A militant supporter of President Donald Trump showed up at a Seattle cat convention this weekend, apparently confusing it for a “furry” event as he caused a scene and accused organizers of being child predators.
Jake Lang, 31, is a MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist. He spent four years in prison after allegedly attacking Capitol Police with a baseball bat during the infamous Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, DC.
After receiving a pardon from Trump, Lang reinvented himself as a terminally online “truth-teller.” He began showing up at major demonstrations and tense situations, like the January protests in Minneapolis after Renée Good was killed by ICE agents, to stoke the flames and create more chaos for social media content.
On Sunday Lang turned his attention and “activism” toward a cat convention and adoption event in Seattle.
The self-described patriot was apparently expecting violent resistance from attendees because he was wearing body armor under his clothes as he confronted deeply confused gate staffers.
“You guys are indoctrinating the youth with homosexual and transsexual ideation. This furry stuff is not for children,” he yelled at convention staff after one woman tried to tell him it was a literal cat convention. “This is homosexual stuff … These people here, they dress up in these outfits and then they have sex with each other in these orgies every single weekend! Now they’re inviting the children to come to their furry convention. They’re mislabeling it!”
“This is a convention for cats,” a Sea-Meow staffer interjected.
Lang then accused him of using cats to “groom children into this fetish” as he walked toward a bewildered group of kids leaving the convention, gesticulating and yelling in their direction.
Lang was so pleased with himself, he did a victory lap and posted a video to X, crediting himself with “BUST[ing] UP a digesting [sic] ‘Sea-Meow FURRY CONVENTION in Seattle that was TARGETED FOR CHILDREN.”
Incredulous convention organizers tried to reason with Lang, pointing out actual felines – not “furry” fetishists – were the focus of the convention. Along with adoptable cats, Sea-Meow featured booths with pet products, family friendly entertainment and appearances by cat experts like Jackson Galaxy.
Lang could not be dissuaded, insisting that “sick Democrats” were behind the show and were using it as cover to assault children.
In a statement issued after, convention organizers said they were baffled by the confrontation and accusations.
“If anybody had done the minimum amount of research, they would have figured out this is a cat convention, and they were barking up the wrong tree,” they wrote.
Lang’s presence was due at least in part to messages circulating within ideological echo chambers on X that mislabeled the convention as a sexualized “furry” event.
Extremely online “influencers” have attempted to conscript pets into their culture wars, insisting that dogs are the preferred pets of rugged men who value loyalty while cats are companions to lonely women who spend their nights curled up on their couches with their felines and pints of Ben & Jerry’s while engaged in supposedly subversive anti-American activity like, uh, reading books.
Lang has been busy lately. Four days before he turned his towering intellect toward the evils of cat adoption, he crashed a Diwali event at the Seattle Center Armory. Witnesses told local press that Lang raged about an alleged scheme to replace Christian Americans with Hindus and used an offensive slur to demand the deportation of immigrants from India.
It’s easy to argue Lang should be ignored, and in a perfect world he would be. But on Elon Musk’s X, Lang’s post accusing convention organizers of being child predators has been viewed 6.5 million times.
Some of those people live exclusively in the ideological echo chambers that thrive on the former Twitter, and they’ll believe Lang when he says “groomers” are using cat conventions to lure children into sexually depraved activity.
While it might seem far-fetched that someone could act on that misinformation, consider the fact that a man drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington, DC, and opened fire on a pizzeria with children inside because he believed a conspiracy theory that alleged Hillary Clinton was using the eatery as a headquarters for a child sex trafficking ring.
Convention organizers said it would have been immediately apparent to anyone who looked at Sea-Meow’s website or signage that it was centered around actual cats, “so either Jake Lang’s team did not bother to research, or he is just a grifter LARPing as a conservative activist.
“If Jake Lang is really a Christian man, then he should apologize for his mistakes,” they wrote. “Apologize for shouting profanity in front of a family-friendly event with children.”
