Joe Rogan Backtracks On His Claim That School Has Litter Box For Kid

Say it ain’t so, Joe. On the October 11 episode of his Joe Rogan Experience Spotify podcast, 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,” you know, a non-human animal like a cat. Well, back then, I asked in my coverage for Forbes for any litter-al proof that this had actually happened. Others on social media essentially said you’ve got to be “kitten” me about Rogan’s claim as well. Well, it now looks like Rogan has done a litter backtracking on his claim. In an episode of his podcast this past week, Rogan admitted that “It doesn’t seem like there was any proof that they actually put the litter box in there.”

OK, that is a positive step after litter-ing the air with such misinformation in the first place. Rogan didn’t offer an apology on air but he did say, “The kitty litter boxes is a weird one,” on The Joe Rogan Experience. He continued with “I fed into that and let me. I should probably clarify that a bit. I have a friend and my friend’s wife is a school teacher. And she told him that there was discussions in the school that the mother wanted to put a litter box in a school.” That would be a bit different from actually installing a litter box in the girl’s room as Rogan had said in the previous broadcast. Rogan then mentioned how he and his friend’s wife had made some more inquiries and concluded, “I don’t think they actually did it.” Rogan went on to say, “I think there were discussions about doing it because there was one particularly wacky mother. It doesn’t seem like there was any proof that they actually put the litter box in there.”

Rogan may have voiced this sort of, somewhat of a, kind of a retraction. But was this a case of too litter, too late? The cat may already be out of the bag on such unfounded rumors. If you search social media platforms for “litter box” you’ll find a video of a woman eating out of little box and a cat running away presumably in disgust but also lots o’ claims similar to what Rogan had made. Looks like the claims have been coming in a fast and furrious manner. For example, WTCV News Channel 9 tweeted how Brandy Zadrozny, a Senior Reporter for NBC News, responded to a reader asserting that “students were accommodated with litter boxes”:

As you can see, Zadrozny asked the reader for that little thing called evidence and WTCV News Channel 9 tweeted, “For this to be ‘still true’ even though we haven’t seen any such report, you’re going to have to accept the premise that this happened in a school filled with students who kept completely quiet about it.”

By making such litter box assertions in the first place, Rogan had further amplified similar stories that Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Scott Jensen, MD, who’s running for governor of Minnesota as a Republican candidate, and other politicians have been laying out like a mulch spreaders. For example, during a campaign speech, when Ryan Walters, who is running for State School Superintendent for Oklahoma, asked, “have you heard about the litter boxes,” he got a number of yeses, as seen in this video tweeted out by The Lost Ogle:

Such stories seem to be perpetuating a narrative that schools in the U.S. have somehow gone too far to accommodate the different identities that kids may have. Such malarkey clouds and hinders the legitimate work that schools have been doing to be more welcoming to kids of color and other backgrounds who have long suffered discrimination in school settings.

Unfortunately, these days too many folks will accept what they hear from certain personalities without actually questioning it, asking for evidence and going to the source to confirm whether a claim is actually true. It would be kind of nice if personalities with any type of platform were to actually offer evidence or proof before making any kind of claim in the first place. Such personalities do have a responsibility to do so because whatever the heck they say has its consequences. There are people who are litter-ally hanging on personalities’ every word.