Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard spread the debunked internet hoax that students are using litter boxes at school
Spotify’s Rogan claimed that a school “had to install a litter box in the girls' room because there is a girl who's a furry, who identifies as an animal”
Written by Alex Paterson & Alyssa Tirrell
Published
On the October 11 edition of his Spotify podcast, host Joe Rogan and former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) promoted the online hoax that students are using litter boxes in school restrooms, with Rogan claiming that one school “had to install a litter box in the girls' room because there is a girl who's a furry, who identifies as an animal.” Rogan and Gabbard framed the fabricated story as “bananas” and “absolutely insane,” respectively, and used the hoax to attack President Joe Biden’s administration.
Rogan was seemingly referencing the persistent but baseless hoax that schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate students who self-identify as cats. The litter box hoax has been wielded as an anti-trans cudgel by prominent right-wing figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Chaya Raichik , who runs the viral anti-LGBTQ hate account Libs of TikTok. According to PolitiFact, “School districts in Iowa, Michigan and Nebraska have debunked claims that they are providing litter boxes in bathrooms.”
Notably, the litter box hoax has been used by other conservative politicians and anti-trans advocates to fuel the right-wing assault on trans youth and the institutions that aim to support them.
During the episode, Rogan introduced the hoax as an anecdote from his “friend” whose wife “works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry.” Rogan claimed that the child’s mother “badgered” the school into putting a litter box in the public bathroom.
Gabbard did not question the bogus anecdote, saying that Rogan's fabricated story was “absolutely insane."
Citation From the October 11, 2022, edition of Spotify's The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): How did anybody allow it to get this far? Who? Are there no adults in the room? I mean, that's a big expression, right?
TULSI GABBARD (FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE): It is.
ROGAN: That was the thing that everyone said we were going to love about the Biden administration.
GABBARD: Right.
ROGAN: The adults are back in the room.
GABBARD: Yeah.
ROGAN: Really? Like what? Is everyone out of their fucking mind? Like, we know children are incredibly malleable. We know children are impulsive. They decide, like there's kids — Ready for this? My friend, his wife is a schoolteacher, and she works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry, who identifies as an animal, and her mother badgered the school until they agreed to put a litter box in one of the stalls. So this girl goes into the litter room or to the girl's room and urinates or whatever — I don't know if she poops in it, that's pretty gross. Like, if you could teach your cat — By the way, here's the thing: If you could teach your cat to use the toilet, you would.
GABBARD: Mm hmm.
ROGAN: OK.
GABBARD: Yeah.
ROGAN: Like you don't want a box of piss in your house, it's the worst. I’ve had cats all my life. It’s the worst thing about having cats. You gotta clean that box of piss every day.
GABBARD: Yeah.
ROGAN: Well, it's the greatest thing about dogs. They go outside. Like, you're a fucking human.
GABBARD: The cat's got their humans trained.
ROGAN: Imagine how crazy that is. You're a fucking human being, and you prefer a litter box. You want to piss into a pile of sand rather than use a bathroom that you could flush the toilet, wipe yourself, like a normal person. Like, you're so crazy with what you think an animal is that not all of you said this, but you've conned the school into putting this fucking litter box in a girl's room.
GABBARD: Yeah.
ROGAN: Which is bananas.
GABBARD: It is. It's absolutely insane.
Later in the episode, Rogan and Gabbard again pushed the litter box hoax to fearmonger that the growing acceptance of trans rights will cause society to normalize pedophilia. (For years, right-wing groups have tried to smear LGBTQ people by falsely associating them with pedophiles.)
The two pushed the hoax again while reading from a Guardian report about a university in the United Kingdom investigating a Ph.D. student who had “written a research paper about sexual attraction to young boys.” Gabbard connected the paper to the litter box hoax, claiming that both can happen since “there are no boundaries anymore.” Rogan agreed, adding that the fictitious child who uses a litter box in school bathrooms “is fucking crazy, and you're encouraging that."
Citation From the October 11, 2022, edition of Spotify's The Joe Rogan Experience
JOE ROGAN (HOST): There's a normalization of all kinds of sexual attraction, you know, including illegal sexual attraction. They’re trying to talk — they’re trying to say that people aren't pedophiles, they're minor-attracted individuals.
TULSI GABBARD (FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE): Exactly. Go back, sorry, go back to that article, Jamie, if you don't mind, just — see that bottom part? It says — This is the guy, right? The guy who did this research? He says, “I happened to live alone during this experiment and I had newly become single after a long relationship. Those factors probably contributed to my willingness and eagerness to explore this method.” Sick.
ROGAN: That's so crazy.
GABBARD: Sick. This, this is, this is exactly — You know, when you don't believe in truth and you know, you're talking about the furries, like, you know, the accommodations for this child who identifies as a cat in school, then you have the minor-attracted persons. There are no boundaries anymore.
ROGAN: Right. The teachers in the school and the school itself should have said no to the parent.
GABBARD: Exactly.
ROGAN: No, crazy.
GABBARD: Right.
ROGAN: First of all, what are you doing to your kid?
GABBARD: Right.
ROGAN: That you let your kid, because they identify as an animal, Use a litter box. They're still a human.
GABBARD: Right.
ROGAN: Use a goddamn bathroom. It's sanitary. It's much better. Like, you want your house to smell like human pee? What if they eat asparagus and then they pee into a box? You don't think that's gross? You want to go into the bathroom and smell asparagus pee because your kid is fucking crazy, and you're encouraging that?
GABBARD: Right.
ROGAN: That's nuts, right?
Rogan has repeatedly used his podcast to spread right-wing misinformation to his millions of listeners
Rogan has faced widespread backlash for spreading bigotry, medical misinformation, and right-wing falsehoods on his Spotify podcast. But Spotify has determined that its platform rules do not prohibit the numerous dangerous and unfounded claims spread on The Joe Rogan Experience.
For example, Rogan has repeatedly suggested that social acceptance of trans people is a sign of “civilizations collapsing,” falsely asserted that mRNA coronavirus vaccines are “really gene therapy,” and baselessly suggested that a rally by the white nationalist group Patriot Front was “fake” and put on by “the feds.”
As The Washington Post noted in a May 2021 report, Rogan has “an estimated 11 million listeners per episode" and "reaches nearly four times as many people as prime-time cable hosts such as Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.”