Kevin Roberts, president of the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Heritage Foundation, which created a conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term administration known as “Project 2025,” has reportedly bragged about killing a neighbor’s dog with a shovel because it barked too much.
One of the conversations in which Roberts spoke about killing dogs allegedly took place at a dinner party in 2004, when Roberts was a history professor at New Mexico State University.
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“What I remember him saying was he was in the hallway talking to a few other faculty members, including me, and he said that the dog next door was barking pretty relentlessly, keeping the baby and presumably the parents up at night, so he lost his temper and killed the dog with a shovel. End of story.” Keith Hammond said: GuardianHammond was chair of the history department at the time.
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Two other anonymous sources said: Guardian They said they heard the story when they were invited to dinner at Roberts’ home, and that three other professors had heard it from a colleague who had heard it from Roberts at the time, and who was so shocked that he told others about it.
Several witnesses said they found the story “disturbing” and did not question Roberts further because he is a conservative and was already something of an outsider within the police department.
Guardian None of these people noted that they recalled Roberts ever mentioning a physical threat from the dog in question.
A Las Cruces neighbor’s dog was a pit bull named Roca, who went missing in 2004, according to his owners, Danielle Alan and her mother, Norma Noriega.
Alan, who was 18 in 2004, said he had always been a dedicated carer for dogs. When asked if he had the dog that went missing in 2004, he replied: “Yes, of course. My little female dog, Loca.”
“We had one female and that was her. She was a tiny little thing like this,” Alan said. “She was tiny and cute.”
“She went missing and we couldn’t find her.”
Allan said he doesn’t know what happened to the dog and that the “dog catchers” have never found it.
Noriega said the family’s dog would sometimes run away, but he always brought it back.
“I had no idea what was going on with Roca,” Noriega said. Guardian“She disappeared and we always thought it was strange that we’d never see her again. [Daniel] I went looking for her but never found her.”
The Heritage Foundation is responsible for Project 2025, an authoritarian blueprint for President Trump’s second term. Written by former Trump administration officials, the 1,000-page handbook seeks to vastly expand presidential powers, effectively fulfilling Trump’s desire to be “dictator from day one.”
Project 2025 also includes training for partisan appointees expected to take over the roles of career government officials to replace expertise with conservative dogma. The document suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblical, social science-backed definition of marriage and family” and proposes removing a long list of terms, including “sexual orientation,” “gender equality,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights,” from all laws and federal regulations.
Roberts himself has called for a “second American revolution,” saying it would be “a bloodless revolution if the left allowed it.”
Donald Trump claims to be unaware of Project 2025, but his denial is less credible given his extensive ties to Project 2025 and the similarities between Project 2025’s policy proposals and those of the Trump-Vance campaign. Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the foreword to Roberts’ latest book, calling it “ambitious and provocative” and saying it “ushers in a new conservative movement.”
The dog-killing story came after Vance and Trump spread the rumor. Proved to be untrue Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are reportedly stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
Roberts denied killing the dog.
“This is a patently false and unfounded story based on no evidence,” he said in a statement. “In 2004, I was working in my yard with my young daughter when a neighbor’s leashed pit bull attempted to jump the fence into our backyard. Fortunately, the owner intervened in time to stop the animal before it escaped and attacked us.”
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