Rick Santorum Shining a Much-Needed Light On Movement Conservatism

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One of the interesting things about the rise of Rick Santorum is that it’s giving a lot of people their first up-close-and-personal look at some of the more — what to call them? — unorthodox beliefs that animate American movement conservatives. They really do believe that we liberals support prenatal testing because it’s a good way of ensuring that Down’s Syndrome kids are all aborted. They really do believe that widespread contraceptive use has led directly to dissolution and cultural decay. They really do believe that “freedom of worship” is a dog whistle used by President Obama to indicate his contempt for religious liberties. They really do believe that global warming is just a hoax designed to allow lefty elites to seize control of the means of production.

And they believe that Europe is a post-socialist hellhole run by Godless bureaucrats and doomed to disintegrate. For example, here is Rick Santorum peddling a common myth:

In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are enthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.

This Soylent Green version of life in the Netherlands attracted my attention because I ran across it a while back and took the time to look into it. I’m not going to bother digging up all the references a second time, but basically this is totally untrue. The bracelets don’t exist. Euthanasia accounts for only about 2% of all deaths in the Netherlands. And Dutch safeguards are, in fact, quite effective. No system is perfect, but virtually no one in the Netherlands is euthanized without explicit, repeated requests — and the tiny number of violations of the rules are mostly technical. No one is allowed to die who doesn’t want to.

But the Dutch myth persists, and Santorum is doing nothing more than repeating something that’s a commonplace in movement conservative circles. Glenn Kessler, whose family is originally Dutch, provides all the facts here. Not that it will make any difference. These myths simply never die, and the movement conservative machine has already produced dozens of defenses of Santorum’s statement. They want to believe in the secular annihilation of everything traditional and decent, so they’re going to believe whether it’s actually true or not.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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