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:
An entire right-wing news cycle driven by a single Reddit comment, incredible.
Replying to @RottenInDenmarkThey're not even linking to original Reddit post, probably so they can hide the fact that it's nearly a year old and doesn't include any of the claims they're making about it.
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.
Greta Thunberg.
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