch it at dailywire.com slash subscribe. You are memeing it. You are talking about it. It is driving reviewers crazy. It is creating lots of commentary. Lots of LGBTs are getting pushed off of rooftops. Spoiler alert. Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet. The movie everyone's talking about. You have to go dailywire.com slash subscribe. Watch Run, Hide, Fight Infidels right now. The White House and the DOJ are scoring victory after victory on the trans kids phenomenon. It is phenomenal. It's not getting nearly enough coverage. All of this after a major study finally destroys whatever tiny little vestige of respectability the trans ideology had. That has been wrecked. That study also not getting enough play. We'll get to all of it. First, though, I want to get into this Patrick Clancy interview. This was the big banner interview, the relaunch of 60 Minutes. They've hired the conservative Ross Douthat from The New York Times. This was his first big break on 60 Minutes with the tabloid true crime story that has had America talking for over a month now. Speaker 2 (2:37) Everybody tunes in. And what they got, I think, was something totally different than what they were expecting. In other words, the interview was extremely important. It was one of the most important interviews, I think, to air in decades, but not for the reasons that everyone was expecting, not for the reasons that they're even talking about now. I'll play just a couple of clips from the interview to get into what it was. What everyone was expecting was. some new detail about the crime, some new detail about Lindsay Clancy's mental state in the lead up to her committing the crime, some explosive revelation about the trial and her guilt or innocence. That's not what we got. We got something actually much deeper and more important. One big revelation is on how Patrick Clancy feels about his wife, which is that he says he's forgiven her, but the shock is she has never asked for forgiveness. Speaker 3 (3:32) I saw headlines that said, you know, killer mom and baby murderer, monster, and none of them were accurate. I believed that it was her mental illness that caused that. So I shared those words. And I think when it comes to forgiveness, I also felt that if I didn't get there, I would be eaten up inside forever. Speaker 2 (3:57) Did you ask Lindsay why she did it? Speaker 3 (4:03) I asked her if she remembered it. And what did she say? She said it was like a dream. And she remembered it much in the way you would remember a dream after waking up. Do you feel like you failed in some way in this period? Or do you feel like you did the best you could? I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time. And I live with the outcome. I live with it every day. Speaker 2 (4:32) Has she ever asked for your forgiveness? Speaker 3 (4:36) No, but I gave it to her. Speaker 2 (4:41) No, no, she's never asked for forgiveness. This is a little bit crazy because Clancy here is giving the most gracious, most charitable take. He'll be pilloried for that too, by the way. And then the psycho ladies who are following Lindsay Clancy will accuse him of doing it himself or something, a point that not even Lindsay Clancy or her lawyer make. But we know he's going to be totally pilloried for this answer. But what does he say? He says, I have forgiven her. She has never asked forgiveness. Hold on. He says, I don't blame her personally. I think this is mostly due to her mental illness. And I asked her if she remembered it. She said it was like a dream. But even if that were all true, if you did something accidentally, if you did something because of a fit of a psychosis. wouldn't you still ask forgiveness? Wouldn't you still express some kind of sorrow or regret? He says she hasn't done any of that. So my takeaway about Lindsay Clancy from that comment is the woman is simply a monster. Speaker 2 (5:41) whatever else, she's just a monster. And yet, Patrick Clancy says, I have forgiven her. Now, there's a Christian read of this, which is, well, we're called to forgive people. We're called to forgive other people's trespasses because we want God in heaven to forgive our trespasses. And we want to be forgiven in as much as we can forgive. So there is a Christian read of that. This seems more human than that. This seems more terrestrial than that. What he's saying is, I had to forgive her because otherwise I would be eaten up inside. So it's not even that I'm chiefly forgiving her because I think she deserves my forgiveness. I'm just forgiving her because I will be destroyed. I will be eaten up inside by my resentment and my fury and my rage if I don't forgive her. So it's not that I want to forgive her. It's not that I want to move on. But the only way that I can survive is by forgiving her. Then he goes into how he celebrated his kid's next birthday. Speaker 3 (6:49) Five weeks after I moved to New York on May 26th, I had to figure out how I'm going to celebrate Kellen's first birthday. And how do you celebrate your son's first birthday months after he's passed away? And so I go to St. Patrick's Cathedral, I light a candle, and I say, I love you, buddy. And I walk out on Fifth Avenue, and I start crying my eyes out. Speaker 3 (7:20) And Speaker 2 (7:20) nobody cared. And was Speaker 3 (7:22) that good? Were you grateful for that? Speaker 2 (7:24) I thought this is where I need to be. Speaker 3 (7:27) I Speaker 2 (7:27) can grieve. This interview is so, so important. And the reason it's so, so important is because it's just a guy suffering. That's why it's important. And our culture doesn't permit that. Speaker 2 (7:47) The left does not deal with suffering. They won't acknowledge suffering. They'll deny all manner of suffering and try to sublimate it into political revolution. This is why the real radical leftists, they no longer even say rest in peace, requiescat in pace, which is a prayer that we say when people die. It's a prayer for the dead, RIP. They won't say that. They have to change it. Rest in power. What does that even mean, rest in power? The person's dead. Well, I don't think they're talking about heaven. What they're talking about is there's going to be a kind of powerful effect, a change to the world, a political revolution as a result of this. In other words, we're going to take all that pain that we're feeling, but we're going to use it for good. George Floyd will not have died in vain. No, sir, we're going to march. We're going to change the laws. Same thing on the right. The right, which is more realistic than the left, the right has a big problem suffering. This is because a lot of what passes for American Christianity lacks a theology of suffering. Christianity has a very longstanding theology of suffering. We say we're going to kiss it up to God. We have a sense that our sufferings are sanctifying experiences, that we can offer it up, and this will somehow help us grow in holiness and bind us more closely to Christ, especially as Christ suffers on the cross. But American Christianity, we're a little worse at that. We don't quite have, we have to be happy clappy all the time. And a lot of the American kind of funerals, even putatively Christian funerals, we say, no, you shouldn't be sad. Don't be sad. Your loved one is with Jesus right now. We make these kind of confident claims, claims with more confidence than is traditional in Christianity. But regardless, even beyond that, we say, no, no, no, you got to be, you got to be happy. There's no suffering up there. We're not even going to have funerals anymore. We're going to have celebrations of life. We can't even grieve at a funeral. The funeral itself has to be a celebration. No, no, it's okay. Don't cry. Don't grieve. In other words, as if it were somehow a mark of a weak faith, if you are to grieve, nevermind, of course, that Christ himself weeps in the gospels over the death of Lazarus. No, we feel uncomfortable with that. And on the left and the right, we have this impulse to take whatever grief we have and to transform it into some political crusade. But that's not what's going on here. The Patrick Clancy interview reveals all of that to be weak, reveals all of that to be insufficient, because there's no crusade here. There's no law to change. Are we going to now pass a law? Hey, we're going to pass the new Lindsay Clancy law. Moms are no longer allowed to kill their kids. Some on the left want to pass new laws that make it easier for moms to kill their kids. But for the people who are grieving with this guy, who feel sympathy for this guy, there's no law. There's no crusade. There's no great illuminating fact, some kind of enlightenment that changes the way we think. No, it's just sad. It's just a guy grieving. And there's not all that much to be done. The most you can do in this case is. Forgive the perpetrator, very difficult to do, and go light a candle and cry. You can't actually cure suffering. The political radicals on the left and the feel-good power of positive thinking people that you sometimes see on the right, what they're all after is trying to eliminate suffering from life. If you just take this one health supplement, if you just enact this one political revolution, If we just kill the kulaks and transform the political order a little bit and you give the government a little bit more money and you pass some new law, then we're not going to have suffering anymore. But that doesn't work. It doesn't actually work. There just is suffering. And it's something that we have to grapple with in this life, in this veil of tears that we find ourselves in. And the Patrick Clancy interview puts that on display. Speaker 2 (11:49) How do we deal with that? How do we look in our quiet hours and just deal with the fact that life deals us sad circumstances sometimes? What are we to do with that? And there's no resting in power. There's no, yes, there was this crime, but it's actually going to redound to greater good. It's actually a good thing in a way. No. At the scale of eschatology, maybe that's the case. But in this world, no. How are we going to deal with suffering? Really powerful. So obviously we should just pray for Patrick Clancy and pray for ourselves because hopefully none of us ever has to experience something that horrific in our lives, but we're all going to experience sad