More see domestic terrorism as bigger threat than foreign terrorism: Survey

American Anxiety Shifts Inward: Homegrown Terror Now Outweighs Foreign Threats in Public Mind

Provpnadvice.com – As the nation approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks — events carried out by foreign terrorist organizations that reshaped decades of American security doctrine and foreign policy — a new national survey reveals a striking reversal in how ordinary citizens perceive the greatest danger to their personal safety. The data, drawn from a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between August 28 and 31, shows that Americans increasingly view threats originating at home as more pressing than those arriving from abroad.

The Numbers Behind the Shift

When asked to identify the single most significant threat to the average American’s safety, 33 percent of the 1,167 surveyed respondents pointed to domestic terrorism. Foreign terrorism, by contrast, drew only 20 percent of top-of-mind selections. An even larger share — 42 percent — singled out random acts of violence, such as mass shootings, as the primary danger they face in daily life.

The poll went a step further by asking whether extremist ideologies rooted domestically or abroad pose the greater risk. A decisive 61 percent chose homegrown extremism, while just 34 percent directed their concern outward. The margin of error for the survey stands at three percentage points.

A Decade of Domestic Political Violence

The findings land against a backdrop of escalating political violence carried out by Americans against fellow Americans. Since 2021, the country has endured a series of high-profile incidents that have eroded public confidence in institutional protections:

The January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol remains the most visible rupture, but it was far from isolated. Multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump’s life followed in subsequent months, each one reinforcing the perception that political figures — and by extension, citizens who gather near them — operate in an environment of genuine physical danger. More recently, the murders of former Minnesota state House Speaker Melissa Hortman (Democrat) and conservative commentator Charlie Kirk added further fuel to the sense that partisan animosity can cross the threshold into lethal violence.

These events collectively explain why the poll’s respondents gravitate toward domestic threats. Unlike the foreign-terror paradigm that dominated national discourse after 2001 — one that justified prolonged military engagements across the Middle East and a sweeping expansion of surveillance and border-control apparatus — the current wave of incidents feels immediate, personal, and politically charged in ways that make abstract foreign-policy debates feel distant.

Washington Responds: Rubio’s Multilateral Push

The administration has moved to frame the domestic-terror question as a global concern. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered officials from more than 60 nations for a summit specifically designed to spotlight what his department characterized as a worldwide uptick in far-left political violence. At the gathering, the secretary urged delegates to coordinate an

“international response”

to the phenomenon. The summit represented a notable broadening of the Trump administration’s agenda, which now treats left-leaning political violence as the paramount terrorist challenge confronting the United States — a framing that departs sharply from the post-9/11 emphasis on Islamist militant networks abroad.

Why the Timing Matters

The proximity of these results to the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks is not incidental. That day’s twin-plane strikes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, followed by the crash of American Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, triggered a two-decade arc of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, along with a permanent restructuring of federal agencies, immigration enforcement, and civil-liberties balances. For many Americans, foreign terrorism was the defining external threat of the 21st century’s first quarter.

The current poll suggests that generational memory is recalibrating. Younger cohorts, who came of age after the initial shock of 2001, have grown up amid school shootings, Capitol riots, and partisan killings. Their threat calculus naturally centers on actors within their own communities rather than on distant state sponsors or transnational jihadist networks. The 42 percent who named random violent acts as their top fear underscores that the anxiety is not purely ideological; it is also about the unpredictability of gun violence in public spaces.

Implications for Policy and Public Discourse

If the trend captured by this single survey holds, policymakers face a dual challenge. On one hand, the administration’s push to internationalize the domestic-terror narrative — as seen in Rubio’s 60-nation summit — risks importing foreign-policy machinery into what many Americans experience as a homegrown civic problem. On the other, treating political violence purely as a domestic law-enforcement matter may understate the transnational networks of media, funding, and ideological exchange that the State Department argues amplify far-left agitation abroad.

For the average citizen, the practical takeaway is simpler: the fear that once centered on foreign operatives striking American soil has migrated, in public consciousness at least, to neighbors, colleagues, and political opponents. Whether that perception matches the statistical reality of threat frequency remains a subject of ongoing debate among security scholars, but the psychological shift is unmistakable, and it will shape electoral priorities, legislative agendas, and media coverage well beyond the anniversary season.