While "with a shovel" has an ambiguous antecedent, most are guessed to be reading it correctly. Guardian tells more than you need to know:
“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.
Two other people – a professor and her spouse - recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.
None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.
In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.
“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.”
The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.
“I think that probably 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.
Is it news? Or a metaphor for something else? Writing the Project - authorizing it, not writing directly - is an intent to kill bureaucratic jobs. With a shovel? Well, a tool you'd never think to use, e.g., a boring nine hundred page full rhetorical tome.
Another metaphoric possibility, he was making the point that if Kristi Noem had used a shovel instead of a firearm she might not have also killed her VP chances since gardening tools have less political controversy attendant to their use or misuse than firearms.
I expect readers could better those possible metaphors, but is that well spent time?
UPDATE: On reflection, analogizing the 900+ page Project 2024 full and complete multi-author text, to a shovel, is disproportionate.
Fitting proportionality:
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