> I keep hearing this theory, but it just begs the question: how are these people deciding which sources to trust? What makes them trust Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones rather than other "mainstream" news?

Abstractly, the same way ~everyone does: heuristics, confirmation bias, post-hoc rationalization, etc. On a relative scale, some people's methodologies are better than others (often much better), but on an absolute scale they are almost all bad.

If unpopular opinion X turned out to be reality, early adopters/investors would come out ahead of skeptics - think how ridiculous quotes from internet nay-sayers now appear.

If you can make your opinion reality, by either persuading or bullying people into accepting it, you don't need to trust it - you can just choose it and act accordingly. Politics is just religion without the anthropomorphism. Societies and civilizations need to be rational all the way down, just as people are not creatures of pure logic.

People always want explanations to things we simply don’t have good answers, maybe because we don’t have the information or because there is money to made selling macho pills online or just because a people don’t want to face reality. It is fundamentally a form of escapism that I think am we are all by default detectives in a thought game trying to find proof of diets that will make us live longer or find the true reason global warming is happening is sunspot activity.