The Patriot Post® · Terror Fears Rising

There are widely differing polls over whether Donald Trump is going too far with some of his latest remarks about Muslims and terrorism. But what the polls don’t disagree on is that the American people are increasingly concerned about the threat we face from radical Islam.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that fears of terrorist attacks are at their highest levels since the days immediately following 9/11. Seventy-nine percent of Americans believe a terrorist attack is likely to occur in the next few months. Terrorism also beat out the economy as the top concern among Americans.

Why are fears of terrorism sky high? I believe it is at least partly due to repeated examples of misfeasance by the Obama administration. The president is clearly failing to inspire confidence. The CBS News/New York Times poll finds that 57% of Americans disapproved of Obama’s handling of terrorism. It’s not hard to understand why.

For starters, this administration can’t even identify the source of the problem — radical Islamic terrorism. When attacks take place, like in Benghazi, administration officials rush to cover them up and blame something else.

Even though they were repeatedly warned, government officials missed the Tsarnaev brothers.

Consider the case of the Fort Hood assassin. Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was counseling returning soldiers and often accused them of committing war crimes. Other warning signs were repeatedly ignored because officials were paralyzed by political correctness.

Political Correctness Kills

Is left-wing political correctness responsible for the San Bernardino massacre? Perhaps in part. A whistleblower has come forward alleging that administration policies likely prevented authorities from stopping the San Bernardino attack.

Phil Haney, a counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, had been working on a program that tracked the movements of Islamic radicals. According to Haney, some of these radicals under observation had gone to the mosque attended by Syed Farook in 2012.

Haney contends that this program likely would have flagged Farook’s connection to the mosque and Tashfeen Malik’s connections to related radical overseas groups. Farook could have been placed on the no-fly list and Malik could have been subjected to additional scrutiny.

But we will never know what could have been because the Obama administration shut down Haney’s program, claiming it was “profiling” Muslims.

America’s Vanishing Middle Class

The Pew Research Center has released a new survey showing what many Americans instinctively feel — the middle class is shrinking. There are many reasons the middle class is declining, including globalization, which has undercut manufacturing — once a major path to the middle class for many American families.

This alarming trend raises many complex and disturbing issues, such as a shrinking tax base to support a growing welfare state.

In addition, the breakdown of the traditional family has contributed to the decline of the middle class. It is simply a fact that many single parent homes have the odds stacked against them.

As many pundits have noted this year, there is a growing anti-establishment mood in the country. People are looking to insurgents on the left and the right.

Again, there are many reasons for this, but the biggest may be the shrinking of the middle class and the loss of the American Dream. Not surprisingly, people are searching for answers outside of what they perceive to be an ineffective and broken political establishment.