By now, the oh-my-God-we're-all-going-to-get-Ebola fever that gripped much of the United Sates this summer has pretty much subsided. Although one study suggests that the virus could reach the U.S. by late September, we all pretty much know that any outbreak here would likely be a relatively small cluster and more easily treatable than in West Africa, where the disease has killed 2,200 people so far, due in large part to a lack of healthcare workers and hospital facilities in the hardest-hit areas.
This story, in other words, would be really hard to spin into some kind of paranoid, feverish rant about how terrifying, dusky foreigners are going to give us all Ebola. Unless you're Glenn Beck, who, God love him, is still at the top of his game, paranoid rant-wise. He devoted the entire opening monologue of his show last night to a theory about how "Nigerian prison guards" will be our harbingers of Ebola-flavored doom. Right Wing Watch captured this very special moment in T.V. sleuthery:
[YT]rPjJzXt4K_E[/YT]
The gist, if you don't quite have the stomach for two and a half minutes of Beck in his bow-tie and faux professor tweeds, is that his crack team at The Blaze got a hot tip from a reader: Texas prisons, faced with a shortage of prison guards, are bringing in Mexicans and Nigerians to work as corrections officers. And in Nigeria, Beck adds, "Ebola is breaking out. So we're hiring people from Nigeria who are going back and forth to their country. Right? Doesn't really seem like a good policy for a number of reasons... Call me crazy, but letting Nigerians roam freely in and out of our country as they work as correctional officers also in transportation and food service, might seem like something we should look into."
It almost seems worth mentioning that Nigeria isn't one of the places that's been hit by a large Ebola outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports only a small number of cases in Port Harcourt, seemingly brought from Liberia. One man died in Lagos on July 25, soon after arriving from Liberia. As for the supposed prison guard shortage in Texas, that chestnut appears to be from 2012, when union leaders for correctional officers in Austin were asking for a raise.
But beware of the dangers of doubting Glenn Beck, guys. Let's not forget how he nailed it on both the creeping scourge of Sharia law and the Chinese-Russian New World Order who now hold our very lives in their hands.
t:
