Everything is pretend to him. Even the importance of human life. If you think he cares about words, you’re sorely mistaken.

We should stop excusing blatant malice as some kind of mistake. He cares about words as much as Hitler actually cared what the word Aryan meant. They recognize that the definitions of words are established by people, so they can make them mean whatever the fuck they want them to mean. They … give … no … fucks. And I mean literally. None of the fucks. Not words, not human rights, not the sanctity of life, none of it. Only power.

edit: Oh, and they think you’re fucking stupid for actually caring about dumb shit like “what words mean” when we can exercise power over that.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

• Jean-Paul Sartre