The head of a right-wing think tank that authored the Project 2025 agenda for a second Donald Trump presidency has been accused of beating a dog to death with a shovel, The Guardian reported.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, allegedly told colleagues that he killed the dog because its barking was disturbing his family. The alleged incident occurred in 2004 when Roberts was an assistant history professor at New Mexico State University.
“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,” Kenneth Hammond, chair of the history department, told The Guardian.
Multiple sources at the university also described Roberts recounting the incident at a dinner at his home.
Roberts, however, tells a very different story: “This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. 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.”
According to Hammond, most university staff were liberal and chose to keep their distance from Roberts because of his conservative Republican background. When he told them about killing a neighbor’s dog, many didn’t ask further questions because “people were not eager to engage with him over this.”
“It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.
Roberts is not the first prominent Republican to garner media attention for their treatment of animals. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, in a book published earlier this year, detailed how she killed her 14-month wirehair pointer because the puppy was proving too hard to train.
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