Project 2025 mastermind bragged about killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel

Kevin Roberts, the president of the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Heritage Foundation, which created the conservative blueprint for a possible second Trump administration known as “Project 2025,” reportedly bragged about killing his neighbor’s dog with a shovel because it was barking too much.

One of these conversations where he talked about killing the dog allegedly occurred in 2004 at a dinner back when Roberts was a professor of history at New Mexico State University.

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“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” Keith Hammond told The Guardian. Hammond was the chair of the history department at the time.

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Two other unnamed sources told The Guardian that they heard a similar story when they were dinner guests at Roberts’ home. Three more professors also said they heard the story at the time from colleagues who had heard it from Roberts and were shocked enough to tell others about it.

Several of the witnesses said they found the story “unsettling” and didn’t ask Roberts more questions about it since he was already something of an outsider in the department because he’s conservative.

The Guardian notes that each of these people could not recall Roberts mentioning any physical threat presented by the dog in question.

A dog that belonged to his neighbors in Las Cruces was a pitbull named “Loca.” Loca went missing in 2004, according to its owners, Daniel Aran and his mother, Norma Noriega.

Aran, who would have been around 18 in 2004, said that he was always diligent about watching his dogs. When asked whether he had a dog that disappeared in 2004, he responded, “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female.”

“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” Aran said. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”

“She went missing, and we never could find her.”

Aran said that he didn’t know what happened to the dog and that “the dog catchers” didn’t find her.

Noriega said that the family’s dogs would sometimes get out, but they always brought them back.

“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened,” Noriega told The Guardian. “She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found.”

The Heritage Foundation is responsible for Project 2025, the authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump presidency. The 1,000-page handbook, written by a cadre of former Trump administration officials, seeks to vastly increase the powers of the presidency, effectively granting Trump’s wish to be “a dictator on Day One.”

Project 2025 also includes training for partisan appointees who will be expected to take roles from career government workers in order to replace expertise with conservative doctrine. The document suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” and it proposes the elimination of a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation,” “gender equality,” “abortion” and “reproductive rights.”

Roberts himself has called for a “second American Revolution,” which he said would “remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

Donald Trump has claimed not to know about Project 2025, but his denials aren’t very credible because of his extensive connections to it, as well as the similarities between the policy proposals in Project 2025 and what the Trump-Vance campaign is proposing. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), even wrote the foreword for Roberts’ latest book, calling it “ambitious and provocative” and saying that the book “announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement.”

The dog-killing story comes after Vance and Trump have both perpetuated rumors – proved untrue – that Haitian immigrants have been stealing and eating their neighbors’ housepets in Springfield, Ohio.

Roberts denied the dog-killing story.

“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence,” he said in a statement. “In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”

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