&gt; Even Bernie doesn&#x27;t make this point (or at least, I haven&#x27;t heard him make it). To stand up and say, &quot;Actually, terrorism isn&#x27;t a big threat to the US, especially compared to ...&quot; would be political suicide.<p>Sanders has expressly argued that climate change is a bigger national security threat than terrorism (or anything else) -- and did so in one the Democratic debates, in response to a question on national security threats. While that may not be directly minimizing terrorism, it certainly is explicitly placing it behind other problems in terms of need for focus.<p>&gt; (And in another twist of irony I am positive that the American Revolutionaries were called terrorists by the British.)<p>They absolutely were not; the term &quot;terrorists&quot; was first applied to the leaders of the regime of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution (shortly after the American Revolution), and it was quite a long time after that before the term was applied to actors other than state leaders applying terror as a weapon to control their subject population.