Both the prosecution and the defense in the Lindsay Clancy trial agree on one thing: she killed her three children.

So when I said as much publicly, one commenter wrote back with two words: "No, I don't."

But why? Ostensibly, she thinks Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s husband, committed the heinous crimes and framed Lindsay.

And it turns out that commenter isn't alone. There's a real pocket of people online convinced of this very thing.

No one has produced a single piece of evidence for that — including the defense, who would present that theory if it were even a remotely plausible explanation for the deaths of the 3 Clancy children.

I understand some of where this comes from. If a man hurt you badly once, it's not hard to start seeing every situation through that lens — the man is guilty, full stop, every time. (That runs the other direction, too.)

But feelings aren’t evidence of a crime. At best, this is anecdotal — their own experience, treated like a universal law.

When you start with the answer you already want, you can build almost any story to justify it, no matter how implausible.

And we’re getting more and more of that these days.

Next Thursday marks one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. Investigators identified Tyler Robinson as the suspect through his own text messages about the murder weapon and through his own family recognizing him on surveillance video. There's real, documented evidence in that case.

And still, we’ve heard a whole host of people blamed for Charlie’s assassination, including the Israeli government, the American government, Erika Kirk — take your pick.

Conspiracy theories. Every last one of them.

Next Friday marks 25 years since September 11th. And there are still people who insist the towers came down some other way than what nineteen men with box cutters and four hijacked airplanes did, in plain sight, on live television — with all kinds of evidence.

I want to be fair here. Questions are healthy. We should be skeptical of powerful people — they lie to us constantly, and I say so on this program all the time.

But there's a real difference between skepticism and addiction to conspiracies.

Part of this, I think, is true crime culture. A lot of people now process every tragedy the way they process a podcast episode — as a mystery with a hidden villain waiting to be uncovered, instead of what it usually is: a plain, ugly fact.

Part of it is pride. Figuring out the "real" story makes you feel sharper than everyone who fell for the obvious version. Nobody wants to be duped.

And part of it, candidly, is boredom. A lot of Americans live comfortable, predictable lives with very little actually at stake day to day, and a good conspiracy is more interesting than an ordinary Tuesday.

None of that makes the people who fall for it stupid or bad. It makes them human. I get the appeal.

It would be easy for me to sit behind this microphone and feed you a new conspiracy every day. You'd probably love it. And it would be entertaining, of course.

But I wouldn’t respect myself if I did that because it wouldn’t be real and authentic.

Instead, it would distract from the real, harder work in front of each of us — winning elections, showing up at the school board meeting, having the uncomfortable conversation at your own church, standing up for truth everywhere — doing the boring things that actually make small differences in this cold civil war.

The people doing bad things in this world are not as powerful as conspiracy theories make them out to be. They're not infallible. Most of the time, they're not even especially clever. They're just people with pride and bad intentions who sometimes get away with things. We need to watch them and be skeptical, but we shouldn’t be fearful or exaggerate their actual power.

The simplest explanation is almost always the right one. Not because the powerful are always honest — they aren't. It's because pulling off a genuinely clean conspiracy is a lot harder than people give it credit for.

Especially with their massive egos.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

NBC News — The jury told the judge it's deadlocked, and he sent them back for a fifth day of deliberations.

CNN — What the jury is actually weighing, and why a "not criminally responsible" defense concedes she killed them.

PBS NewsHour — The evidence against Tyler Robinson: his own texts, his DNA on the rifle, and his parents recognizing him.

9/11 Commission — The full, official, primary-sourced account of what happened and why on September 11th — free to read in full.

NIST — The government's direct answer on whether explosives brought down World Trade Center 7, question by question.

National Park Service — All 37 calls placed from Flight 93 that morning, 35 of them on the Airfones built into the seatbacks.

Pew Research Center — The actual split on true crime listening: 44% of women tune in regularly, versus 23% of men.

Next Friday marks twenty-five years since September 11th, 2001. Nineteen hijackers working for al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden took over four commercial airplanes and turned them into weapons. (And it’s possible they had planned to hijack a fifth.)

Two hit the World Trade Center towers in New York City. One hit the Pentagon, just outside Washington. The fourth, United Flight 93, went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back against the men who'd taken the cockpit. It’s believed that plane was en route to either the Capitol Building or the White House.

Nearly 3,000 people died that morning. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

A lot of us watched it happen live. I remember exactly where I was, and I'd guess you do, too, if you are old enough to remember the horror of that day.

And still, you can find people who insist it was something other than what it plainly was — that the towers were brought down by a controlled demolition, that the whole thing was an inside job.

Here's what the record actually shows, after years of investigation, thousands of pages of documents, and testimony from people who lived through it. Four of them trained specifically to fly commercial aircraft — and not to land them. Phone calls were made from the planes themselves — with some recordings in existence today — from passengers and crew who reported exactly what happened aboard those planes. A trail of real intelligence failures across federal agencies that simply didn't share what they had with one another. And a very angry, evil group of Islamofascists who believed they were justified in carrying out jihad against Americans.

There absolutely were failures — missed warnings, agencies that didn't talk to each other, decisions made afterward that weren't always the right ones. Asking hard questions about all of that is fair — and it's necessary.

But a failure to stop something and a secret plan to cause it are two entirely different claims. The first is exhaustively documented. The second has never been supported by a single piece of physical evidence, in twenty-five years, from the thousands of people who would have had to keep that secret.

The independent 9/11 Commission's full report is still online, free, for anyone who wants to read the primary sourcing themselves. So is the federal government's own structural investigation into why WTC7 came down the way it did — a separate, later study, done specifically because people asked good-faith questions about it.

I’m not defending every government document and investigation in our nation’s history, but the final reports make much more sense than the conspiracy theories.

Twenty-five years later, the truth about that morning hasn't changed. Nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly three thousand people, and most of us watched it happen.

And we should never forget.

This is the argument I couldn't let go of after one comment convinced me people will build almost any story rather than accept an uncomfortable, obvious fact.

Give it a watch, then tell me in the comments whether you think I'm being too generous to the people who fall for this stuff — or not generous enough.

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