An extensive survey of U.S. citizens, conducted yearly by Chapman University, has just revealed the thing most Americans fear — more than anything else — is their own government, NOT Terrorism.
Participants across the country were asked their level of fear about eighty different fears across a huge variety of topics ranging from crime, the government, the environment, disasters, personal anxieties, technology and many others. Below is a list of the 10 fears for which the highest percentage of Americans reported being “Afraid,” or “Very Afraid”:
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“The 2017 list of fears clearly reflects political unrest and uncertainty in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. Increased tensions with North Korea, concerns about sweeping changes proposed to health care and discussion (at the time the survey was administered) of the United States leaving the Paris Climate Accords produced a much different list from 2016.
“What is, perhaps, most striking about American fear in 2017 is that environmental fears, including water pollution and drinking water quality, figure more prominently than ever before. Environmental issues never cracked the top ten fears in our previous surveys.”
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Popular conspiracies and conspiracy theories such as the JFK assassination, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, alien encounters, the moon landing, and the 9/11 attacks were new elements to the 2016 survey.
More than half of all Americans believe the government is concealing information about the 9/11 attacks as well as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 40% believe the government is hiding information about extra-terrestrials and global warming.
Dr. Christopher Bader, professor of sociology at Chapman University and team lead, noted:
“We found clear evidence that the United States is a strongly conspiratorial society. We see a degree of paranoia in the responses. Most indicative is nearly one-third of respondents believed the government is concealing information about ‘the North Dakota crash,’ a theory we asked about that – to our knowledge – we made up.”