In fact, by February 1996, GWS had come to act as a “powerful metaphor for disease” for a generation of Americans who suspected that GWS itself had been “created by the hubris of modern science … one of our terrible Frankenstein monsters.” Conspiracy theories about the government’s responsibility for the creation of GWS were similar to those about AIDS. McVeigh’s belief that the U.S. government created and released AIDS into the population was one shared with a large number of Americans, particularly African-Americans.
