And even better, because the media has painted anarchy as chaos, it's hard to convince people that life without government is life changing, and not chaos.

Yes. Because we're fighting against our own government to prove our right to live in freedom. The Chinese and Russians don't really get much from our records that can help them. Of course there are exceptions but I'd say the USA is more dangerous atm.

Welcome to the loop, I joined only 4 years ago, and there are others who have been there even before me, but hey, you are new and special for knowing what all these "crazy conspiracy people that are so totally uncools, because the tv saids so" may actually not be that.

Seriously though, if you even bothered a little bit to watch at the news that goes through the cracks, you would have guessed where we are now. There is a reason why leenux dude uses some shitty chinese laptop, with a shitty chinese cpu, and why these laptops, even though they have 5% performance of a similar computer, still sell for the same or even higher price.

If I had money, I could probably buy a secure system with the knowledge that I have. Find me a proper foreign VPN service with some research that is probably not NSA coopted and I would actually be invisible...so I could just browse with some privacy.

Maybe? It's not maybe. It's well known they backdoor the HARDWARE itself. That makes it easy. Why do you think they banned custom router firmware?