You freely admit that there's a fair amount of crazy. The signal/noise ratio is absurdly bad, even if we assume there's some kind of signal at all. The (usually banal, obvious) nuggets of truth are often intentionally thrown in as a way to make you let your guard down. If you are not 100% flawless at separating the nugget of truth from the shit, then over time your mind will inevitably fill with shit. Don't overestimate your own mental resilience. If people were half as strong-minded as they thought they were, there'd be no money in advertising.
Never listen to crazies. If there's something non-crazy in what they're saying, somebody non-crazy will be saying it too; listen to them instead.
So, again, I'll throw on a podcast at the gym and try to form my own opinions. If you exclusively get your opinions from clips on twitter or reddit, I don't think the opinions you've formed are actually yours.
Despite being exposed to "dangerous" ideas (I assume you're mostly talking about Jones), I don't think inter-dimensional space aliens are actually behind everything. I've managed to stay at least partially sane.
...or maybe I'm just not ready to believe yet (dun dun dun!) :)
Different communities are good for different things and there is such a thing as community standards. It doesn't have to get to the Alex Jones political level either, just think like how weird it is when people hit on each other on Nextdoor [1] or if some guy was trying to sell his lawnmower on Grindr/Tinder.
1 - https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor/status/100265658134170009...
I think of listening to them largely in the spirit of Lincoln's “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” There's an entire machine telling me to hate these people, write them off, or that they're overall "bad." So I listened to a bunch of their content to see what it was about. That's kinda it, really.
I haven't turned into some conspiratorial nut job or joined some cult (I don't think!). I listened to a couple of podcasts to try to form my own opinions. The output of the exercise was that I don't think these people are evil demons. I think they're largely just... people. Complex, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, and fun to hate on by the general media.
I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones.
So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports.
The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.