This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 3rd, 2021.

I'm Keelip Brown.

How are our opinions shaped around terrorism?

John Mueller is author of the new Cato paper Public Opinion on War and Terror,

Manipulated or Manipulating. We spoke last month.

John, you've written about this subject before in 2018 you wrote about public opinion and counterterrorism policy.

Is it a chicken and egg problem that is public opinion and policies relating to terrorism or I guess how do you how do you evaluate it there

there doesn't seem to be a baseline opinion that absent some sort of manipulation that the public would have regarding

terrorism and war and how the government how governments ought to react to it.

Yeah that you're right that that is the baseline, and I'm basically countering the baseline,

arguing that in many cases the opinion is basically bottom up rather than the other way around. In that paper and I also

repeat some of that and develop it more in this current paper, it seems to me a

strong case we made for the fact that the whole thing about terrorism is because the public is so

alarmed about it. Even though elite history about it has declined over the decades,

and it's been two decades of course. Nonetheless, people still are as afraid of it

as they were in 2001. And efforts to try to change that have not really been made.

And when they've been made, they've been cut off.

And because they basically felt that they couldn't do it.

So the manipulators basically is the public, the elite it seems in this case.

With respect to public opinion and how what moves the needle on public opinion how does that happen?

Well good guess. I don't know. If, as I say at the

end of the paper, if I could predict that with any kind of real clarity and

...