Journalist Malcolm Harris was having a “weird” week when he said he found an abandoned Project 2025-branded duffle bag in his Capitol Hill neighborhood. But when Harris started posting about the bag online, things reportedly got even weirder.
Harris claimed on X that he found the bag during a nighttime walk on Aug. 9, and he posted that it was full of Project 2025 swag, including a water bottle, and a “Trump Save America” emblem.
“Looks like someone from Heritage’s Young Leadership Program wasn’t excited about walking around DC with this swag bag,” he wrote in an Aug. 12 post.
In another, allegedly showing the contents of the bag, he added, “Vast right-wing conspiracy starter pack.”
When Harris posted that he was thinking about turning the documents inside the bag over to a journalist, a Project 2025 staffer supposedly called the police on him and reported the bag stolen. The police showed up at his home on Tuesday.
“I don’t talk to the police, so we didn’t have a very long conversation,” said Harris, who identifies as a Marxist and has written several books, including Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023) and Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (2017).
Harris told the Post about the contents of the bag, “It’s not like I found secret internal documents about Project 2025,” Harris said. “It’s not that crazy; it’s like, ‘Whoops, they left this out.’”
According to the Post, the time between when the bag was last seen and found didn’t exactly match up. But upon learning about the police investigation into the bag’s whereabouts, Harris walked the bag to The Heritage Foundation’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., but not before posting more about the absurdity of the situation.
“Here’s a story about my weird week,” he posted about his interview with the Washington Post.
In another post in front of The Heritage Foundation, he added: “Wanna see a scary image from a different timeline?”
“How does someone file a police report accusing theft when they left it out on public property and just walked away?????” wrote @ohkirsten under the post.
“This is like something out of Burn After Reading lol” wrote @ChrisKattan4eva.
In a reply, Harris wrote: “I had the balls to walk over with the bag and deal with Heritage security myself. They, on the other hand, called the police because they lost a bag and I found it.”
