On August 22, 38-year-old Minnesota resident Bonnie Pierce ran back into her burning duplex building for her young daughter Grace. Firefighters found her unresponsive and shielding the toddler. Both were carried to safety, but Bonnie died of her injuries two days later. Grace, however, is expected to make a full recovery thanks to her mother’s sacrifice.
“That’s the whole story, and it doesn’t need anything added to it. What an amazing story. What an amazing mom,” says BlazeTV co-founder Glenn Beck.
This story of a mom who died a hero, he notes, is probably unknown to many people because “cameras always go where the fight is,” and “there isn’t anything to argue about” when it comes to Bonnie.
“You know where the cameras are? The cameras are in two courtrooms,” says Glenn.
One of those courtrooms is in the Bronx, where last week 26-year-old Dimone Fleming was found not criminally responsible for the 2022 stabbing of her two sons, three and 11 months, due to postpartum psychosis.
The other courtroom is in Massachusetts, where Lindsay Clancy’s jury is currently deliberating. In 2023, the mother of three killed her children — 5, 3, and 8 months — with exercise bands. She has pleaded not guilty, arguing she was not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis.
“Let me tell you what those cases have in common, and it is not the diagnosis,” says Glenn.
“There is such a thing as a mother genuinely, medically, out of her mind. Postpartum psychosis is real. It’s rare, and it’s savage, and it turns a person into somebody they are not,” he continues, “And the women that it happens to, they’re not villains; they’re casualties.”
But “evil,” he argues, is just as real.
“And that evil has learned to speak the language of illness because that’s the language that gets you out of it,” Glenn explains, emphasizing that the juries in both of these cases have experienced incredibly heavy burdens — especially for “ordinary citizens.”
“It’s hard because we all agree on the standard. Every single one of us — the prosecutor and the defense attorney and the psychiatrist and the grandmother in the gallery. Nobody in that room is arguing what a mother is supposed to be,” he continues.
What a mother should be, Glenn says, is a “rare” standard because “it’s not in dispute.” What makes these two trials so incredibly difficult is that the juries must decide “whether [these mothers] could still reach [that standard].”
“The standard is the reason there’s a trial at all, and I’d submit to you that the standard doesn’t live in a law book or a diagnostic manual,” says Glenn. “It got carried out of a burning bedroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, just a few days ago by a firefighter who found a toddler underneath a woman’s body.”
In our modern society where people can’t even define what a mother is, Bonnie Pierce makes it plain, he says: “It’s the thing that gets between the fire and the child every time — without a meeting, without a poll, without weighing the options. In about four seconds, she’s down on her knees, feeling the floor for her child in the dark.”
To hear more, watch the video above.
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Glenn beck, Lindsay clancy, Postpartum psychosis, Blazetv show, Bonnie pierce
