Bulwark Takes - Texas Republican Proposes A Ban On Children Barking? What?

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Tim Miller & Will Sommer break down the wild conspiracy that kids in schools are identifying as cats and using litter boxes. Spoiler: It’s NOT true. A new Texas bill banning “non-human behavior” in schools—because apparently, kids pretending to be animals is now a legislative issue.  A Crack in Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire  https://www.thebulwark.com/p/mysterious-exit-daily-wire-ceo-jeremy-boreing-ben-shapiro  MAGA Brocasters Grow Suspicious of the Jews  https://www.thebulwark.com/p/maga-brocasters-grow-suspicious-of-the-jews-joe-rogan-theo-von-antisemitism  Furrygate: A Litterbox of Lies https://www.thebulwark.com/p/furrygate-a-litterbox-of-lies?utm_source=publication-search

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here with Will Sommer, our newest team member, focusing on what's happening on the far right and crazy MAGA world and conspiracy land. And one of my favorite MAGA conspiracies, the idea that there's this rampant trend of kids pretending to be cats and pissing in litter boxes in schools all over the country. This has reared its little cat ears one more time with a bill in Texas.

And I want to tell you about the insanity going on in Texas. But first, well, you got a new newsletter for us. We cover all this craziness called false flag. People can get it at the bulwark.com. It comes out on Thursday morning. So what do you got for us today?

What do you got this week? We have the mysterious shakeup at Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire. His CEO, who is supposed to be this kind of titan of conservative media, $200 million company, suddenly steps down mysteriously. And there's a lot of speculation. I'm trying to figure it out. But in the meantime, you know, we have a lot of, did they spend too much money on a kind of Game of Thrones knockoff? You know, there's all kinds of interesting uh things to look into i'd noticed that uh some of the stars that created brett cooper candace owens kind of dunking on him after the firing well he's a guy who's made a lot of enemies you know which is the perfect guy to cover all right well uh check out

for more uh will's false flag uh he also did his first newsletter a couple of days ago focused on Tim Pool, another another MAGA podcaster having an alleged encounter at a Cracker Barrel with Antifa skaters. Texas. We've got this guy, Stan Gerties, state rep in Texas, and he's introduced a bill to ban non-human behavior in public schools, such as barking, meowing, and other animal-like practices commonly used by furries. It is called the Furries Act. I've been tracking this for a long time. We'll put this up on the screen here. Here's October 22. I wrote this article for the Bullwark, Furry Gate, A Litter Box of Lies, where I really tried to figure out what was the genesis of this? Why does this happen?

I don't know about you, Will, but I have non-political moms in my life bring this up to me. I was at a crawfish boil, and one of the moms like, you know, I'm a little worried about the kids in the cat ears pretending to be cats. And I'm like, this is not a thing. Kids are not peeing in litter boxes in schools. There's no evidence of this anywhere. And yet there's now a, you know, a proposed bill in Texas. What, what, what,

what do you know about this? Have you been, have you been obsessed over this as much as me? Yeah. I, I've certainly tried to get to the bottom of, you know, with this unfolding national issue. You know, it's certainly evocative, right? I mean, so, you know, as you've written for several years now, this has been a sort of an urban legend, I guess we could call it, that's become very political. And people will casually say, well, I heard that at sort of the neighboring school, or the school two counties over, that there are all these you know self-identified furries who believe that they're cats uh and i think the main instance and they need a litter box and so it's sort of like i guess the it's sort of an outgrowth of like the

like trans bathroom issue um but but sort of taken to to even further extreme yeah i um the the thing that the the thing that got the closest which is this is getting dark. So this is one of these stories. It's like 80% funny, 10% dark, 10% a little scary on the free speech. So we'll get to all that. Here's the dark part. The thing I found was that there was an instance of a school that had a litter box. Seems like kind of a dumb idea that they did this but it wasn't because the kids were identifying as cats it was because they were worried if there was a lockdown that they would have like some some fucking administrator got the idea that if there was like a shooter and there was a lockdown they should have cat litter on campus really dumb in its own right

also speaks to kind of the horrifying american reality but um but yeah no no evidence of like a kid getting on all fours and peeing you never found any of that at the daily beast no i mean and i obviously you looked into this really extensively i mean there are all these examples of of people saying or it's like a specific school and they're like a rumor starts on facebook that it's happening at the school and consistently every time the school says this is just totally made up yeah joe rogan did this and it's all in every situation it's always the same it's like you know oftentimes in the case rogan's like somebody without a kid it's like oh my friend you know said that their friend sally told them that at their school it's a problem right like it's always like one of these you

know games of telephone examples it's it's and anytime you try to track it down it's never somebody being like i it's me like i have seen it i have evidence you know it's always somebody told me somebody told me all right i want to get into this bill because i i actually think this is to me in some ways this this uh is reminiscent of the of the big fight around the don't say gay bills remember that and and one thing that frustrated me about the don't say gay bills is a lot of the like legislation like was harmful because it felt like it was not written by people who had any experience with seven-year-olds you know or had forgotten what seven-year-olds are like you know like so i've got a seven-year-old you know she's got two dads like we come into the school like seven-year-olds are curious like the other kids

on the playground are like why does he have why does she have two dads like why like that you know what i mean like they ask the teachers questions and so to create a bill that would ban the teachers from talking about that like doesn't you know like in their minds they made the bill as if it was like oh teachers shouldn't be teaching kids about you know gay sex clubs or whatever like the history of homosexuality in kindergarten it's like yeah but sure but like still like sometimes things come up in which i do so it's this is kind of a similar case there's a restriction on students here students cannot wear tails leashes collars restriction on students here. Students cannot wear tails, leashes, collars, non-human accessories. They cannot wear accessories designed for pets,

no animal ears. They cannot make animal noises such as barking, meowing, or hissing. They cannot lick oneself for grooming. The punishment of this is real. Students who violate this could face placement in a juvenile justice education program. Educators who fail to enforce the law could face fines with penalties up to $10,000. A teacher could get fined for $10,000 if they don't stop the barking in class. Literally, have you met a seven-year-old, Stan Gerties? Seven-year-olds like to bark and pretend to be animals. Seven-year-olds love pretending to be animals. My kid comes home from school every day and is like, can and pretend to be animals. Seven year olds love pretending to be animals. That's what my kid comes over from school every day is like,

can we pretend to be bears today? And it's not, they're not identifying as a fucking bear. They're just being a child using their imagination. You have children. Will, am I, have I,

am I off the off base here? No, I mean, I totally agree. It's crazy. I mean, the, the,

the part of the bill that specifically says, you know, kids cannot make, uh, make hissing or meow. I mean, that's, they in the bill that specifically says you know kids cannot make uh make hissing or meow i mean that's they're gonna arrest like you know half the seven-year-olds in texas i think i had wes moore on the pod today and he said he got arrested when he was 11 for uh uh for what he called tagging um and they said they handcuffed him when he was 11. i mean this is great this is great we're gonna be handcuffing you know we're gonna be handcuffing eight-year-olds because they want to pretend that they're a character in Paw Patrol.

Like the whole thing. Oh, I hadn't even considered the Paw Patrol aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah. And the Paw Patrol thing is huge. Yeah. And so, you know, this is also related to these other Republican bills you've been covering. We're like, these guys, they're very fond of like suing now to lawsuits are very much in vogue, right? Where it's like, oh, yeah, if the if the

school doesn't do this, like the craziest mother, or father, sorry to pick on the moms, the craziest parent could come to the school and sue them. Because, you know, they read the gay penguin book or because, you know, the kids are hissing and meowing. I mean, like it leads to a very bad potential place. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the, you know, you think on one hand, well, you know, what teacher would really care if kids are barking? But then they include these just like brutal punishments

in terms of the fines, you know, much less like the criminal aspect of it. And it's just very – the whole thing, I mean down to the individual behaviors is very bizarre. All right. So just to be clear if you're watching because I've even heard from some liberal parents about this. Sometimes these urban legends catch on. There's no evidence of this. Some kids do like to wear cat ears.

That's kind of in trend. There is kind of a thing now with, you know, what's called anime. You know, people do like, kids do like to dress up as characters. But it's not a trans thing. They don't think that they're a cat. They're not growing up to be a cat. They don't want to pee in a litter box. It's just children being children.

We should not sit on their imagination. Will, I'm going to ask you to kind of take us out because I also like to play imagination. But do you have any other final thoughts? Yeah, I just had a couple quickly. I mean, one thing about this bill is it's – one thing about the bill is that it says, you know, kids can only dress up in celebration of human history. So, you know, if you want to talk about the great whale migration, the bear wars, whatever, you know, none of that. And then the other aspect is Stan Gerties. I looked into him in particular. It seems like he's been getting a lot of heat from his like local Republican parties for not

being hard right enough. And so I suspect maybe this is kind of like he's tossing some meat to the base. He's like, look, I banned, I banned the furries. Come for me, Stan Gurdies. I dare you. I dare you. Come for us. Send the cops. All right. Thank you, everybody.

Subscribe to the feed. Will, you take us out because they might not be able to hear me. All right. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for subscribing. Check out the bulwark.