What Paul Pelosi has in common with litter boxes
What does Paul Pelosi have to do with the placement of litter boxes in public-school bathrooms? The truth might make your tail twitch.
Last week in North Hampton, N.H., the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, Don Bolduc, gave his supporters some hair-raising information.
“Guess what? We have furries and fuzzies in classrooms,” Bolduc informed them, according to audio obtained by CNN. “They lick themselves, they’re cats. When they don’t like something, they hiss.” A hissing sound could be heard in the room. “And get this,” he went on. “They’re putting litter boxes, right? Litter boxes for that.”
“I wish I was making it up,” the GOP nominee said.
Bolduc was making it up. He was repeating an absurd online conspiracy, endlessly debunked, that public schools are accommodating kids who identify as cats by providing them with litter boxes as toilet alternatives. No amount of discrediting prevents it from being asserted as fact by, among others, Republican gubernatorial nominees Scott Jensen of Minnesota and Heidi Ganahl of Colorado, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and rightwing influencer Joe Rogan.
Hours after Bolduc’s feline fearmongering, and on the other side of the country, an intruder broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, shouting “Where is Nancy?” (she wasn’t home) and attacking her husband, Paul, with a hammer.
Even as surgeons got to work repairing Pelosi’s fractured skull, the same sort of right-wing conspiracy mongers who brought us litter boxes were getting to work inventing Pelosi attack conspiracies.
Dinesh D’Souza (creator of the phony electionfraud film “2000 Mules”) and Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate fame) joined others in spreading false impressions and all-out nuttiness: The intruder was Black, or a left-wing radical. A third person was in the house. The intruder didn’t break in. Both men were in their underwear. Both had hammers.
Increasingly right-wing provocateur Elon Musk, the new Twitter owner, and Donald Trump Jr. helped promote the ludicrous notion that Pelosi was in a drunken dispute with a male prostitute.
It’s bad enough that Republicans and right-wing media figures are convincing people of these fish stories. Worse, they’re about to be rewarded with control of the House, and perhaps the Senate.
How will they govern, given that their supporters have sent them to Washington to fix problems that don’t exist? Their campaign speeches portray an America in which the economy has collapsed, the borders are open, violent crime is at a record high, teachers are “grooming” children for sexual abuse, trans athletes have overrun girls’ sports and school bathrooms are full of predators and perverts.
As The Post’s Azi Paybarah observed Tuesday, “GOP ads are showing a breathtaking disregard for accuracy and clarity, with Republican candidates and their allies twisting tangential elements into baseless or misleading claims.” Among the lies: Democrats are sending money to the Boston Marathon bomber, they’ve hired “87,000 new IRS agents to audit middle-income families,” and they will “join” Nancy Pelosi to “defund the police.” In the Republicans’ litter box, the false claims “are 100 percent and indisputably accurate,” purrs Calvin Moore, a spokesman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC affiliated with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California.
Moore might actually believe that — just as millions come to accept conspiracies that are demonstrably false: The 2020 election was stolen! Ivermectin will protect you from COVID-19 — but vaccines will kill you!
If you repeat a falsehood enough, more people will believe it.
That’s how the cat conspiracy got out of the bag. NBC News traced its possible origins to Canada in October 2021. The false claim soon crossed the border, surfacing at a school board meeting in Michigan in December, continuing from there and eventually finding a home in Republican candidates’ talking points.
Now the Pelosi home invasion is following a familiar pattern. Fact becomes fiction, victim becomes perpetrator — and, with repetition, a whole new conspiracy is groomed.