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Greenville County Schools Superintendent Burke Royster debunked a rumor that schools are providing litter boxes for students who identify as cats. File/Stephanie Mirah/Staff

Greenville County Schools Superintendent Burke Royster debunked a rumor that schools are providing litter boxes for students who identify as cats. File/Stephanie Mirah/Staff

No, Greenville and Horry County schools aren’t setting out litter boxes for students who identify as cats.

None of their students are "meowing" their answers in class, or wearing collars. Well, not because of this anyway.

All that would be hilarious — if it wasn’t terrifying that some people are hopelessly gullible enough to believe such nonsense.

In fact, two people considered this so purr-fectly plausible that they weren’t embarrassed to ask publicly about it at a recent school board meeting.

As The Post and Courier’s Sara Gregory reports, Greenville schools Superintendent Burke Royster last week had to address this “categorically false” rumor after two women made those wild claims at the school board. Horry County schools have gotten similar inquiries.

“I never imagined that I would have to deliver this kind of superintendent’s report,” Royster said. “The kinds of things that have circulated on social media and that we have read about are absolutely not the kinds of things happening in our schools.”

Now, these women hadn’t spied any scratching posts in classrooms, nor had they been asked for “Tidy Cats” on any teachers’ supply list. They just read it on the internet and ... bought it.

They'd better hope no Nigerian princes have their email addresses.

This debunked (declawed) cat stuff has been scratching around the internet a while, and is somehow loosely tied to “furries” (seriously, don’t ask). It’s been co-opted as part of the ongoing campaign to stir up voters about transgender people.

Which means it’s like much of this culture war nonsense — largely internet baloney. Some of the folks wringing their hands about “critical race theory” need to brush up on their “critical thinking skills.”

Because they are being played.

This sort of disinformation is not just disingenuous, it's dangerous. A few years back, one guy shot up a D.C. pizza joint after internet trolls claimed the restaurant was running a child trafficking ring out of its basement. The place didn’t have a basement, much less a trafficking ring.

In the June primaries, several Charleston County election workers reported threats from people who interfered with voting and suggested workers were rigging the results. Wonder where they got that crazy idea?

And on Monday, several national health care organizations asked the Justice Department to investigate a rising number of threats against doctors and hospitals based on transgender medical care conspiracy theories. Which has become a problem at MUSC.

Last week, a number of questionable sources claimed the hospital is performing sex-change operations on kids. Which, of course, isn’t true.

The people spreading this stuff (which included some political candidates) took a graduate student’s research paper about the hospital’s Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic and conflated several disparate facts to suggest the hospital was helping kids as young as 4 to "transition." Again, malarkey.

MUSC does not provide gender-affirming surgical care to anyone under 18, and doesn’t treat any minor without parental consent. The paper was based on historical data, before current state laws passed, and is just a student’s position anyway — not the hospital’s.

Kids go to that clinic when they have thyroid problems and the like. Doctors refer most of the clinic's patients, usually when they have hormonal imbalances — maladies that can sometimes lead to suicide attempts.

But MUSC isn’t cutting on kids or encouraging them to change their sex.

That hasn't stopped several Republican state lawmakers from demanding an investigation of the state hospital. Great use of state time there.

You can bet those guys don’t understand the medical issues, and can't even define "endocrinology." They've already demonstrated that they don’t understand the human reproductive system.

But the facts don't matter, because the point is simply to stir up the gullible and get them to vote.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and existed long before the internet. But they were almost charming when it was just a bunch of cranks arguing that the moon landing was faked or the Earth was flat (especially when the Flat Earth Society claimed to have members “around the globe”).

But now they're used to advance radical political agendas, and some people will believe anything they see online, or cable news ... if it conforms to their belief that the world’s gone mad. In some ways, it has.

Trouble is, if politicians and internet trolls don’t stop weaponizing gullibility, somebody’s going to get hurt.

Folks would be much better off checking with reputable news sources than some guy named Gus (or Ivan) on Facebook. But this is where we are.

The only way to neuter all these disinformation campaigns is at the ballot box. A good rule of thumb: Vote against anyone spreading rumors that clearly came out of the nearest litter box.

Reach Brian Hicks at bhicks@postandcourier.com.

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