Republicans and the right-wing media are in full swing with a tactic to powerfully bind their followers to them and to each other through a sense that only they are reasonable and the rest of the world is spinning out of control. Painting your political opponents as other is a time-tested technique and one that’s extremely flexible—often, all they really have to do is point to the existence of Black people or LGBTQ people—but right now it’s getting a little ridiculous, and a lot dangerous, as they reach further and further for material.
Take the whole litter boxes in schools thing, for instance. If you’re asking “What litter boxes in schools,” congratulations, you are blessedly removed from the right-wing media ecosystem. But since it’s been repeated again and again by some prominent Republicans, as well as by lesser-known ones as it percolates through their bubble, there’s a decent chance you know what this lie is about.
The litter boxes in schools claim has been circulating since at least January, and if you don’t know what it’s about, here you go: The claim is that students who identify as furries demand to use litter boxes, and schools are obliging them. It is unequivocally false, but it has been repeated by Rep. Lauren Boebert, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois, a Nebraska Republican state senator, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Colorado, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Minnesota, and more.
“They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” one said. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?” He later apologized—but that didn’t stop the lie from spreading.
“I hear story after story from teachers and school administrators detailing meetings about this 'furry' trend in (Illinois) public schools,” Illinois congressional candidate Catrina Lauf emailed the Daily Herald, refusing to provide examples but railing against a Democratic law to provide free menstrual hygiene products in schools, as well as teachers being forced to refer to children “by whatever pronouns they decide to go by that week.”
”What are we doing to our kids? Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds. We’ve lost our minds,” Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen recently said.
School systems are constantly having to come out and rebut this claim: Danville, New York. Greenville, South Carolina. Monroe County, Illinois. Des Moines, Iowa. Salem-Keizer, Oregon.
“It is unconscionable that this afternoon I am sending this communication,” the superintendent of one Michigan school system wrote early in the year. “However, our Midland PS stakeholders may be confused about a false message/accusation that has resurfaced this week and is gaining traction in the social media realm.”
”Perhaps someone on social media connected the puddle in a bathroom to this social media trend and took it to another level,” the superintendent in Danville, New York, told the Associated Press. “There are so many important issues in the world right now. I just am baffled by anyone’s reactivation with this kind of nonsense.”
On one level, this is an attack on trans students and schools with affirming policies, saying that supporting trans kids is the same as providing litter boxes for kids who “identify as cats.” On another level, it’s an attack on public schools for allegedly catering to the whims of children rather than leading them, and exposing fragile innocents to the deviance of their peers. This obsessive Republican attack is absolutely those things. But it is also a message to conservatives fearful of a changing world in which people who aren’t just like them are nonetheless seen as fully human. The message? You should be afraid. You should feel disgust. You should layer over your fear and disgust with ostentatious contempt and ridicule to make sure the world gets the message that people who are different from you are abominations. You should feel that the world is spinning out of control and your place in it is under assault from all sides—all sides except the Republican Party and its media outlets and your fellow fearful white conservatives.
The litter boxes in schools lie is among the most persistent and damaging versions of this message in recent months. But it’s one in a long string of them, and they come in versions large and small. Before litter boxes in schools there was “critical race theory,” also something that did not exist in public K-12 schools but became a right-wing fixation. There’s Tucker Carlson on Fox News every night spewing great replacement theory and delivering warnings like, “The point of the exercise is to humiliate the rest of us by forcing us to obey transparently absurd orders.”
“I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing the country I grew up in,” Carlson has said, getting to the heart of the fear he is urging his viewers to be consumed by. And on Wednesday night, he delivered a rant against two young women who have tried, in their different ways, to change the world: Greta Thunberg and Amanda Gorman.
Carlson’s attack on Thunberg was to two ends at once: railing against efforts to combat climate change and arguing falsely that she, like John Fetterman, is a disabled person being used and exploited by Democrats to gain political advantage. But it was also, very importantly, just an attack on a young woman, still a teenager, for being different from him and for working to bring change. Carlson’s attack on Amanda Gorman, by contrast, was a straight-up ridicule, a gratuitous line tossed in to denigrate a successful young Black woman.
“We’re supposed to accommodate Greta Thunberg’s disability, pretend her words are profound. Just like the fake poet at Biden's administration,” Carlson said. He broke into a mocking tone, saying, as if quoting someone, “’Oh, she was so great. We dare you to say she wasn't,’” then breaking into a high-pitched cackle and adding, “She was ridiculous.”
Gorman is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and someone who has an auditory processing disorder and a speech impediment but read her own work on one of the biggest possible stages. Her poetry books have made bestseller lists, a rather rare achievement for poetry. To Carlson, she is ridiculous—or so he would have his audience believe. But he’s pairing that insistence that this remarkable person is ridiculous with the implied threat (“We dare you”) that speaking this truth will draw condemnation. The prospect of young women gaining fame for trying to move us past a world dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson is terrifying to him, and so he tells his audience to greet it with rage and fear and mockery all at once.
The idea that the kids these days are going to ruin everything is a longstanding one, of course, and it’s fodder for a lot of right-wing fretting on things from the enormous to the trivial. Take this:
The youths are mocking you … and also, they’re incredibly oversensitive and speak in their own language and who can understand these weirdos. So remember, everyone, if a young person suggests that something you said was sexist or racist or transphobic or ableist, these are the people who also think a thumbs up emoji is “hostile” and “inappropriate.” That means that your sexism or racism is only on par with the use of an innocent, friendly emoji.
Again and again and again, Republicans use lies to advance the idea that their supporters are the only sane, reasonable people out there, but that they are embattled and endangered by a series of threats coming from everyone else, all those other people who think trans kids should be supported or want to fight climate change or use emojis a little differently or are simply young and Black and exemplary. From the outside, it’s often bizarre and more than a little silly, but the effect is to create solidarity among Republicans, to tell them that only people who are like them in every particular way—down to the finest little difference—can be trusted or respected. That the correct posture to take toward everyone else is fear and contempt and aggression. And as we see again and again, the message is received.
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