I did a small dive and found an account of an apparent legit case of a litter box in a school, but it was for an option for extended school shooting drills

https://www.denverpost.com/2018/03/03/school-shooting-preparations/amp/

And when you try and tell anyone who bought it they say there is evidence, while never being able to provide any.

While you're right about that being fake, it's just pandering to their base who do take issue with forms of self-expression that are common amongst queer, trans and/or autistic students. Things like wearing a collar, a tail or cat ears are absolutely relatively common and this bill targets those all the same.

The lesson here is don't troll these idiots, they'll fucking believe it and then start passing idiotic laws for non-problems.

Exactly this. Just like flat earthers (and that super bizarre one about time cubes or whatever), the rubes will gobble it up and eventually people will get hurt over it.

Another one is the Birds Aren't Real meme, which I think is pretty funny, but you just know that an innocent birdwatcher will get shot some day because an extremely mentally unwell person will assume that they're some government spook checking on the "drones".

These are the same sort of dumbfucks that absolutely believed the "LSD stickers/tattoos" bullshit way, way back and would insist on schools passing out flyers based on that stupid urban legend.

I remember being in sixth grade when they had a bout of that going around our school, and I was like, wait, what? And I had a lot of doubts. And that's when I was in sixth grade. Years later, you could look it up and see what nonsense it was. Anyway, I was at TWO different jobs where someone was trying to "inform parents" with some printouts they had about you guessed it, the bullshit LSD stickers nonsense. The first time, I told them "you know, this is urban legend, right?" I get immediately treated like I'm some kind of criminal that does not want to protect the children.

I suspect the bullshit around litter boxes will have a similar lifetime among those that are hard of thinking.

The lesson here is to actually troll these idiots, but with stuff that lead to idiotic laws so inconvenient that even their voter base will hate them for it.

Give them enough rope, and they'll hang themselves with it.

I always love using that example to dismiss some concerns about deepfakes sparking national conspiracies.

Nobody even tried to fake a picture of it. I've seen photos on lemmy of people shaving their heads in weird ways or making some horrible bean-themed food just for the karma. Throwing an empty litter box in an empty classroom takes much less effort yet nobody even bothered.