Because we watch Trumpland TV so you don’t have to, today we learned that Newsmax TV host Brett Winterble does not believe the Great Pacific Garbage Patch actually exists. And, of course, somehow this all relates to his feelings about undocumented immigrants. More on that later, but here’s what Winterble had to say about the trash vortex that has been studied by scientists for several decades now:

All of the straws and stirrers are apparently washing out into the sea and ending up in the Pacific gyre 15,000 miles from where I’m sitting. It’s not true. It’s fiction. But they have outlawed straws. You have to bring your own shopping bag to go shopping at the store! Or buy a shopping bag for ten cents each [...] you could literally detonate a small nuclear weapon inside one of these bags and it wouldn't even melt it.

Over 1 million tons of plastic enter the Pacific Ocean each year, and the entire surface area of the gyre is about twice the size of Texas. The non-biodegradable trash accumulates over time, breaking down into smaller pieces until they become micro-plastics. Marine life that feeds off those tiny plastics are considered “at-risk.” And those smaller pieces are hazardous to marine life that could become entangled in plastic nets and webs, or they could feed off the micro-plastics that would then affect the entire food chain—including for humans.

Nevertheless, Winterble concluded his rant about the environment with a comparison of non-biodegradable plastics’ dangers with those of undocumented immigrants, before quickly changing the subject—something we’d have done, too, had we tried to conflate such disparate topics.