Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc said he is “not backing down” from a claim that a New Hampshire school has litter boxes for kids who identify as cats.
Mr. Bolduc, a retired Army brigadier general who is facing Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, said the burden of proof is on the school to prove it is untrue after a parent and a student talked to him about it at an event.
Audio posted by CNN depicted Mr. Bolduc telling a campaign audience there are people who identify as “furries and fuzzies” and act like cats in schools and they have litter boxes available to them.
Mr. Bolduc defended the comments when pressed on the source for his account.
“I’m not backing down. You got the wrong guy,” Mr. Bolduc told NBC News. “Just because they say it. They need to prove it. Prove it. I got parents and kids telling me, they need to prove it to us, I don’t need to prove it to them.”
Mr. Bolduc said the activity was taking place at schools called the Pinkerton Academy, which hit back at the claim on Twitter.
“It has come to our attention that at a recent event in Claremont Don Bolduc named Pinkerton in false claims suggesting that unhygienic, disturbing practices are taking place in our classrooms and spaces on campus,” the school said Monday in response to the CNN story. “We want to assure our community that Mr. Bolduc’s statements are entirely untrue.”
The school invited all politicians to speak to staff or visit the school before making claims about the facilities.
Mr. Bolduc is hoping to pull off an upset against Mrs. Hassan.
The race has tightened, though Mrs. Hassan holds a roughly 2-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Establishment Republicans have winced over Mr. Bolduc’s rhetoric.
Mr. Bolduc once called New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, a “Chinese communist sympathizer.”
He also echoed former President Donald Trump’s view that the 2020 election was stolen, though he then said “the election was not stolen” right after winning the GOP primary.
CNN reports a number of GOP politicians have made claims about children acting like cats and using litter boxes and that the claim spread on the internet after someone said it during community commentary in a local school board meeting. It is described as a hoax on its own Wikipedia page.
Mr. Bolduc, when pressed by the NBC reporter, tried to point to broader concerns about education.
“What I was talking about is all the craziness going on in our schools, and this is just one of them,” he said. “I had a parent and a student in that audience who came up to me and told me all about it.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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