Perhaps. Clearly, Wright is an egomaniac and a publicity hound. Today he appeared at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, and ABC News reports on the wreckage:
But he didn't distance himself from any of the sentiments underlying the clips shown on television. Indeed, the former pastor embraced the most controversial items he has said.
On his contention that the U.S. government had created AIDS as a method of committing genocide against African-Americans, Wright referred to a hotly-disputed 1996 book "Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional?" by Leonard G. Horowitz, which contends that AIDS and the Ebola viruses evolved during cancer experiments on monkeys.
He also referenced "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" by Harriet Washington, and said based on the Tuskegee experiment -- in which the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a 40-year study on 400 poor black men in Alabama with syphilis whom they did not properly treat -- "I believe our government is capable of anything."
The Tuskegee atrocities are universally condemned--as they should be. But to use that sorry chapter, and to extrapolate that into a nut-ball theory that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus, is way beyond the pale of reasonable discourse.
Fox News is also reporting that the retired pastor has received death threats, and he now has security protection--provided by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
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