One might wonder where the outrage is for these surveillance programs initiated by the state that clearly target Muslim populations in the United States. The overt anti-Muslim rhetoric espoused by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election campaign has led to the public's awareness of the surveillance of Muslims in the United States. When he said he would register Muslims during his campaign, he was met with outrage from a large segment of the American public. However, in the years before Trump, the American public had not protested the surveillance of Muslims that had been ongoing under both the Bush and Obama administrations. According to a 2010 Gallup Poll survey, 71 percent of Americans supported profiling individuals who fit a terrorist profile based on age, gender, and ethnicity (Jones 2010). … According to the survey, 54 percent of respondents claimed they held a positive view of Islam and 65 percent said mainstream Islam was a religion of peace, yet 58 percent still felt surveilling Muslims was an acceptable practice.

QUESTION: Why did public outrage trigger on rhetoric but not on actual policy? Worth exploring the psychology of symbolic vs. material threats. SEED: Potential essay angle: how political speech, not policy, mobilizes public outrage — the gap between abstract approval of surveillance and reaction to explicit rhetoric.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 64