Cecil the Lion and the Cultural Perils of Internet Outrage

By Ian Tuttle

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Walter Palmer, it turns out, is far from the only American who enjoys bloodsport. That irony is, of course, lost on the hordes to whom it applies — the thousands of Twitter users and Yelp posters and (non-digital) protesters who have shut down Palmer’s Minneapolis dental practice and forced him into hiding, all because he shot a prized Zimbabwean lion earlier this month.

The circumstances of Cecil the lion’s death are unclear. The Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force says that Palmer and his guides lured Cecil out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, that the company attempted to destroy the GPS collar Cecil wore as part of an Oxford University study, and that after being initially shot with a crossbow, Cecil limped along for some 40 hours before the group was able to track him down and kill him. Zimbabwean police arrested, and released on bail, Palmer’s two guides, but in a statement earlier this week, Palmer denied the accusations. Rest assured: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has opened an official investigation.

Poaching is heinous, and most people are, rightly, disinclined to slaughter a creature of beauty and might, even when it’s legal. But the response to Palmer’s safari has gone beyond mere disapproval into abject rage. On Yelp he is a “gun-toting redneck murderer,” a “f***ing waste of sperm,” and “a true example of everything that is wrong in this world.” Twitter users have fantasized about shooting him with his crossbow and murdering him with his dental implements. Actress Debra Messing called for his citizenship to be revoked, and Sharon Osbourne summed up the general mood with her usual modesty: “Walter Palmer is Satan.”

Interestingly, there has been outrage over the outrage. Conservatives complained that Cecil’s death received far more media attention than videos of Planned Parenthood’s gruesome abortion procedures and fetal organ-trafficking, while left-wing race activists complained that Cecil’s death had been more lamented than Sandra Bland’s.

Everyone, it seems, has a reason to be angry of late. It’s entirely possible to be upset about a dead lion and dead babies, or a dead lion and a dead woman in a Texas jail, or about all three. But surely their intuition is right. It certainly has precedent. Note a story related by the Greek historian Plutarch in his Pericles:

    Caesar [Augustus] once, seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying up and down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys, embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by that prince-like reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind.

The last few days undoubtedly have shown that the moral priorities of a great many Americans are woefully inverted.

It cannot go unremarked, though, that this latest episode follows April’s cyber-siege of the O’Connors of Walkerton, Ind., targeted for (hypothetically) objecting to catering a same-sex wedding out of their pizza shop, and June’s hysteria over Confederate symbols. What can account for the spitting rage of, say, Yelp “reviewer” Bob H. of Beaverton, Ore., who warned Palmer today, “Keep your eyes open—someone is going to beat the living s**t out of you. I am just jealous it will not be myself!”?

In his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes of the pernicious effect of mass media:

    The information, the content, or, if you will, the “stuff” that makes up what is called “the news of the day” did not exist — could not exist — in a world that lacked the media to give it expression. I do not mean that things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking a technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business.

Now they can. Postman was referring to the cultural sea-change represented by television. The same effect is compounded beyond measure by the Internet, which has, in essence, made everything “news.” It’s no longer enough to care just about what we read in our local newspaper — about the daily business of our own locality. We’re now called upon to care about Christians in Iraq and political prisoners in Iran and starvation in North Korea. Did you know that Robert Mugabe, the dictatorial president of Zimbabwe, celebrated his 91st birthday in February by dining on baby elephant? Shouldn’t we all be outraged by that, too?

A psychic siege is taking place.

It’s not difficult to see that our inclination to mobbishness is, at least in part, a reaction to being psychically overwhelmed by issues that are too complex, and too many, to sort through. Instead, we retreat, aiming to seize upon occasions for easy moral outrage. In the midst of so many troubles about which Sharon Osbourne, let alone the average Yelp reviewer, can do so little, social media is the perfect medium for theatrical, self-affirming expressions of moral superiority. The shrinking of the world has, in fact, shown us just how big it is. What can you do? Well, you can get mad.

There are no solutions to this problem, but it might be mitigated. In an earlier time, the excesses of a Walter Palmer would have been the interest of Zimbabwean authorities, perhaps a few American policemen, and whatever private sporting organizations he belonged to. The “daily business” of London lawyers, Dutch cat owners, and electronica producers in Dubai — all of whom have demanded that Palmer himself be hunted down — would have been considerably more provincial. Without neglecting crucial matters of national or international concern, an effort to refocus on the provincial could do much good. What does it matter to a citizen of Buffalo, N.Y., or Plainview, Tex., that a Minnesota man killed a lion halfway around the world? Nothing. But it matters a great deal if your Buffalo neighborhood is succumbing to blight, or if your child’s Plainview public school is lousy. And, of course, about those problems a person can do something. This is “daily business” to which one can actually attend.

The problem, of course, is that you cannot credibly posture on Twitter about a dangerous intersection nearby. Rage is easy; responsibility isn’t. Most people would rather roar about lions.

The Death of Cecil the Lion: A Shameful Waste, but Not a Global Tragedy

By Rich Lowry

Friday, July 31, 2015

     “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

     — African proverb

On the ledger of global outrages, the killing of Cecil the lion outside of a Zimbabwe national park should barely register.

What is the fate of one big cat compared with the civil wars and human-rights abuses that fill the headlines — or should fill the headlines — every day? Even in Zimbabwe alone, where grotesque misgovernance is the rule, the death of one lion should hardly be a blip.

And yet the animal’s shooting by a Minnesota dentist, Walter Palmer, has evoked a fierce reaction. Some of it is hysterical and insipid. Palmer shouldn’t be personally ruined, let alone brought up on war-crimes charges, as some seem to suggest. The outpouring over this particular cat is, in part, based on the childish anthropomorphism of his having a name, Cecil, after Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist and founder of Rhodesia, subsequently Zimbabwe.

Nonetheless, at the core of the outrage is a natural and healthy revulsion at the wanton destruction of an animal of great majesty. Perhaps the greatest majesty.

Lions have been the subject of wonder and awe since the beginning of time, a symbol of power and nobility. They feature in cave paintings and in royal iconography. The Book of Proverbs refers to the “lion which is strongest among beasts, and turneth not away for any.” C. S. Lewis made the lion the messianic figure in his classic story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The stateliness of the New York City Public Library is made unmistakable by its two famous marble lions presiding over Fifth Avenue.

The regal self-possession of the lion stands in stark contrast to the tawdriness of Walter Palmer’s hunt. There was the money-grubbing — he reportedly paid about $50,000 for the privilege of killing one of the beasts. There was the unseemly baiting of the animal — allegedly with an animal carcass tied to a car to lure it out of the sanctuary of Hwange National Park. There was the cruel incompetence of his method — supposedly wounding it with a bow, then tracking the creature for another 40 hours before completing the kill with a gun. And there was the casual butchery after the fact — beheading the cat and leaving its carcass to vultures and other scavengers.

When it emerged that the lion he had killed was Cecil, a popular fixture long tracked by researchers, Palmer issued a statement saying he had no idea that the lion he “took” (although he won’t be giving it back) was a local favorite. As if it would be okay to wound and hunt down over two days some pitifully unpopular and anonymous lion, for nothing more than the sport and glory of it, such as they are.

Trophy hunters like Palmer have a passion for killing polar bears and the like. There is no accounting for taste, but surely there are other engrossing hobbies that don’t involve shooting the planet’s most stunning creatures. How about stamp collecting? If that’s not thrilling enough, there’s always mountain climbing, BASE jumping, or tightrope walking.

Anti-poaching laws, which might have been broken in this case, should be as tightly enforced as possible, and the act of killing a glorious beast for a photo with his carcass and a stuffed head on the wall as a conversation piece back home should be considered the shameful waste that it is.

None of this is to say that lions in particular should be sentimentalized. They are man-eaters whose social life is Hobbesian in the extreme. They also are a wonder of nature whose numbers are dwindling. We can disagree about the exact parameters of our obligations to the animal kingdom, but surely going out of our way to slay a creature like Cecil the lion should be out of bounds.

Huckabee’s Hitler Comparison That Wasn’t

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, July 31, 2015

It’s been a hard time for politicians not named “Trump” to get any attention, but Mike Huckabee managed it. He did it by comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.

At least that’s what I gathered from headlines like this one from Gawker:

“Mike Huckabee Compares Obama to Hitler”

I don’t put huge amounts of stock in Gawker headlines (or really any headlines on the Internet), but then I saw that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said Huckabee had “essentially likened [Barack Obama] to Adolf Hitler.” National Journal’s Ron Fournier went on a tear on Twitter, insisting that Huckabee apologize for comparing Obama to Hitler. And of course, Hillary Clinton and Obama himself denounced Huckabee for making a Hitler comparison. Clinton even said she was “really offended personally,” as if her feelings are what really matters.

Here is what Huckabee said in full during an interview with Breitbart News:

    This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Huckabee’s style of politics — or policy. But a remotely fair reading of the statement strongly suggests that Huckabee was comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain or some other member of the “Hitler is a man we can do business with” school. That’s the point of calling Obama “naive” for trusting the Iranians — the Hitler in Huckabee’s analogy.

We can parse more deeply if we must. Hitler didn’t march Jews to the doors of the ovens, but into them. The Iranians are the ones with sinister intentions in Huckabee’s description, not Obama, who, again, is described as naive and feckless, not sinister and evil. Huckabee probably shouldn’t have used the word “march” because it muddies his point. “Delivered to” or “abandoned at” would have worked better.

I think, as a general rule, one should pretty much always avoid talking about Jews and ovens unless discussing the actual Holocaust. And one could argue that Huckabee, who insists he never compared Obama to Hitler, was cynically hoping to be misconstrued in order to get some media attention — which he got.

But on the merits, Huckabee isn’t saying anything that lots of serious people haven’t said, albeit more eloquently. In countless speeches, Bibi Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have stressed that the legacy of the Holocaust is such that Israel cannot take a chance on Iran having a nuclear weapon.

In his address to Congress in March, Netanyahu movingly singled out Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize–winner Elie Wiesel from the audience. “Elie, your life and work inspires to give meaning to the words, ‘never again,’” Netanyahu said to bipartisan applause. “And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past.”

What mistakes? Precisely the mistakes Huckabee says Obama is making. It’s the same argument.

And it’s not a dumb argument. At least it’s not a dumb argument if you listen to the Iranians. As my National Review colleague David French recently catalogued, Iranian civil, military, and religious leaders have for years vowed to “wipe Israel off the map,” deliver a new Holocaust (while denying the first one happened), etc.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran’s pet terrorist group, Hezbollah, has said, “If all the Jews gathered in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide. . . . . It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” Until that time, Hezbollah has had to make do with killing Jews where they find them.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry don’t take the Iranians at their word when they say they want to kill Jews, no matter how clearly and consistently they say it. But they trust the Iranians to stick to their word on this nuclear agreement (which would be a bad agreement even if Iran could be trusted).

George W. Bush was routinely compared to Hitler with a fraction of the outcry Huckabee has received. Perhaps that’s because Huckabee’s real sin has nothing to do with Hitler analogies and everything to do with Iranian reality.

Planned Parenthood’s Mammogram Lie

By Michelle Malkin

Friday, July 31, 2015

The gruesome hits keep coming for the baby butchers of Planned Parenthood. President Obama and his top health officials have one last-ditch response left: Quick, hide behind the imaginary mammogram machine!

As more graphic, money-grubbing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood’s for-profit aborted-baby-parts racket emerge, thanks to the investigative work of the Center for Medical Progress, desperate Democrats are in full deflection mode. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Mathews Burwell defended federal funding for Planned Parenthood this week by invoking the women’s-health shield. “What I think is important is that our HHS funding is focused on issues of preventative care for women, things like mammograms,” Burwell told the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Just one teeny, tiny problem with this defense: It’s a completely calculated fabrication.

The breast-cancer screening charade casts Planned Parenthood as a life-saving provider of vital health services unavailable anywhere else. You may recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama himself falsely claimed during a debate that the abortion provider administers mammograms to “millions” of women — and liberal CNN moderator Candy Crowley let him get away with it.

On cue, Hollywood activists Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria, and Kerry Washington all attacked the GOP ticket for wanting to “end” funding for “cancer screenings” by cutting off government subsidies for Planned Parenthood’s bloody billion-dollar abortion business. The celebrities in the White House and Tinseltown took their script straight from Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, who purported to speak for countless women for whom Planned Parenthood is “the only way” they can gain access to mammograms. (If the name sounds familiar, Nucatola is the same wine-swishing Josephine Mengele who was exposed on video by the Center for Medical Progress two weeks ago lolling through a business lunch negotiating payments for aborted baby parts.)

Once again, it was undercover pro-life journalists who unmasked the truth.

An investigation of 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states, conducted by the pro-life group Live Action, confirmed that the abortion provider does not perform breast-cancer screenings. “We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona confessed on tape.

Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, Kan., admitted: “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine at our clinics.”

Even the liberal Washington Post doled out a three (out of four) Pinocchio rating for the White House’s mammogram lies. “The problem here is that Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms or even possess the necessary equipment to do so,” the paper’s resident fact-checker reported. “As such, the organization certainly does not ‘provide’ mammograms in the strict sense. Instead, its clinics provide referrals and direct low-income women toward resources to help pay for the procedure. These services are by no means unique to Planned Parenthood. In fact, the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society provide them, as well.”

As I’ve pointed out previously, Planned Parenthood’s purported “referral services” to outside mammogram facilities are negligible — especially given the widespread availability of these and other free and low-cost breast- and cervical-cancer screening services across the country, supported by both private and public grants.

Reluctant to do its job and just call out the president as an outright liar, the Washington Post fell short of giving Obama the full four-Pinocchio treatment for his Planned Parenthood mammogram propagandizing, but acknowledged that he has repeated the lies “too many times in one form or another for this to be considered just playing with words to generate a misleading impression.”

The Obama HHS apparently needs to be reminded of its own review exposing the mammography deception. In June 2012, the agency responded to a request for information about how many Planned Parenthood clinics were certified to operate mammogram facilities. “Our search did not find any documents pertinent to your request,” HHS told the Alliance Defense Fund.

Zip. Zilch. None. Nada.

Pro-life investigative journalist Lila Rose of Live Action has it right: “It is an alarming dereliction of duty that the Secretary of Health and Human Services refuses to view investigative reports that clearly demonstrate that Planned Parenthood, which receives close to half a million taxpayer dollars a year from the federal government, is engaged in the selling and trafficking of aborted baby body parts for profit,” she said this week. “Ms. Burwell should be investigating Planned Parenthood, not covering for them.”

Ladies, open your eyes and hearts. Watch the videos for yourselves. Get the facts. Unmask the lies. The cackling profiteers of Planned Parenthood don’t care about your breasts. They’re too busy putting price tags on the baby hearts, livers, lungs, and limbs swirling around in bloody pie plates, stacked in their “research” labs, subsidized with your tax dollars and sold to the highest bidders. For “preventative care,” of course.

What True Immigration ‘Reform’ Would Look Like

By Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Can we be honest about illegal immigration?

It is a common challenge to almost every advanced Western country that is adjacent to poorer nations.

American employers and ethnic activists have long colluded to weaken border enforcement and render immigration law meaningless. The former wanted greater profits from cheaper labor, the latter wished more political clout for themselves.

Mexico conspired, too. It received billions of easy dollars in remittances from its expatriates in America. Mexico had few qualms about letting millions of its own citizens illegally cross its northern border into the United States — even though the Mexican government would never tolerate millions of Central Americans illegally crossing the border to become permanent residents of Mexico.

For better or worse, illegal immigration is tied to race and ethnicity. No doubt, ignorant racism drives some to oppose illegal immigration. But by the same token, the advocates of open borders, many of them with strong ties to Mexico, would not be so energized about the issue if hundreds of thousands of Europeans or Africans were entering the U.S. illegally each year.

There is too often a surreal disconnect about the perception of the U.S. in the immigration debate.

Millions, we sometimes forget, are fleeing from the authoritarianism, racism, corruption, and class oppression of Mexico. They have voted with their feet to reject that model and to choose a completely different — and often antithetical — economic, social, cultural, and political paradigm in the United States. Somehow that bothersome fact is lost in the habitual criticism of a hospitable and magnanimous America.

Then there is the matter of law. America went to war over the Confederate states’ nullification of federal laws. A century and a half later, do we really want hundreds of sanctuary cities, each declaring irrelevant certain federal laws that they find bothersome?

For every left-wing city that declares immigration statutes inoperative, a right-wing counterpart might do the same with the Endangered Species Act, gun-registration laws, affirmative action, or gay marriage. The result would be chaos and anarchy, not compassion.

Controversy has arisen over the number of undocumented immigrants who have committed felonies or serious misdemeanors, such as the Mexican national — a repeat felon and deportee — recently charged with the fatal shooting of a young woman in San Francisco. But the furor begs the question: Why would any guest violate the rules of his host? And why is the data on such violations so hard to come by and so prone to controversy?

Either the number of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes is so vast that no one knows the extent of the problem, or there are political hurdles in determining that number — or drawing politically incorrect conclusions from it.

We should not minimize criminality. Creating a false identity, using a fraudulent Social Security number, and knowingly filing inaccurate federal forms are serious felonies for most Americans. They are neither minor infractions nor simply the innocuous wages of living in the shadows, but undermine the sinews of a society.

Numbers also count. When millions come to a country illegally, integration breaks down and tribalism takes over. Do we really want permanent Balkanized ethnic lobbies, frozen in amber — another century of a monolithic Asian, white, or Latino vote? Are Americans to fragment even more, as they collectively sigh, “If they vote predictably along ethnic lines, I guess I should, too”?

President Obama talks grandly of “immigration reform.” But he apparently does not mean what most Americans would assume from that faddish catchphrase.

Reform should first include strict enforcement of the border. A new, ethnically blind immigration system would select from among applicants based on skill sets and education, and consider candidates from all over the world — not on the basis of ethnic identity or proximity to the border.

Immediate and lasting deportation would ensue for those who committed crimes or cynically chose to receive public assistance rather than work while here illegally.

Many Americans are in favor of offering a path to legal residence to those undocumented immigrants who have long lived and worked in the U.S. and have crime-free records — after they pay a fine for breaking federal law and then wait patiently in line while the legal process plays out — as long as the border is sealed to prevent future illegal immigration.

If some newly legal residents wished to become full-fledged citizens, then they could pass citizenship and English tests and assimilate into the American body politic.

Somehow I doubt that this fair, reasonable process is what the president really wants.