On Monday, Rush Limbaugh responded to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) recent criticisms of American nationalism associated with President Donald Trump.
McCain’s regularly frames the “America First” platform pushed by Trump and his supporters as amounting to an American retreat from global leadership, casting the post-WWII international order as worthy of preservation and further expansion. “America First,” suggests McCain, is rooted in irrational fears of globalization and bigotry toward foreigners.
Limbaugh described the “America First” ethos as rooted in a desire to reassert American global leadership after decades of its diminution by “the establishment,” a group which he describes McCain as a “proud member” of.
Partial transcript below.
This is the problem. What you’re missing, sir, about this nationalism that you despise is its real intention is to once again assert this leadership of the world, to assert this guiding light and beacon of freedom. Because for way too many recent years people in your club have been buying into the notion that whatever the United States has been doing the last 75 years has been hurting people. The United States is the problem.
The United States is blamed for climate change. What is that? Destroying the planet, no less! United States is blamed for this, it’s blamed for that. We have to sit here and listen to how socialist and communist worlds and nations are much preferable to ours. What world do we lead? The United Nations exists to fleece the United States, to blame the United States. Barack Obama openly admitted that his purpose was to transform the United States, which means cut it down to size.
It was Barack Obama who started this process of taking America out of the leadership role, and you couldn’t say enough good things about him, Senator McCain. It was Barack Obama and his two terms — and everybody he hired to work with him — who set about to make Iran a nuclear power? How in the world would a United States-led world permit that to happen, for the good of humanity? Senator McCain, with all due respect, you’ve got this totally backwards.
Your club or members in your club were actively presiding over the decline of the United States as a leader in the world, as a beacon of freedom.
Your definition of open and leading the world is to open our borders and let the disadvantaged race in! Sorry. That’s not what leadership of the world means. But too many people think leadership of the world meant we need to act on our guilt. We have guilt that we are so wealthier, so richer, so more advanced than most nations on Earth, it isn’t fair, and so we must let the downtrodden in because we’ve made them downtrodden.
That’s what your club has started turning this country into, and that’s why people are standing up against it.
Listen to Limbaugh’s monologue below, amounting to an open letter to McCain.
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