Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested on Monday that President Barack Obama thought that people in the U.S. “deserve” to contract Ebola as payback for slavery.

“They say it’s hard to get, Obama’s telling us that, the CDC guy is tell us it’s hard to get,” Limbaugh told his listeners in an audio clip obtained by Think Progress.

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He recalled that an author had told him “in his own politically correct way, that we bear the responsibility for these people in African getting this disease, and we can’t turn our backs on them because of that.”

Limbaugh said that the author asserted that Liberia, where many are suffering from Ebola, would have never been founded if freed slaves had not colonized it.

And that was why the Obama administration had not banned travel from west African countries, Limbaugh argued.

“The danger that we have now is that we’ve elected people in positions of power an authority who think this or think like this in terms of this country being responsible, this country being to blame for things,” he continued. “And it’s that kind of thinking that leads to opposition to shutting down airports from these various countries, it leads to opposition to keeping these people out of the country. How dare we?”

“Well that means that anything that happens to anybody here because of that policy, we kind of deserve,” the conservative host reasoned. “And it’s a perverted convoluted way of thinking, and it’s there. Political correctness has been around for a long time, and it’s always been over there, it’s always been fringe.”

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“But it isn’t fringe anymore because we’ve elected people who think this way.”

Listen to the audio below from the Rush Limbaugh Program.