Joe Rogan *Somehow* Can't Track Down Source Of His Litterbox Nonsense

It's his own gullibility.

Over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly obsessed with insisting that school bathrooms across the nation are installing litterboxes in order to accommodate students who are furries. This is not a thing. Children are not furries and no one is doing this. It is a thing they made up because they want to make transgender children seem ridiculous and encourage the notion that schools take things "too far" in order to accommodate students with varying concerns.

It's a narrative they have fallen in love with, to the point where even when they are willing to accept that it is not actually happening, they will follow it up with "Well, it may not be true but it says something about society that we believed it!"

It does. It says that we live in a society with very gullible people who would believe with their whole rotten little hearts that schools were providing litterboxes for students who identify as cats without even bothering to find out if it's true or not — and that the kind of people who are this gullible tend to vote Republican and/or listen to the Joe Rogan podcast.

Rogan, notably, spread this rumor a few weeks ago during an interview with Tulsi Gabbard, claiming that his friend's wife worked at a school where a mother came in and demanded a litterbox for her child who is a furry.

“My friend, his wife is a school teacher and she works at a school that had to install a litterbox in the girls room because there is a girl who’s a furry, who identifies as an animal,“ Rogan said to the predictably credulous Gabbard. "Her mother badgered the school until they agreed to put a litterbox in one of the stalls. So this girl goes into the litter room or to the girl’s room and urinates or whatever."

This week, however, he's backtracking. Just a bit.

On Wednesday, Rogan's guest was atheist Michael Shermer, who conveniently had just come out with a book about conspiracy theories and why people believe them. Shermer brought up the litterbox thing, noting that the reason it caught on was because "it kind of fit the conservative view of liberals and their confusion about gender and sex" and Rogan provided an update on where he was with that.

"I fed into that," Rogan said, "I should probably clarify that a little bit." He then explained that he heard the story directly from his friend, whose wife told him that. After he was widely mocked for believing "an internet rumor," he called up his friend and asked for more clarification on what happened. The wife however, she didn't work at the school anymore and when she called that school in order to get confirmation of the incident, they ignored her and did not call her back.

Rogan then said that he doesn't think they ended up doing it, but that there were "discussions" about it because of this mom.

Rogan's compromise position on this was that he shouldn't have presented it as a thing happening everywhere when it was perhaps just this one "crazy woman" — but I am willing to bet that a few other things got mixed up in that little telephone game they were playing as well. Especially if no one at Rogan's friend's wife's former school will talk to her.

He then explains that the reason he believed it was because 10 years ago he went to a UFC event at a hotel at which a furry convention was taking place — insisting that a litterbox was installed in the middle of the lobby and that a guy working at the hotel told him that these people were demanding that their food be delivered to them "in bowls on the ground so they could eat it like animals." Which seems rather difficult to do while wearing a giant mascot head. The guy also told him that they had asked to have a litterbox in the lobby, which definitely did not happen.

Rogan says he then did a "deep dive" on furries, going to forums to find out if they like to use litterboxes and was able to find one person saying that they liked the idea of using a litterbox as part of fetish play.

"One of the things I found out about these furries," he said, "is it's sexual in some sort of weird way. They like to get together and have sex with their furry outfits on and they don't want people to know who they are." This is actually incorrect. It's not just a sex thing. It's really more of a hobby/fandom type thing where, for some people, there is a sexual aspect. Like anything else. There are tons and tons of articles and documentaries dating back years that explain this.

"How that got connected to gender I do not understand," Rogan said.

It's really not that hard. Conservatives wish to aggressively misunderstand transgender people and paint them as being ridiculous (ie: "I identify as a toaster oven!" jokes) and have insisted upon believing that they are people with a sexual fetish rather than simply people whose actual gender does not match the gender they were assigned at birth. The purpose of this is explicitly to dehumanize trans people so that the transphobes don't accidentally feel empathy or feel badly about how horribly they are treating people, especially children. People usually feel badly about being horrible to children.

Conservatives also traditionally understand very little about culture in general, which is why they end up believing all of these bizarre conspiracy theories about backmasking Satanic messages into rock music (which would be so exhausting!) and confuse performance art for Satanic rituals .

When it comes to more alternative subcultures, like furries, they frequently understand nothing. When they don't understand something, they take the one piece of information they do know and extrapolate from there, like a blind man holding an elephant's tail. So instead of finding out more about furries, they go "Oh hey! There are these people who dress up like mascots and have sex. I bet they also 'identify' as these animals the way trans people identify as a gender different from what they were assigned at birth, and this is therefore proof that it is a 'sex thing,' which then means that anyone allowing transgender children to exist is sexualizing children."

Or maybe they saw this commercial one time and thought it was real. Who can say?

 www.youtube.com 

They make it up because they want it to be true, because it is important to them to be horrible to transgender children. That's it, that's all it is.

Joe Rogan fell for this — and still seems convinced that it might be a little true — because he has no bullshit detector and is equally invested in being horrible to transgender people.

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