After weeks of lobbing accusations of pet-killing at Haitian immigrants, Republicans are facing allegations of killing dogs within their own ranks.
Kevin Roberts, the current president of the far-right policy think tank The Heritage Foundation who has been called the “architect” of the Christian nationalist Project 2025 policy blueprint, allegedly told colleagues two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was making too much noise, according to a report in the Guardian.
Roberts reportedly made the comments at a dinner party in 2004, according to attendees who spoke to the news outlet. At the time, Roberts was a history professor at New Mexico State University. He became president of The Heritage Foundation in December 2021 and went on to spearhead the Project 2025 agenda for a second Trump term, which includes detailed plans for gutting queer and trans rights.
“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, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time of the 2004 dinner party, told the Guardian.
At least five other people, including four professors and one of their spouses, recall hearing a similar story either directly from Roberts or from people who said Roberts told them the story. In a statement to the news outlet, Roberts denied killing the dog, calling the story “patently untrue” and “baseless.”
“In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter,” he said. “ Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.” The Guardian notes that Roberts did not answer questions about why several people reported he had killed a dog.
Project 2025 is a 920-page policy blueprint that contains far-right plans for how The Heritage Foundation could change the face of American government if Trump were to be elected to a second term. The plan includes getting rid of the Department of Education; abolishing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which tracks hurricanes; terminating the legal status of Dreamers; as well as rolling back LGBTQ+ rights. Though Trump has tried to separate himself from Project 2025 given its electoral unpopularity, 31 of the 38 people responsible for the report were either appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration.
The Guardian was able to find Daniel Aran, whose mother lived next door to Roberts in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and who bred and sold pit bulls.
“I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs,” he said. When asked if a dog went missing around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female,” who he said had been his favorite. He added, “I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing.”
“I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that,” he said. “But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catcher’s.”
Marsha Weisiger, one of Roberts’ former colleagues, also told the Guardian that Roberts had mentioned considering killing puppies owned by a neighbor, as well.
“My husband and I were stunned,” she said. “First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it.”
News of Roberts’ alleged dog killing confessions come just a few months after notoriously anti-trans South Dakota governor Kristi Noem admitted in her own memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics that she killed her own dog, Cricket.
She writes that Cricket, who was about 14 months old, had an “aggressive personality.” After taking Cricket to hunt pheasants, and seeing her misbehave (by chasing birds), the dog eventually got loose from her truck on the way home and attacked her family’s chickens. She said Cricket behaved “like a trained assassin.”
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote in the memoir, according to the Guardian, and called Cricket “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” Noem said, “I realized I had to put her down.”
Noem said she included the story in her memoir as an example of her willingness to do things that are “difficult, messy, and ugly” if they need to get done. At the time, Noem’s name was being considered as a potential running mate for Donald Trump in the 2024 election cycle.
The story about both Roberts and Noem is ironic, given that current VP candidate J.D. Vance has, in recent weeks, peddled a lie that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, have been killing and eating the pets of local residents. Vance first made the claim on September 10 on X, then repeated it multiple times following Trump’s mention of the rumor during his televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Stunningly, Vance later admitted that he made up the stories to score political points.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash in a heated interview. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I'm going to do.”
As Vance and Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants continued to circulate, the city had to close schools due to several bomb and shooting threats in the town. Haitian immigrants in the town reported being afraid to leave home in the days following the claims made by right-wing politicians.
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