Given the recent Kristi Noem violence towards her dog, it’s not too hard to believe such a story could be true about Kevin Roberts either. He denies it, and the incident is alleged to have occurred twenty years ago. Friends and colleagues recall Roberts bragging about the incident at the time. The Guardian tracked down the dog’s owner but he could not shed any light on what happened, just that “Loco” had disappeared.
Source: The Guardian
The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.
Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown 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,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.
Roberts denies this but then goes into far more detail than expected for something alleged to have occurred about twenty years ago.
“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.”
See, here’s the thing. If a story is untrue you just say it’s untrue, end of story. But when you embellish it and add details like this, it makes you look like a liar.
One of his colleagues was stunned when he told the story at a dinner party.
Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.
“My husband and I were stunned. 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,” she said.
The Guardian tracked the dog’s owner but he couldn’t confirm whether or not Kevin Roberts had killed his dog, just that it went missing and was never found.
