...AND THAT'S HOW COVID STARTED, KIDS...:

First it was my brother, who works at a school in Colorado. He regaled me with a story from a recent function where multiple moms mentioned the proliferation of furries in schools and the grim news that some teachers were putting litterboxes in classrooms. Then it was Heidi Ganahl, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Colorado sharing that she was "collecting and distributing photos" of children who identified as furries. She pledged in an interview to blur out the faces in her binder full of kittens.

The furry tales compounded upon themselves in my Twitter mentions and DMs. They were shared by several other prominent Republicans. Last week the man with the largest audience in all of podcasting, Joe Rogan, got in on the action during an interview with former Democrat and noted furriologist Tulsi Gabbard.

"Are you ready for this," he begins. (I was.)

"My friend, his wife is a school teacher and she works at a school that had to install a litterbox in the girls room because there's a girl who is a furry who identifies as an animal and her mother badgered the school until they agreed to put a litterbox in one of the stalls. . . . It's bananas."

"It is, it's absolutely insane," Tulsi concurred.

So insane that it makes one wonder, is it actually true?

If it is, why does every litterbox story seem to be sourced by a friend's wife's CrossFit trainer's mom? Shouldn't there be photo evidence? Or primary-source documentation of the stench that curls toes?

Our friends at NBC News looked into the matter recently and came up empty. But is it possible that they are a corrupted part of Big Mascot?

We needed to get to the bottom of this ourselves. What follows is a Bulwark investigation.

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