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There is someone with Ebola in quarantine down in Texas. It seems as though hospital personnel down there screwed the pooch fairly thoroughly when the man first showed up at the ER with a fever. It also seems as though the response of the officials in Dallas has been less than adequate, at least so far.

In the latest indication, state and local authorities confirmed Thursday that a week after a Liberian man fell ill with Ebola in Dallas, and four days after he was placed in isolation at a hospital here, the apartment where he was staying with four other people had not been sanitized and the sheets and dirty towels he used while sick remained in the home. County officials visited the apartment without protection Wednesday night. The officials said it had been difficult to find a contractor willing to enter the apartment to clean it and remove bedding and clothes, which they said had been bagged in plastic. They said they now had hired a firm that would do the work soon. The Texas health commissioner, Dr. David Lakey, told reporters during an afternoon news conference that officials had encountered "a little bit of hesitancy" in seeking a firm to clean the apartment.

This reminds me of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when undertakers refused to bury the dead, and emergency workers were afraid to treat people after automobile accidents and commonplace domestic catastrophes. Which is to say this isn't surprising at all. One of the other things that marked the early days of the AIDS epidemic was the truly wicked role played by various satraps of the Christian Right and by the nascent conservative media bubble machine. There was talk of God's vengeance upon gay people, and more talk of curses than we'd heard in this country since the Mather family closed up shop in Massachusetts Bay. Then, of course, transfusion patients and hemophiliacs began to die, and the gay community rallied itself heroically, and the disease finally got itself treated as a disease, and not some creature out of the subtext of Leviticus. This is where the historical parallel ends. Unfortunately.

What we had in the AIDS epidemic was political opportunism married to what became obvious ignorance. What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul. These are dangerous people, and it's far past time for the honorable people in my profession to stop treating them like the worthless hacks they are. They are no longer cute. They are no longer funny. They are no longer the respectable "other side" of some fanciful imaginary political debate.They are dangerous propagandists. They are peddling poisonous lies and putting people's lives at risk. Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.

Take, for example, Laura Ingraham, who cashes a very nice check from ABC News in addition to her day job as a radio flamethrower. Ingraham has begun to traffic in "alternative" theories about Ebola, treating a virus as though it were another vote to suppress or immigrant to bash, and lending her microphone to fringe nitwits because panic is profitable, and because almost everything, even a rare disease, is worth throwing at a president you don't like.

Vliet's facts are completely wrong about Ebola's transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that Ebola "is not spread through the air." A Vox report points out that "basically every health agency in the world agrees" that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air. Medical experts also agree that it's highly unlikely Ebola could mutate into a form that changes its mode of transmission. In fact, such a thing has never been observed in medical history, according to Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He writes, "We have been studying viruses for over 100 years, and we've never seen a human virus change the way it is transmitted."

You can't do this and then claim to be acting responsibly. You can't spread ignorance this way, because ignorance is more virulent than the virus is. You can't have your own science just because you have your own media, and you have your own history, and your own Constitution. You can't do this and be treated as anything but a pariah in any country that pretends to make sense. What the hell does ABC think of their premium hire now?

Vliet's medical degree and penchant for hyping anti-immigrant myths has helped develop her reputation as the far right's go-to expert for medical conspiracy theories. In August, Vliet wrote an exclusive column for WND.com titled, "Illegals Bring Risk Of Ebola." In her article, the Vliet parroted other anti-immigrant voices by suggesting undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border were spreading Ebola and that the government was concealing their diagnoses. Despite "zero evidence" that migrants have carried Ebola through the U.S.-Mexico border, Vliet's opinion was cited by Breitbart, Infowars, and Newsmax, a continuation of a long conservative tradition of smearing immigrants as dirty or diseased.

Jesus. Right now, there is a man with a disease, who may have given the disease to a few other people, whom officials are trying to find. The disease is killing people by the thousands in a part of the world about which most of the media ordinarily doesn't care about, and about which the self-contained media universe in question is proudly ignorant. In this country, people are more nervous than they ought to be. (Parents are pulling their kids out of school in Dallas "just in case.") This is a problem that may yet become a crisis, but hasn't yet, except for those people who seek to create a crisis so they can make a buck or win an election. If it does become an actual crisis, it is going to require a national response grounded in the best medical science we can find.

The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immuneto the delusions on which demented ideology feeds.

And, most important of all, we are going to have to trust each other, and we are going to have to trust our government, which is the political manifestation of all of us, no matter what 30 years of Reaganite heresy has taught us. We are going to have to trust ourselves as individual citizens, and we are going to have to trust ourselves as partners in the creative act of self-government. I am afraid we will not, because there is one side of our politics who will stand in the way, and another side of our politics that is too frightened or too polite to call dangerous nonsense to account, and to shun the people who are promoting it. And that is what scares me the most about the man in Texas with the disease.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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