I'm a psychologist, and in my country there is a fracture between different levels of training and skilled psychologists, some of them behave extremely unprofessionally and harrass and bully other psychologists. I asked a colleague once how that can be, that a mental health professional can behave in such an unhinged manner. His response was eye-opening.

In any population, mental illness has a particular occurence rate, say 10% to be conservative. So in any group of people, be it professionals or not, there's a chance that 10% of them carry a mental illness.
Since Alex Jones has a bullhorn, he casts a very wide net, and is able to hook in people who may actually be mentally ill in some form, or may be more suspectible to suggestion. Keep in mind that he whips his listeners up into a fearful frenzy and when they are most open to suggestion, hawks his products.

This was all the more apparent in the court case this week where it was revealed that after the Japan nuclear power plant meltdown, he sent staff to California to try to record radiation levels so he could sell his fucking iodine tablets.

Grifting is successful because not everyone is capable of critical thought, for mental health reasons, or other. It's a bit fascinating, in a morbid way. You think you meet perfectly normal people and then you overhear them saying that Bill Gate's is trying to control the population via vaccines.