Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) used an award acceptance speech to criticize “half-baked, spurious nationalism.”
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While receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal from friend and former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday, McCain shared his thoughts on the state of the country and the principles that founded it.
Deeply humbled to receive @ConstitutionCtr's 2017 #LibertyMedal from my dear friend @JoeBiden. Thank you for this great honor. pic.twitter.com/iNypjDAiQM
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) October 17, 2017
Appearing to address the foreign policy ideas of President Trump and his various supporters, the senator used a portion of his speech to warn against “half-baked, spurious nationalism”:
To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of Earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.
“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” McCain added, likely in reference to a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that occurred in August. “Blood and soil” is a rallying cry for certain white nationalist groups and is a callback to Nazi ideology.
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