A trio of kittens helplessly trapped in an industrial shredder were rescued by quick-thinking maintenance workers on Long Island, heartwarming video shows.
Page A4From§Eachthe early bird edition — 28 September 2026
Kittens pulled from industrial shredder, screened for political affiliation before adoption.
As it ran on the front
Three kittens went into an industrial shredder on Long Island this week and came out the other side as video. Maintenance workers pulled them free before the machine could do what the New York Post called, without irony, what it could have "obliterated" them into. No one at the scene asked the kittens for identification. That's the whole appeal of the clip: an emergency with no paperwork.
The paperwork starts after. Itty Bitty City Kitties, the rescue that took in the shredder kittens, posted its adoption terms three days before the video went viral — on September 25th, not after, meaning the policy was already sitting there waiting for whoever came looking. "MAGA? Nope," the post read. "Conservative? Nope. 'I'm not political'? Nice loophole. Still nope." The rescue closed the exits itself: no self-identified conservative, no MAGA supporter, and no one who tries to duck the question by claiming neutrality gets a kitten out of that shelter.…
…(cont) Sit with the mechanics of that for a second, because the shredder and the shelter are running two completely different admissions policies on the same three animals. The machine on Long Island didn't ask who anyone voted for. It would have taken any kitten that wandered close enough — it doesn't discriminate, that's what makes it a hazard and not a bouncer. The rescue that saved them from it does discriminate, on purpose, in public, with a screenshot to prove it. The most dangerous thing in this story checked nobody's registration. The safest thing did.
None of that makes the rescue wrong to have opinions, and none of it makes the video staged — the kittens are still real, the shredder was still real, the workers still reached in. What it makes clear is that the softest story of the week, the one built to travel without controversy, was sitting on a landmine the whole time, three days old, dated, public, in the rescue's own words. The heartwarming footage and the loyalty test came from the same account. One of them just got there first.
The kittens don't know any of this. They were rescued once, unconditionally, by a machine's absence of judgment. Whether they get adopted now depends on somebody else's.
“The shredder didn't card anybody — that's the whole point of a shredder. The rescue that pulled these kittens out of it turns around and cards the next guy in line before he gets to take one home. Real "no kitten left behind" operation, long as you didn't vote the wrong way.”
“Look, a private rescue can set its own adoption criteria, that's just freedom of association — we've always said that about bakeries, we can say it about kittens too. Screening someone out for who they voted for isn't the same as screening someone out for who they married, obviously, I just haven't worked out why yet. Did I say that? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
· New York kitten rescue says ‘NO. F***ING. MAGA’ adoptions, responds to backlash from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.