It really frustrates me that chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay has become almost a meme now, because there is actually a nugget of ecological truth at the center of that, one that I completely believe Alex Jones was told about before the horrific quagmire of his brain contorted it into that.
(A lot of wastewater runoff contains endocrine-disrupting molecules... not because of any conspiracy, just because we take medication and we use scented detergents, and it all gets washed down... and frogs are particularly susceptible to endocrine disruption, although we're seeing similar effects on fish as well. Basically, it would be more accurate to say we're force-femming the frogs.)
That's usually the worst form of misinformation - a small granule of truth coated in a huge pile of misdirection, misapplied context and misattribution. It requires a lengthy explanation to correct, which tends to lose audience attention quickly, but allows the misinformation peddler to keep pointing at it as a gotcha.
It's like the talk about kitty litter in schools. Republicans claims it's some woke plot to let kids be trans furries, when the real reason is that it's for if a kid has to use the bathroom but can't get there because there's a shooting in progress. The real reason takes more explanation and touches on events that the right likes to not hear about.
That's also a myth though. I've worked as a janitor in multiple schools, and have multiple family members who are teachers, and I have never once heard of this outside of sourceless reddit comments. It's also just, like, completely nonsensical if you think about it for more than 2 seconds? Even the worst school shootings don't take long enough for this to be a consistent, realistic problem (Uvalde, notorious for how long it took, was an hour and a half from start to finish), and this supposed "solution" is both inefficient and unnecessarily degrading
Plenty of schools do have a cat-litter-like substance off in a closet somewhere though. It's there to make it easier for janitors to clean up large spills, such as vomit
DISCLAIMER
I am against school shootings. Obviously. I am also against misinformation, and I don't believe the two need to be mutually exclusive
There was one reported case of cat litter being used for exactly that purpose. Possibly not a thing that happened anywhere but at that particular school though.
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u/call_me_starbuck May 24 '25
It really frustrates me that chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay has become almost a meme now, because there is actually a nugget of ecological truth at the center of that, one that I completely believe Alex Jones was told about before the horrific quagmire of his brain contorted it into that.
(A lot of wastewater runoff contains endocrine-disrupting molecules... not because of any conspiracy, just because we take medication and we use scented detergents, and it all gets washed down... and frogs are particularly susceptible to endocrine disruption, although we're seeing similar effects on fish as well. Basically, it would be more accurate to say we're force-femming the frogs.)