Far more Americans are afraid of the nation’s increasingly corrupt government than they are of the terrorist threats and economic issues government officials use to maintain power.
According to the latest rendition of Chapman University’s American Fear poll, the vast majority of Americans count government institutions and the corruption they breed as their biggest fear. Sixty percent of respondents to the poll said “corruption of govetnment officials” was their biggest fear.
In second place, with 41 percent, was “terrorist attack on nation, followed by “inadeqyuate funds for the future” in third place (39.9 percent).
“People often fear what they cannot control, and we find continued evidence of that in our top fears,” Christopher Bader, Ph.D., professor of sociology at Chapman University, said.
According to the researchers, a majority of Americans believe the government is concealing information,
Via Chapman University:

[M]ore 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. Another 40 percent believe the government is hiding information about extra-terrestrials and global warming; and one-third believe there are conspiracies surrounding Obama’s birth certificate and the origin of the AIDs virus. Nearly one-fourth of Americans also believe there is something suspicious about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

“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,” Bader said.
Of course, it’s not paranoia if it’s true.