Watching Infowars bloviator Alex Jones squirm on the stand in his defamation civil case last week was its own form of justice for all the pain he caused the families of victims after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Connecticut. Despite his wild conspiracy theories that the massacre was fictitious, Jones now admits that the massacre 100% did occur — something he's known all along.

What still hasn't gotten the attention it deserves is the business model upon which Jones built his Infowars empire. That model is rooted in the adage that there's a sucker born every minute. Jones is an expert at using social media to rally the clueless behind his conspiratorial concoctions, then gladly taking their money. According to financial records introduced at his civil trial in Austin, Jones has earned up to $800,000 per day hawking Infowars T-shirts, books, videos, military and hunting gear, brain pills, dietary supplements and survival equipment. By 2017, fools and their money were feeding $10 million a year into Jones' bank accounts.

No wonder, then, that Donald Trump adopted the same model before his 2016 presidential run: Say anything. Improvise on the spot. Make anything up. Lie like there's no tomorrow. For every 10 or 20 people who recognize it as nonsense, there will be one person out there who will embrace it as the truth — and act on it. And those are the suckers who Jones and Trump set out to exploit for riches and political gain, no matter whose lives, or democracy itself, were destroyed in the process.

This scam operation has expanded to the point that the dupes of Jones and Trump are now seeking and winning elections that could put them in positions to enact laws and enforce policies based on the conspiracies they've been brainwashed into believing.

Jones targeted grieving parents of 20 first graders slaughtered at Sandy Hook, insisting the parents were actors and that their children weren't real. He harassed them mercilessly on his show, while his supporters shot up their cars, threatened them and confronted them in public. As if the pain of losing their children weren't enough, Jones insisted on subjecting them to endless psychological torture — all so he could profit off his followers' idiocy.

On the stand last week, he admitted that the massacre was "100 percent real." But for all the suffering he caused, he proposed paying $1 to those he defamed. Jurors awarded the plaintiffs $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages.

His lawyers mistakenly sent hundreds of gigabytes of text messages from Jones' cellphone to the plaintiffs' lawyers, which not only can aid in a future perjury case against Jones but also could help the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection that Jones helped organize.

He's now trying to claim bankruptcy. Morally speaking, he and Trump reached that point years ago.

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