The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts

Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.

By Samuel G. FreedmanSeptember 29, 2024

• Politics

• Biography & Autobiography

IN THE WANING DAYS of 2023, several months before Project 2025 catapulted Kevin Roberts into political infamy, the Heritage Foundation president was chatting on his podcast with a similarly polarizing figure, psychologist Jordan Peterson. At Peterson’s prompting, Roberts took on the subject of what “so-called progressivists” have done to higher education.

Without naming the institution or the exact years, Roberts alluded to New Mexico State University, where he had been an assistant professor from 2003 through 2005. He described a symposium on Ronald Reagan in which he and a fellow conservative asked to be included on the panel to “offer a balanced opinion.” But rather than include the dissidents, Roberts continued, the other members of the history department, all “big libs,” canceled the conference altogether.

“I think they were fearful of the facts that we would bring to the table,” Roberts told Peterson. “And so, […] if that anecdote’s helpful, it’s helpful in this way: that is just emblematic of everything that’s wrong with [the] university.”

In the same portion of the podcast, Roberts provided another account of his persecution. This anecdote referred to his scholarly expertise in Black enslavement, which had been the central subject of both his master’s degree at Virginia Tech University and his doctorate at the University of Texas’s flagship campus in Austin. “I’m decidedly a middle-aged bald white guy,” Roberts said, “which means that I could no longer, according to the powers that be in academia, be a specialist or an expert in African American history.”

On one level, the stories that Roberts shared in the podcast were entirely predictable examples of a victimization narrative favored by certain conservatives. His depiction of universities so dominated by left-wing ideologues that they cannot bear even one opposing voice on the faculty, his portrayal of a hiring and promotion process deformed by racial bias against white males—these are assertions entirely consistent with Project 2025.

The nearly 900-page to-do list for a second Trump presidency decries a “totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening,’” as Roberts himself puts it in the introduction. In that same essay, he accuses the federal Department of Education of “inject[ing] racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”

There is just one problem with Roberts’s versions of his experiences. The facts of both the supposed symposium about Reagan and the blunting of Roberts’s academic career completely differ from his retelling—or so I have concluded after about two months of digging into Roberts’s past life as a graduate student, scholar, and professor. I gave him the chance to correct any misapprehensions on my part, supplying a detailed list of questions at the request of the Heritage Foundation’s media office. After more than three weeks of waiting, and two promises of responses, none of which ever appeared in my inbox, I am going to take Roberts’s silence as a tacit admission that I got things right.

At the outset of all this spelunking, I had not intended to probe Roberts’s background for an article. I was simply a curious citizen and a worried Democrat. But in the course of following all the journalistic coverage and political discourse about Project 2025—a blueprint for turning much of the federal civil service into a phalanx of Trump loyalists and thus enacting an extremist agenda—I grew intrigued enough to read Roberts’s official biography on the Heritage Foundation website. I was startled first to see that he had earned his PhD at UT Austin, an institution decidedly not associated with the political right. Though it has taken some money from conservative oil interests, notably the Charles and David Koch foundations, its brand name is never associated with redoubts like George Mason University or Hillsdale College. Even more, I was struck to discover that Roberts had done his dissertation on Black enslavement—and not to rationalize or diminish its horrors. In fact, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831” has all the markings of conventional historiography.

So I went in search of both the written record that Roberts had laid down during his decade at Virginia Tech, UT Austin, and New Mexico State and the recollections of his classmates and professors. From them, I gleaned the impression not of a contrarian who had been ostracized and punished for his apostasy but rather of a diligent and gifted young scholar of well-known conservative views who was mentored, befriended, advocated for, and professionally advanced by unabashedly liberal colleagues and superiors. Far from being denied a career in higher education, Roberts willingly left a tenure-track position at New Mexico State, where none of the professors from the history department recall any symposium on the Reagan presidency having been formally planned, much less jettisoned in order to silence Kevin Roberts.

Several of those colleagues do, though, remember Roberts talking about beating a neighbor’s dog to death with a shovel. And, upon leaving New Mexico State, Roberts appears to have exaggerated his academic credentials on his curriculum vitae. More about all that later.

My purpose is not to play “gotcha.” The saga of Kevin Roberts the scholar may lack the election-year urgency of the investigative reports on Project 2025’s contents, the relentless denunciations of it in Kamala Harris’s campaign, and the feckless efforts by Donald Trump to dissociate himself from a governing manual developed by scores of his own former staffers. But there’s something revealing about exploring Kevin Roberts’s doppelgänger, his alternate self. Whether his transformation resulted from opportunism or revelation, it comports with the broader mutation of the Republican Party from conventional conservatism to a hostile, hateful brand of pseudo-populism. How can the Kevin Roberts who wrote with incision and sensitivity about the humanity of enslaved Black people be the same Kevin Roberts who, in the Project 2025 introduction, likened the United States’ ultimate rejection of slavery to his hoped-for rejection of “wokeism”?

The academics who worked mostly closely with that earlier iteration of Kevin Roberts have been doing the same kind of head-scratching.

“I’m at a loss to explain this transition,” Crandall Shifflett, a historian who was Roberts’s thesis advisor at Virginia Tech, told me. “Maybe it wasn’t a transition. Maybe he held some of these ideals when he was as a graduate student. If he did, he never expressed them. I’m at a loss to explain how you can go from an interest in African American slavery in a historical context to Project 2025.”

Matt O’Hara, who was a doctoral student alongside Roberts at UT Austin and is now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, echoed the same bafflement:

I started reading some of those [Project] 2025 articles, and at one point I saw the name “Kevin Roberts” and said, “No.” And then I googled his name and realized it was the same one. I was just surprised that this person I knew from this one context, either I didn’t really know him, or there was some kind of transformation.

Toyin Falola, one of Roberts’s mentors and proponents on the UT Austin faculty, responded to my query this way: “You’re not the first person to ask me that question. My neighbors ask me as well.”

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Besides Project 2025, Kevin Roberts’s recent notoriety rests on his forthcoming book, a militant manifesto entitled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, which originally carried the subtitle Burning Down Washington to Save America and a cover image of a lit match. Even with both the subtitle and illustration replaced, Roberts felt it wise to postpone publication until after the presidential election, presumably to avoid giving the Democrats another cudgel as effective as Project 2025.

But The New Republic did manage to obtain and publish verbatim the introduction written by J. D. Vance, and it includes a kind of origin story that he and Roberts share. It’s the one that Vance unspooled in his best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy—substance abuse, family dysfunction, financial instability.

A lengthy and detailed profile of Roberts by the nonprofit news organization WyoFile filled in more specific details about Roberts’s upbringing in Lafayette, Louisiana: father’s alcoholism, parents’ divorce, brother’s suicide, and the slump in the oil and gas industry that was the linchpin of the local economy. And the article, written with cooperation by Roberts, attributed his survival in part to hurling himself into schoolwork and academic achievement. This portion of Roberts’s life culminated with graduating from the honors program of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (known then, in 1996, as the University of Southwestern Louisiana) with an award as the outstanding student in the College of Liberal Arts. He wrote his honors thesis on the Confederate general James Longstreet.

As Roberts explained his next academic step to WyoFile, he had intended to concentrate on Civil War military history in graduate school but, finding that field already crowded, shifted to a focus on Black enslavement. The reason, he explained, was because the topic of slavery was “more PC.” That post-facto account, with its sneering phrase, differs significantly from what I learned in my reporting. It is one more example of the current version of Kevin Roberts distancing himself from his own body of scholarly work.

Rather than applying directly for a doctoral program in history, Roberts sought and earned admission to the master’s program at Virginia Tech. His thesis advisor there, Crandall Shifflett, told me that he assumed that Roberts had calculated that he might not be admitted to a top-rung doctoral program straight out of a middling university like Southwestern Louisiana and would be better positioned if he first excelled in a terminal master’s program like Virginia Tech’s. Roberts was committed enough to postpone his wedding date rather than miss the first day of class. (In Roberts’s written recollection, he said he forsook a honeymoon, but the overall point about his intense focus on his studies is the same.)

A scholar of enslavement and a political liberal, Shifflett took a keen interest in Roberts. And in his telling, there was nothing remotely coercive or cynically “PC” in Roberts’s ultimate choice of enslavement as his subject matter. At one point early in Roberts’s studies at Virginia Tech, Shifflett assigned him to read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1964 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The future senator was then an assistant secretary of labor in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. His report, drawing partly on the scholarship of Stanley M. Elkins and E. Franklin Frazier, portrayed Black families caught in a “tangle of pathology,” a preponderance of fatherless or matriarchal households that was the long-term consequence of the slavery system’s destruction of intact African families. Though Moynihan was serving a president devoted to civil rights and perceived his report as making a case for affirmative action, some Black intellectuals assailed him for racism.

Once Roberts had read the Moynihan report, Shifflett suggested that a historical look at Black family structure might be worth exploring—especially given that Roberts’s home city of Lafayette was then around one-quarter African American. As Shifflett recalled these conversations, Roberts needed no pressuring to dive into the subject. And two trends in slavery scholarship underlined Roberts’s change of academic direction. One was the digitization of numerous records of enslavement, which Shifflett had utilized in his own work. The other was the emergence of Atlantic World studies, which explored the interactions between nations and people on both the eastern and western shores of the ocean rather than treating the United States as a self-contained entity.

“In class one day, I mentioned it would be great to compare slave families during the same period in a comparative context,” meaning across the Atlantic World, Shifflett told me. “He took to that immediately.”

Roberts’s closest friend in graduate school, Paul Grady, was from a similar working-class background in the South. He remembered ambition rather than political pressure factoring into Roberts’s choice of a thesis topic. “Kevin felt after his first year that Civil War ground was so plowed over, there wasn’t something he was interested in that would stand out,” said Grady, who is now a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate. “If you really wanted to stand out and get to a top-notch [doctoral] program, military history was like great man history. But now you could get to the other stuff, and it was about race, class, and gender.” Even within the thicket of theory, Grady pointed out, Roberts took it as a kind of mission to individuate enslaved people, to give them names and actions.

The result was a master’s thesis, “African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870,” completed in 1999. Roberts traced the largest share of enslaved Black people in Virginia to four sections of Africa, and he conducted research into the common family structures in them, determining that kinship networks and matriarchal extended families were normative. Even under the duress of American enslavement, Roberts argued, African captives strove to recreate what was familiar. Far from displaying a culture warrior’s contempt for anything but the traditional nuclear family, Roberts depicted human resilience in a manner of which Moynihan’s many Black critics might have approved.

“By examining the family forms of Virginia’s enslaved Africans and African-Americans from 1730 to 1870,” Roberts wrote, “I contend that slaves preserved many of their family forms, especially the extended family. Incorporating African history into slave family scholarship will finally remove the albatross of the nuclear family paradigm from the enslaved African and African-American family.” He continued: “Likewise, by using a variety of records—namely, plantation records, runaway slave advertisements, and Freedmen’s Bureau marriage registers—I will illustrate how extended kinship networks among slaves flourished in Virginia.”

Roberts’s master’s thesis became Exhibit A in his successful application to the doctoral program in history at the University of Texas. “Kevin was coming along when historians of slavery were trying very hard to understand it more broadly, in a hemispheric way,” recalled James Sidbury, a professor then at UT and now at Rice University who was Roberts’s academic and dissertation advisor. “He read deeply in the historiography of Africa and Latin America. He was able to make connections that were impressive. He was always very open about his political ideology—we all are—but he was a very scrupulous scholar.”

Indeed, if Roberts felt alienated amid the political liberalism and counterculture remnants that characterize Austin, he kept those feelings well hidden. In his introduction to his doctoral dissertation, he thanked “Austin’s informal ‘Louisiana Mafia’—our beer-drinking cadre of muses that has tolerated my strange ideas about Louisiana history and even stranger political beliefs.”

During his years in Austin, Roberts described himself to Sidbury as being a “Karl Rove Republican,” which meant being part of the “compassionate conservatism” espoused by Rove’s most famous pupil, President George W. Bush. That would be the same George Bush who signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act and made his signature domestic policy the No Child Left Behind law, which, for whatever its flaws, was an ardent, sincere effort to close the racial achievement gap in public education. Roberts spoke to his classmate Marian Barber, like him a devout Catholic, of opposing the death penalty as part of “seamless garment” theology. That school of thought, framed by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago in the 1980s, held that a “consistent ethic of life” should guide Catholic positions on a range of issues, from abortion to euthanasia to nuclear war.

As part of his research at Texas, Roberts took a seminar with Toyin Falola, a Nigerian-born professor, on subaltern studies. That field centers on the relations between the dominant and subordinate classes or populations in postcolonial and postimperial societies. One might have expected Kevin Roberts, at least as he now depicts himself, to have recoiled. Quite the opposite was true, according to Falola.

“We tend to focus on the marginalized—the brutalized immigrants, oppressed minorities,” Falola told me. “I could see that [Roberts] understood this from below—history of poor people, history of slaves. He understood issues around marginalized identities, marginalized societies.” When Roberts periodically disagreed intellectually during discussions, Falola added, “he never attacked anyone.”

Most of all, Roberts impressed those around him in the history department with his focus and tenacity. “I remember when Emma Claire was born,” Barber said, referring to Roberts’s first child. “He would get up at four or five in the morning and help take care of the baby and then work on his dissertation and then go and do his TA-ing.” Another doctoral classmate, Timothy Buckner, put it simply: “He was this kind of model graduate student. I don’t think anybody worked as hard as him.”

In just four years, one shorter than the usual timetable, Roberts completed his doctoral dissertation. Three times the length of his master’s thesis, the dissertation traversed several of the ways that enslaved Black people asserted whatever small or brief agency was obtainable—from seeking baptism by the Catholic Church to rising in armed rebellion to performing African music and dances in the New Orleans tract called Congo Square.

As Roberts argued, “Enslaved Africans and African-Louisianans employed a variety of tools—cultural traditions, secret and overt resistance, and a distinctive ideology of politics ‘from the ground up’—to tweak, alter, and challenge the fledgling order that white authorities attempted to impose.” In other words, Roberts was not softening the portrait of slavery, as earlier Southern historians had done, but rather depicting Black agency and tenacity in extremis.

Even before Roberts defended the dissertation, the final stage of the PhD process, he had received not one but two offers of tenure-track positions. He accepted the job at New Mexico State, besting more than 100 other candidates, and took himself out of consideration at Ohio University. Once again, Roberts left his classmates kind of dazzled. As one of them, David Lauderback, told me, “He got a gig when nobody—nobody—was getting full-time positions.”

The Texas faculty continued to support Roberts even after he headed off to the campus in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Falola successfully recommended him as the author of a book about African American social and political issues, part of a series edited by Ronald Bayor, a Georgia Tech professor specializing in ethnic history. Falola also worked with Roberts to put together a conference on the Atlantic World from 1450 through 2000, which would ultimately produce an anthology that they jointly edited. James Sidbury felt strongly that Roberts’s dissertation could be published as a book “by a very reputable press,” had the newly minted historian pursued it.

The reason all this personal history matters is that it completely refutes Roberts’s current self-portrait of having been punished in the academy for deviating from liberal orthodoxy. Liberal classmates welcomed Roberts into their midst. Liberal professors set him up with the publishing prospects that are integral to a junior faculty member gaining tenure.

My point is not that Roberts was undeserving of the friendship and the advocacy—far from it, given his intellectual talent and work ethic—but rather that his own experience as a successful and well-liked scholar who fit in harmoniously despite his minority political view stands in stark contradiction to what he now writes and says about universities.

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Kevin Roberts arrived at New Mexico State in the fall semester of 2003 to join a group of recently hired history professors, many of them, like him, parents of young children. One of those colleagues recalled bringing a casserole to Roberts and his wife, Michelle, after their second child was born. Another remembered bumping into Roberts at a Renaissance fair. These generally liberal professors did not recount any ongoing political tensions with Roberts other than his complaining to one colleague who used a faculty LISTSERV to recruit canvassers for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign against George W. Bush. And that colleague eventually agreed that Roberts was right about keeping partisan appeals out of faculty communications.

Professor Jamie Bronstein divided the teaching of a survey course in American history with Roberts. “When he presented about Congo Square and Catholicism and baptism, that seemed exciting to me,” she said, referring to material Roberts had drawn from his dissertation. “It was good scholarship. And he didn’t give the vibe of being far off politically from the rest of the department. You wouldn’t think someone could cover enslavement and be so conservative.”

Elizabeth Horodowich, another of Roberts’s faculty contemporaries, told me, “I don’t believe someone with the radical views he has now could have contained them and been at home in our department. Nobody in the department would have subscribed to his attitude [of Bush-era compassionate conservatism], but no one would have objected to it.”

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the professorship at New Mexico State offered Roberts the prospect of long-term advancement. He was assembling the body of work to be a formidable candidate for tenure, in the judgment of the department head, Kenneth Hammond. And tenure at New Mexico State would provide the platform for Roberts to seek a senior faculty position at a more prestigious institution or one closer to his Louisiana home, if he so chose.

Yet, after just two years in Las Cruces, Roberts resigned from the university. Though most of his faculty peers were baffled—“I thought, oh, man, this is what we’ve been working on for the last 10 years, getting a tenure-track job,” recalled a fellow professor, Matt O’Hara—Roberts supplied a plausible enough explanation. He told Hammond that he felt out of place as a conservative, which is quite different from feeling persecuted or punished. And Roberts already had a different educational destination in mind.

“He wanted students who were more malleable, you might say. He saw himself going to a private secondary school, where the students would be better prepared,” recalled Hammond. “We’re a public university; we have a lot of first-generation students, a lot of students from poor families. Teaching here requires a certain commitment to the public-education mentality, and he wasn’t as committed to it.”

Roberts indeed spent the 2005–06 academic year teaching at a private secondary school—the Randolph School, near Huntsville, Alabama, which had been founded at the very time, decades earlier, when the public schools there were facing a court order to desegregate. Then Roberts returned to Lafayette to adjunct at his undergraduate alma mater. All the while, it appears, he was planning and fundraising for his ultimate goal: founding a K–12 parochial school oriented around a “rigorous classical curriculum” and conservative Catholic theology. That school, named for Pope John Paul II, opened in 2006.

Whatever the school offered Roberts theologically and academically, it also carried some material benefits. As headmaster and president, he paid himself an annual salary in the vicinity of $90,000. That amount was more than twice the average personal income for the county that included Lafayette, and it was nearly double a typical assistant professor’s salary at New Mexico State when he was there.

Roberts continued to scale the right-wing scaffold—president at Wyoming Catholic College, where he performatively refused federal aid; chief executive officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank closely associated with the Texas GOP of Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott; and finally, in 2021, president of the Heritage Foundation. By then, according to public records, Roberts was making nearly $700,000 annually.

I am not begrudging Roberts, who grew up in a working poor household, his Horatio Alger story with its concomitant remuneration. I recognize, too, based on reporting by The Guardian and New York magazine, that Roberts’s immersion into the right-wing Catholicism of Opus Dei and the Catholic Information Center provided the theological underpinnings of his mid-career transformation from compassionate conservative to MAGA culture warrior. People do change their minds along with the times.

But what sticks with me is the way that Roberts began to revise his professional history and, ultimately, to contradict his own scholarship. Take the anecdote that Roberts told on his podcast about New Mexico State shutting down a symposium about Ronald Reagan rather than including him. None of the faculty members and administrators whom I spoke to from the history and government departments—including the professor who specialized in the American presidency, Nancy Baker—could recall any such symposium ever having been planned.

The history department’s then-head Kenneth Hammond said: “I don’t know if Kevin is misremembering or if he is for whatever reason fabricating this story, but as far as can be determined, there is no factual basis for what he is claiming.” And as William Taggart, head of the government department at the time, recalls: “We were all in the same building. They (history) were one floor below us. We would have seen the flyers. I don’t recall anything about some event being scuttled.”

Whether deliberately or sloppily, Roberts also misrepresented his academic credentials in a curriculum vitae. The CV that he posted around 2006 on Squarespace, and which remains there, claims that he received summa cum laude honors for his master’s and doctoral degrees. Those details have been picked up and repeated in articles about Roberts, such as the otherwise in-depth profile by WyoFile. But here’s the thing: neither Virginia Tech nor the University of Texas bestow Latin honors for advanced degrees. I confirmed as much with communications officers and archivists at both institutions.

All of which raises a question about character. If you had been a stellar graduate student (as Roberts had), and if you had earned the resulting advanced degrees (as Roberts had), and if you had ridden those degrees to a tenure-track position (as Roberts had), then why would you find it necessary to exaggerate your accomplishments? Who were you intending to impress? And if somehow, to give Roberts every benefit of the doubt, the summa cum laude citations had inexplicably landed in his CV by mistake, why would he not have corrected that online résumé by now, nearly 20 years later?

“It speaks to his transition,” Crandall Shifflett of Virginia Tech posited. “The pure ambition.”

On the matter of character, there is also an episode that three of Roberts’s former colleagues in history remember quite indelibly, a conversation in either 2004 or 2005 among several of them in a departmental hallway, which was overheard by several others. “He came in one day and very placidly, as though completely normal,” recalled one of the participants, Jamie Bronstein, “he said, ‘I killed my neighbor’s dog with a shovel.’”

As another of his colleagues told The Guardian, which first reported the story: “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.”

By many accounts, Las Cruces indeed had a severe problem with unleashed, aggressive dogs. One of Roberts’s history colleagues told me that a wild dog attacked her pet dog while they were out for a walk; adding to her distress, the professor was pregnant at the time. Roberts was quoted at length in a local newspaper about being fearful of taking his daughter into his backyard, due to his neighbor’s pack of unrestrained dogs.

Roberts denied the shovel story in a statement to The Guardian as a “patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence.” But the on-the-record recollections of multiple colleagues represent something more than “zero evidence.” And perhaps the incident afforded a glimpse of the rage that Roberts has brought to Project 2025.

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In the nearly 20 years since Roberts left behind his career as a scholar of enslavement, he has periodically returned in speech and in writing to issues of race. His tone could hardly be more of a departure from the intricate, nuanced work on enslaved Black people that he had done as a graduate student.

Troubling assertions began to appear in his published work. Roberts’s 2005 book African American Issues—the same one whose contract Texas professor Toyin Falola made sure he secured—included the statement that the “abolition of slavery aggravated the pervasive racism across the country.”

Think about that for a moment: ending slavery made racism worse; the United States would have had less of a race problem had slavery persisted. In the introduction to the 2008 anthology that Roberts and Falola jointly edited, The Atlantic World: 1450–2000, there is a gratuitous swipe at “mere ‘inclusion history’ for the hollow sake of political correctness.” Still, both of these books were published by reputable academic imprints, not the right-wing echo chamber, and so the texts could not give full vent to Roberts’s evolving extremism.

Now without any such guardrails, Roberts in the introduction of Project 2025 approvingly invokes the term “popular sovereignty.” As a foundational concept of the American nation, popular sovereignty refers to a government attaining its legitimacy from the support and consent of the people. But if you know the history of slavery, as Roberts surely does, then you know that popular sovereignty is also associated with the purportedly moderate position of letting each state choose whether to practice enslavement—and thus, in the volatile case of 1850s Kansas, to extend it westward, with the prospect of adding even more slave states to the nation.

On a 2022 episode of the podcast History as It Happens, which is sponsored by the conservative Washington Times newspaper, Roberts flummoxed even the congenial host Martin Di Caro with several statements. While admitting that he had never visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Roberts denounced it as a “very irresponsible, inaccurate portrayal of history.” He continued, “The problem is that they have produced exhibits that racialize America’s past, that reduce each of us to the lowest common denominator” of race. You would never guess that it was a Republican president, George W. Bush, who signed the 2003 legislation to create the museum and returned as a private citizen to speak at its 2016 dedication.

Roberts did have firsthand familiarity with another historical setting that he discussed with Di Caro: Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello. The scholarship of Annette Gordon-Reed, buttressed by DNA testing, has convincingly shown that Jefferson sired several children by Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello. The historical exhibits at the estate now grapple with this profoundly exploitative aspect of Jefferson’s conduct. Di Caro had no problems with that focus, but Roberts emphatically did.

“So what?” Roberts said of Jefferson’s sexual appropriation of Hemings. While averring that he didn’t “mean this to be sarcastic,” Roberts went on: “I’m a historian of race and of plantation owners and of their enslaved persons primarily. That happened all the time. I don’t say that to excuse that. You understand that. I’m not being dismissive. […] That’s not the news.” Except that maybe it is the news, or at least some part of the news.

Project 2025—and the larger right-wing assault on Black history, DEI programs, and affirmative action in college admissions—relies on an inversion of the United States’ racial history. It depends on conservative whites to claim that they are the true victims of racial discrimination.

At a personal level, Roberts tells the same story about his academic career. He is the victim. He has suffered. And the whole academic edifice must be torn down to correct this injustice. That his story of scholarly persecution is provably dubious has done nothing to diminish its demagogic potency.

As with a number of his allies on the far right—J. D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis—Roberts has accrued political power by having it both ways. He has risen thanks to a top-flight education and then displayed his populist chops by denouncing schools, colleges, and universities. His own degree of hypocrisy may well be the greatest: while the other politicians benefited from elitist, private Ivy League institutions, Roberts is entirely a product of public education—the very same public sector of American life that his Project 2025 now seeks to demolish.

Long gone is the scholar who reckoned honorably with the United States’ original sin of enslavement. When Roberts speaks of wars these days, he refers not to the Civil War, with its prospect of emancipating the shackled and bestowing a “new birth of freedom” upon the United States. Instead, like radicals from the Tea Party movement to the January 6 insurrection, Roberts invokes the Revolutionary War, with both a promise and a threat. As he put it on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

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Featured image: Gage Skidmore. Kevin Roberts (Kevin Roberts speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona), 2022, is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.