Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., perplexed many Twitter users when he posted a tweet Thursday night claiming that Democrats want to ban toilet paper.
“Republicans are working to put Americans First and lower the cost of living,” the freshman member of Congress wrote. “Democrats are busy trying to ban toilet paper and gas stoves.”
It’s not clear what he was referring to. There’s never been an effort to ban toilet paper in either Congress or any state legislature. Some Twitter users mocked Santos’s claim with references to imaginary bills like “the Ban Toilet Paper Act of 2023.”
Other commentators accused him of lying or noted the lack of evidence for his claims — some commenters obliquely alluding to Santos’s numerous lies about his biography and alleged lies about his campaign’s finances — to which he did not respond. A few joked that he had uncovered a secret nefarious plot.
Santos’s office did not immediately reply to requests for clarification as to what he was referencing.
One possibility is that he may have fallen for an April Fools’ Day joke. On April 1, New York City Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat from Manhattan, put out a fake press release saying he would introduce legislation to ban single-use paper products including toilet paper, paper towels, facial tissues, paper napkins and cardboard boxes.
“He fell for it big-time,” Bottcher told Yahoo News on Monday of Santos’s claim.
“I don’t know about you, but my dream is to live in a world where people look at a roll of toilet paper and say, ‘What is that?’” Bottcher said in his spoof announcement. The text included a few hints that it wasn’t on the square, like a quote from a fictional activist, “Scottie Cotton, President of CAK (Coalition Against Kleenex),” who said, “I prefer to think of it as bringing back handkerchiefs.”
A few social media users seemed to mistake Bottcher’s satire for sincerity, but most seemed to get the joke, as did local news outlets — one of which built out the prank into a fake news story featuring interviews with skeptical constituents bearing pun names such as “John Throne.”
Bottcher took notice of Santos’s tweet, impishly responding that “Our quest to ban toilet paper may have gone too far.”
Bottcher told Yahoo News he was surprised his press release had been taken literally.
“I thought long and hard about the best April Fools’ joke to do, and I picked something that I thought was so outlandish that no reasonable person would actually believe it,” he said.
This isn’t the first time the council member has played a prank. On April 1 of last year, he proposed banning all vehicles in Manhattan except golf carts — an idea that some unironically embraced and that he said triggered a few calls from angry constituents.
One reason Santos may have been inclined to take Bottcher’s statement seriously is that conservatives have been increasingly concerned that liberals will limit access to popular consumer products for environmental reasons. In February, right-wing Canadian author and professor Jordan Peterson denounced the “petty tyranny” of a sign in a public restroom encouraging people to use only as many paper towels as they need and to throw used ones into a recycling bin.
Santos’s claim may also stem from an atmosphere of growing partisan polarization and increasingly separate sources of information for the left and right, in which news consumers are likely to believe the most extreme, implausible claims about their opponents’ agenda. For instance, at least 20 conservative politicians claimed last year that public schools are putting out litter boxes for students who identify as cats, despite no evidence of any such occurrence. And a majority of Republicans believe, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through fraud.
On the other side, a meme from the progressive group Occupy Democrats that was widely shared on social media falsely claimed that a majority of congressional Republicans had voted to raise the retirement age for Social Security. (The Republicans mentioned in the ad belong to the Republican Study Committee, which has proposed gradually raising the age for collecting Social Security, but no legislation has come to a vote and it’s not clear how most of the group’s members would vote on such a bill.)
It is, in fact, true that toilet paper has a significant environmental impact, due to all the trees that are cut down to make it: The average U.S. consumer will go through the equivalent of 384 trees just for toilet paper in their lifetime. Deforestation causes loss of wildlife habitats and contributes to climate change, because trees absorb and store carbon dioxide.
To mitigate the impact of toilet paper production, environmentalists propose using recycled paper instead of virgin wood — but not banning the product outright.
The other half of Santos’s claim — that Democrats seek to ban sales of new gas stoves, an issue that has recently become a common Republican attack — is comparatively better grounded. Although neither the Biden administration nor any Democrats in Congress have proposed such a measure, cities such as New York and Los Angeles are phasing out the sale of fossil fuel infrastructure (such as gas stoves and boilers) in homes, and some Democratic legislators and governors have proposed the same at the state level.
In January, Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said the agency was open to banning new gas stoves in response to a growing body of scientific research linking them to indoor air pollution and related health risks such as childhood asthma. But after swift backlash, CPSC Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric said the commission has no plans to consider such a proposal.
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