Over the past few days, I’ve had to argue with a lot of Nazi sympathizers. I’m sure many of you have had to as well. One of the more hellish parts of that experience is the horror-movie inflection point when you realize that, somehow, you are being forced to explain why putting children in cages is wrong. It breaks the fourth wall. You spend a lot of time and energy debating Pennywise about the moral deficiency of terrorizing children, and then suddenly you remember: “Holy s**t! I’m engaging with the worldview of an evil clown! There’s no way this ends the way I want it to.” You can’t debate a person into acknowledging that the fundamental premise of their existence is an affront to decent society.

So it is with the Trump people. They are evil clowns — ALL OF THEM — and as you peel back the rotting layers of their logic, you eventually come to the irreducible kernel of their bullshit: Punishing the weak and desperate makes sense to them. Holding people hostage as leverage for a list of demands makes sense to them. It excites some of them. It arouses some of them. That’s why you can’t effectively argue with them. It’s not on you to explain why using children as leverage is wrong. It’s on them to explain how that could ever be okay.

When you can force them to give their reasons, you see that, practically speaking, they’re willing to live in a world where people who cross the border — the Southern border, of course — are acceptable targets for brutal punishments. And from there, you’re just really arguing with them over the degree of brutality they’re willing to abide. “I don’t think we should be separating kids from their families, but we’ve got to do something.” I’m sure you’ve heard that. But when you plug that line into Google translate, the original German reads, “I don’t think we should kill all the Jews, but it would be great if they could just leave our country.”

The Trump agenda is nothing short of ethnic cleansing. They want America to be a place only for white people, people who wish they were white people, and people who are willing to be subservient to white people. That is the end goal. The caged children are just a means to that end.

If you understand that, you’ll understand that Trump’s proposed “solution” to the “crisis” of his policy of kidnapping children is just to kidnap more people so that the hostage children are reunited with their families during their internment. From the New York Times:

President Trump is preparing to issue an executive order as soon as Wednesday that ends the separation of families at the border by indefinitely detaining parents and children together, according to a person familiar with the White House plans. Mr. Trump’s executive order would seek to get around an existing 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that prohibits the federal government from keeping children in immigration detention — even if they are with their parents — for more than 20 days.

Again, from the perspective of a person who is giddy over the prospect of hostage-taking, but wishes the media would get off their back about it, this makes perfect sense. The law DOES NOT REQUIRE jailing immigrants seeking asylum or fence jumpers who came across at an unauthorized point of entry. It DOES require that children not be kept in indefinite detention, and specifies that they are released in 20 days.

We had a program that was supposed to address this exact situation. It was called the Family Case Management Program. It allowed families to be released and monitored by a caseworker. The program had a 99 percent rate of court appearances. Trump shut it down. Like I said, his goal is not to address any problem, perceived or otherwise, at the border. His goal is ethnic cleansing.

So Trump’s new proposal to address the crisis he caused involves ignoring the law on the books to effectuate a punishment that does not need to exist.

Why? You’ll have to ask them. Some will parrot “we need to enforce our laws” even though you’ve just explained to them that there is no law that requires what they’re doing, but there is a law preventing what they’re contemplating. Some will say “we have a crisis at our border” without being able to explain what possible “emergency” could justify jailing children for more than 20 days. Some will parrot anti-immigrant stereotypes that they copy-and-pasted off a Klan website. Others will say “fund the wall” while casually acting like hostage-taking for budget funding is the way to “shake things up” in this country.

You can continue arguing with these people, for as long as you can stand the fetid smell emanating from their necrotic souls.

For my part, I’ve reached my limit. What Trump is doing is wrong. What he is proposing to do is illegal. I can’t explain that to you. I can’t explain why taking hostages is wrong. I can’t explain why deterring asylum seekers and refugees by locking up their children is immoral. I can’t explain why violating a consent decree IS THE OPPOSITE of “following the law.” I can’t explain how to transform yourself into a fundamentally decent human.

If you can’t understand that, all on your own, you are my enemy. I will fight you. I will try to stop you. I will strike out at you, if I can. I will NEVER agree, and we will never have peace. Because you are an evil clown. I hate you forever.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.