>Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried?

Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us.

This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective:

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...

>It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value.

I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living.

But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.