Joe Rogan Admits ‘No Proof’ Behind Story He Told About Schools Putting Litter Boxes in Bathrooms
23:43 GMT 03.11.2022 (Updated: 08:57 GMT 15.11.2022)
© Photo : YouTube / JRE Clips
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Numerous states and school districts have introduced rules in recent years barring transgender students from using the public bathrooms for their gender. It’s just one part of a wide-ranging conservative offensive aimed at delegitimizing the identities of transgender people in the US.
American podcaster Joe Rogan has walked back claims he made on his show last month about schools being forced to place litter boxes, normally used by house cats, in their bathrooms to be used by “furry” students who identify as cats.
“I don't think they actually did it,” he admitted on his show recently. “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.”
Rogan was interviewing Michael Shermer, author of the new book “Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational,” on his podcast and the discussion came around to the litter box story. Shermer pointed out that it was a rumor that had been fact-checked and found false, and was being used by conservatives to attack liberals.
14 October 2022, 20:13 GMT
“That got spread around as a meme because it kind of fit the conservative view of liberals and their confusion about gender and sex,” Shermer said, calling it “an urban legend.”
“I fed into that,” Rogan said, admitting he’d been swept up by the rumors. He said he’d gone back and tried to verify the story he told last month while interviewing former US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), and couldn’t find proof.
Rogan explained that he had “entertained the idea” because of another encounter he’d had with a similar myth a decade ago involving claims that attendees at a furry convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had requested their food be delivered to them in bowls “so they could eat it like animals” and that they had asked for a litter box in the lobby.
“You can always find somebody,” Shermer said as Rogan and his producer, “Young Jamie,” recounted how their research into the “furry” subculture showed just how rare the behavior really is. “So there’s an element of truth to the conspiracy theory… and the it gets blown up into something else,” he added, comparing it to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, which spread the myth that Satan worship was being introduced into preschools across the country by conspiring Satanists.
Despite Debunking, Candidates ‘Not Backing Down’
After Rogan’s interview with Gabbard came out, which included his story about a school his friend’s wife formerly taught at and was allegedly forced to put a litter box in the girls’ bathroom, NBC published an investigation into the string of similar claims.
According to the news company, at least 20 Republican candidates have repeated the claim, which go back months before Rogan’s show, but after reporters investigated the candidates’ claims, they found that not a single one of them turned out to be true.
Despite the rebuttals, some politicians have continued to push the claims, such as Don Bolduc, a GOP candidate for US Senate in New Hampshire. Asked about his claims on Wednesday, Bolduc said he had only been faithfully reproducing the rumors he’d been told.
“So what I was talking about is all the craziness going on in our schools. And this is just one of them,” Bolduc told a reporter. “And I had a parent and a student in that audience who came up to me and told me all about it. I've had that all across the state. So I'm only articulating what I heard from Granite Staters, parents, children.”
He then turned it into an attack on his rival, Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, saying it was part of her “bad education policies.”
NEW: Don Bolduc- only to @NBCNews says the school he accused of using litter boxes for children who identify as animals needs to "prove" the claim wrong.
— Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) November 2, 2022
He tells me a parent and a student told him it was happening and he is "not backing down." pic.twitter.com/s7CLx09uu2
“I’m not backing down,” Bolduc said, asserting that the school district had lied before about other policies, so “they need to prove it to us, I don’t need to prove it to them.”
Across the US, a wave of conservative politicians have ramped up their attacks on LGBTQ rights, focusing especially on transgender people and on children, who they have claimed are being targeted and victimized by transgender adults and pushy doctors. Dozens of laws have been passed restricting the rights of trans children and adults, including to access healthcare, public facilities associated with their gender, to play on gendered sports teams according to their gender, and for their identities to be respected.
The trend has corresponded with a marked increase in right-wing violence targeting LGBTQ people, including the known murders of 32 transgender people in the US in 2022.
