Sean Strickland has found a new way to set social media on fire, and this time it involves one of the most emotionally charged legal cases in the country. The UFC star posted a message on his account that took aim at people expressing sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged in connection with the deaths of her three children.
Clancy’s defense has centered on claims that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis at the time, and the case, still unresolved, has become something far bigger than a courtroom matter. It has turned into a proxy battle over how society treats mothers who struggle after childbirth, how postpartum mental illness gets talked about online, and who gets to weigh in on any of it.
That last question is where Strickland planted his flag. In a post, he dismissed the wave of public sympathy directed at Clancy, invoked the Salem witch trials as something he now views more favorably, used a crude and dismissive description for women he saw defending her, and said allowing them to vote amounts to a kind of madness.
He didn’t stop there. He also called for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, the constitutional provision that gave American women the right to vote, and closed the post with a blunt line of his own: “Sorry women but you shouldn’t be able to vote….”
It’s not a one-off outburst. Strickland has been building this argument for a while, and he laid out the reasoning behind it in a video that has circulated widely.
“You guys, I got a bunch of DMs about women should have voted, and I stand by that. And I’m not saying women are st*pid, they don’t understand politics, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is women are far too compassionate to rule a functioning society, because women will never accept that there are a bunch of f**king bad people in this planet and this world, in America. You cannot help them. The only path for them is either ex3cution or impermanent carceration. And like, for some reason, women just cannot grasp that concept.”
In Strickland’s telling, the Clancy case functions almost as evidence for his broader theory: that empathy, when it shows up in women, becomes a liability rather than a virtue, and that softness toward a mother facing charges like Clancy’s proves his point about who should and shouldn’t have a say in how the country is run. It’s a framework that erases the specifics of Clancy’s case, including the postpartum psychosis defense at its center, in favor of a sweeping statement about gender itself.
What makes Strickland such a difficult figure to pin down politically is that this kind of rhetoric doesn’t sit neatly alongside everything else he says. MMA analyst Luke Thomas dug into that tension on his show after Strickland’s sit-down interview with Shawn Ryan, and he didn’t land on a simple answer.
Thomas credited Strickland’s working-class roots for giving him a genuine read on how power structures grind down ordinary people, noting that success hasn’t changed how he presents himself.
“He has sort of like a keen sense of how much the working class gets run over and how power structures are designed to mess with people,” Thomas said, adding, “Look at him on that interview with Shawn Ryan. He looks like he just came off a construction site.”
That instinct, Thomas argued, has pushed Strickland toward some strikingly candid takes on Donald Trump.
“You hear him on this thing where he can see Trump for who he is now and he could see Trump’s adoration for what it is now. He’s clearly reasoning through it and he’s alarmed by it,” Thomas said, pointing out that Strickland went as far as invoking one of history’s darkest chapters. “You can hear him say like, ‘I can see how H*tler happened for crying out loud.'”
But according to Thomas, that clarity falls apart the moment the conversation turns to ICE, an agency Strickland has praised as one of the administration’s wins. Thomas pushed back hard on that framing, describing ICE as “a private paramilitary group” that leans on volunteers and surveillance technology “to enforce an ethnostate at the expense of the country’s health.”
He couldn’t square how someone skeptical of Trump on the Epstein files and on affordability could still put faith in “an unaccountable paramilitary force that only answers to the executive.”
Thomas also flagged Strickland’s comments about gay people and racial minorities as further proof that the contradictions run deep. “It’s just it’s like, oh my god, dude. How are we in both of these places?” he said, ultimately declining to declare Strickland fully split from Trump or the MAGA movement.
“He’s got some views that are surprisingly heterodox from the world he comes from and then another one’s just like as retrograde as possible,” Thomas said. “It’s frustrating.”
The Clancy post fits right into that pattern. Strickland has shown flashes of genuine insight into how systems fail regular people, yet his reaction to a case built around postpartum mental illness was to mock the women showing sympathy and use it as a springboard for stripping away their right to vote entirely.
