Joe Rogan has gone ahead and admitted the extremely obvious fact that he had no actual information or evidence to back up his recent claims that children are using litter boxes in schools.
Rogan was one of many right-wing figures to amplify the conspiracy theory, which is yet another roundabout attack on educators who who dare to not be raging bigots when it comes to gender identity. The narrative in play is that these children are furries who “identify” as cats and that schools are making litter boxes available to accommodate those identities.
In reality, this is—obviously—not happening, and the story seems to have spread from a Colorado school district where cat litter is included in “go buckets” that contain supplies to be used if students are locked in a classroom during a school shooting. According to NBC News, more than 20 Republican politicians have repeated the urban myth (while also refusing to do absolutely anything to prevent school shootings).
Rogan repeated the story on an October episode of his massively popular podcast during a conversation with Tulsi Gabbard, pushing the lie to his approximately 11 million viewers and listeners. Rogan claimed that he heard this from a friend whose wife taught at a school that “had to install a litter box in the girls’ room because there’s a student that’s a furry.”
That’s the same formula we’ve seen over and over again: A person hears from the friend of an acquaintance that this was happening in a school he’d never been to.
Now, at least, Rogan is walking his statements back. He said on his show this week, “I don’t think they actually did it. I think there was discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother, but there is—it doesn’t seem that there’s any proof that they put a litter box in there.”
Way to state the obvious, Joe.
(via The Daily Beast, image: Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images)
