52.2. Good Talk #11: Dakota Adams

"There are a lot of people who are attracted to fringe politics purely because they're on the fringe of society in general."

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If you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you know that I’ve had a weird career: a journalism major turned rural reporter, turned music writer, turned chronicler of modern far-right politics in the Northwest. I have no qualms about saying what I weirdo I feel like in most spaces; my resume certainly supports that.

Several months back, I was thinking about what — if any — coverage I would do in advance of the 2024 election. The only story I could muster any excitement about writing was about a long-shot progressive candidate running for a Montana State House spot: a 27-year-old named Dakota Adams.

You might not know who Adams is. But you probably know who his father, Stewart Rhodes, is. Rhodes is the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and engaged in a plot that led to the January 6, 2021 Capitol Insurrection. In 2023, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, among other charges.

The market for freelance journalism is pretty much garbage, so the idea of writing a magazine profile on Adams fell apart pretty quickly. I’m no pollster, and regardless of his chance at winning a seat in the Montana House, I still wanted to write about him. Stewart Rhodes’s life path — attending Yale, founding the Oath Keepers, appearing at Bundy Ranch, plotting January 6 — is fascinating and bizarre. And what it’s like to deal with the ripple effects of his actions. What it’s like to be his child?

Dakota Adams does not call Stewart Rhodes his father. He calls him “Stewart.” He is the eldest of six children and was, in many ways, raised to be his father’s protege: an ultraconservative militia leader who believed Civil War was imminent.

But Adams got away. He, his mother Tasha and his siblings have been very vocal about the abusive environment Rhodes created in their home. In 2022, Adams and his sisters told the journalist Jason Wilson about a harrowing escape from their father, and how the Oath Keepers crept into everything. How it “deformed our lives.”

This election year, Adams — who attends Flathead Valley Community College and works in construction — is throwing his hat into state politics, in part, to beat back the far-right extremist fires his own father stoked. He’s up against a three-term Republican incumbent candidate in a Northwest Montana district that’s about as red as it gets. He wears thick black eyeliner, heavy metal shirts and a spiked leather jacket to campaign events in a place where camouflage is the norm.

Over the course of two Zoom conversations, I spoke to Adams about his upbringing, his political campaign and his affection for a brand of fantastical heavy metal that was, to be perfectly honestly, totally new to me.

These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Leah Sottile:

I was listening to some interviews you’ve done, and one that struck me was an interview you did with WBUR. One of the last questions that the interviewer asked you was really patronizing. Like, “Dakota, this person you’re criticizing is your dad.” Do you remember that? When I heard that I was like, that's a really interesting, paternalistic framing about someone who helped plan the January 6 insurrection. It seems like so many of the interviews you've had to do so far has been like you reflecting on your father’s actions. 

Dakota Adams:

It’s what made my campaign interesting to people. Ideologically, the shape of modern American conservatism and especially Christian nationalism and the Republican party right now is very much patterned off of the same dynamics of a controlling father in an abusive home. Because it's all the same authoritarian mindset. The hypocrisy became impossible to ignore once I got a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. So like, it was very useful, too, when I started seeing the parallels between how Stewart ran the Oath Keepers board of directors and how Donald Trump ran his cabinet.

LS:

Tell me some more of your story — where you’ve been, where you’re from. 

DA:

So I was born in Las Vegas in the upstairs apartment of my maternal grandmother's house in suburban Las Vegas. I can recite this part basically at 2.5 times speed in a DMV announcer monotone by now: we moved roughly every two years for most of my childhood. Stewart came from a semi-grifter family background where my paternal grandmother was a real estate agent, multi-level marketing person, a pastor at her own, like, crystal-healing, Jesus dolphin New Age church³ that operated out of her living room. She eventually ended up escaping prison time for real estate fraud.

So that is the environment that Stewart grew up in, and the lessons that he took into building his career. And I honestly think that for a bunch of his life, Stewart has had a pathological belief that he has to be some kind of important figure in American history. Or like a savior figure, or part of the next round of founding fathers in the next version of America. His entire adult life, I think, has been building up his resume for that. Everything has been a line item on the CV. Being in the army — line item on the CV. College, having a picture-perfect family. My family exists to fill out his political and professional image.

So there was Nevada. Virginia while Stewart was interning with Ron Paul. Connecticut, Arizona, Florida, Montana twice.

I live just outside Eureka, Montana. We moved to Montana in 2011 and then moved to Trego Montana, which is a small town, well off the highway and into the mountains, in 2014. I'm still in the general area and I'm still on Trego Fortine Stryker Volunteer Fire Department. Eureka is the last major town before the Roosville border crossing at the Canadian border.

LS:

What's your community like there?

DA:

It's kind of at a crisis point, especially with the recent flood of out-of-state transplants buying up all available property. There's a lot of vaguely ultra-conservatives who are convinced that they're moving to a super Republican stronghold, which in many ways it is. But they're also, in many cases, very annoying to people who have lived here their whole lives. It’s like the right-wing version of when everybody found out about Portland is the best way that I can describe it.

LS:

[laughs] That hits me right in the heart.

DA:

You get all the people who watch Yellowstone on TV. There is a difference that you can discern at 30 paces between the people who live in Trego who habitually, as a lifestyle, go to the grocery store wearing a pistol, a giant Bowie knife and dressed head to toe in camouflage. And then you can see the people who bought all that just before they moved here to dress up like they live in the area, who just bought 40 acres to be their survival compound property.

LS:

God, that's gotta be so weird.

DA:

It is. There's been a lot of radicalization happening. Yeah. Especially since 2016. In all honesty, a huge thing that drove me out of conservative politics was the amount of times that I would have conversations where people would say, like, ‘I can't wait until the Civil War starts, so we could kill all of them.’ And I'd be like, ‘who is we? Why are you using we in this conversation here? I'm not a part of this we that you're speaking of.’

Eureka has always been a very conservative area. But it's snowballing on itself. There's a lot of people that are really, really concerned with pushing the culture war. There's a lot of extreme suspicion of non-white people that verges on outright racism, but it's always dressed up as prejudice just because they're outsiders to the area, or just because they're the wrong religion.

It’s very economically depressed and extremely dependent on hospitality and construction, which means that the entire local economy blows up and explodes and drifts away like smoke every time there's a boom or a bust in the housing market or the Canadian dollar exchange rate is right or wrong.

There's also a very strong sense of community, and especially in more tight-knit areas like Trego and West Kootenai. There's like a tradition of community service and goodwill towards your neighbor that is stronger than the overall prejudice in a lot of ways. There's the one house in town that has floodlights on the giant Gadsden flag and a Progress flag hanging on one side of the building so that it's just illuminated all night.

The people who are not right-wing tend to be much more left-wing, maybe as a reaction to the prevailing culture, and then also the shift that is happening with the youngest generation now. When my sister organized a pro-choice march on the main drag in Eureka right after the Roe decision was overturned, there was a surprising amount of honking and friendly waving from good old boys in rusted out pickup trucks and camouflage ATVs rolling past on the highway. North Lincoln County is not without its problems, but it's also very complicated. There is not — despite what people moving here think — there is not a single mold that everybody has been poured from.

It's a complicated area. There's also a lot of Trump 2024 revenge tour flags with Trump's head photoshopped onto Rambo flying in front of people's houses.

Leah:

When you see the far-right posturing stuff like that, and the out of state head-to-toe camouflage, how often are you thinking, like, ‘Stewart was responsible for part of this?’

DA:

A lot? I own that the Oath Keepers was part of this becoming a problem. But this is an area that ended up being targeted by the American Redoubt Movement. When Chuck Baldwin's Liberty Fellowship Church moved to Kalispell, it became like a networking center for all of the most fringe right-wing people in this corner of the state within driving distance. And through that is where Stewart met the guy who rented us a house in Trego in the first place.

Trego has been a place for people who want to disappear for a long time. The property that we moved to had been a survivalist compound in the 60s. And there was the outline of a collapsed bunker in the hill behind the house that you could see if you hiked up and looked down. There's a vast network of weird logging roads in particular and old forest service roads. It's a place that if you were trying to wage an insurgency against a conventional military force, it would be an area that's hard to hold, but also very hard to cordon off.

We ended up staying with this guy that Stewart met through Liberty Fellowship. He rented us a house because he wanted Oath Keepers command to start building its compound on his property, so he could be associated with it.

Around that time, people would be just staying in our house who were moving up to Montana to be part of the shifting of Oath Keepers people to this corner of the state. Like there was a time where I was like sleeping in a sleeping bag in a hallway while some dude was sleeping in my bedroom for like two weeks. These are people that Stewart only knew through communicating with them online while they were doing editorial work for Oath Keepers. There was always a rotating cast of weirdos living in the yard.

It was always an island of misfit toys for people who didn't fit in anywhere else. There are a lot of people who are attracted to fringe politics purely because they're on the fringe of society in general.

LS:

I think you're right. How much of all of this just a version of masculinity that was imposed upon you in your household, and has expanded outward to this area you live in? And the country?

DA:

It's definitely been weaponized. Stewart absolutely believed in a grandiose savior vision of masculinity. He was always harping about his self-sacrifice in putting the cross hairs of the New World Order on his family. Like, thanks. Thanks for making us associates of your martyrdom.

The term western chauvinist is very, very useful here. There's a very paternalistic culture warrior masculinity upholding this idea of a western cultural tradition that has reached its peak in the American constitutional republic and in all of the ideals that people like the John Birch Society claim to uphold. And that was absolutely enforced. That is what a lot of preppers are trying to buy when they stockpile their beans and their mini guns is they're better than everybody, not just because they're smart enough to see that the fall of society is coming, but that they're willing to embody rugged masculinity in protecting the themselves and their loved ones from the coming collapse while all these emasculated losers are going to die or be used as slave labor by biker gangs in the aftermath of the end. There's a cultural position of superiority.

It's become entwined with politics as an arena of combat, for dominating in a moral opposition where it's super crass and offensive and being crass and offensive is a means of dominating public discourse and asserting yourself in the public square. Like I have to be going on the offense with my identity to bludgeon everyone around me and control the center of the room everywhere that I go. Even for people who aren't necessarily in camouflage marching around in the woods with guns, it's a very militant kind of politicization that's been wrapped up with this image of masculinity.

LS:

God, that's such a great way of describing it. And it makes me think how if you’re from an inherently colonialist culture, and you embrace that, then even your personality is programmed to take. You aim to dominate every room you're in.

DA:

Winners win.

LS:

I know we have similar tastes in music. Let’s talk about that. I'm always very curious to hear somebody's origin story and how they got into heavy music.

DA:

So, like, this next statement is relevant: it's really hard for me to figure out when, if at all in my childhood, Stewart exhibited regular human behaviors. Because I, in retrospect, have figured out that there have always been severely-controlling behaviors that he exhibited going well back into my early childhood. So that pattern of behavior was always there.

At the same time, I do have positive early childhood memories of him reading Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia to all of the kids before we went to sleep. So it's like there was a piece of humanity there, even though there was continuing behavior that would bloom into being a full-on psycho later on.

But the upshot is that I still have Stewart's old copy of The Silmarillion around somewhere.

So I grew up, basically, in a Tolkien household, and I got introduced to a love of fantasy early on. And through, like, a reference somebody made to a song in a YouTube video, [I discovered] an entire concept album that was like basically a metal opera with spoken word intermission tracks dedicated to stories from The Silmarillion.

It’s Blind Guardian’s Nightfall in Middle-Earth. I loved it immediately because it was from the point in their band's history where they were really figuring out exactly what they wanted to do. Other people had done the fusion of orchestra and metal music, but they did it better than anyone. It was partway between power metal and thrash, paired with orchestra music and just like this sense of like enormous, completely unashamed grandiosity. It’s just really, really, fun. That was the start of me discovering a whole new world outside of old school country and Dad rock and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Until then, my musical exposure had been Johnny Cash and a AC/DC. And Linkin Park for some reason.

LS:

Linkin Park seems like one of those bands that really found its way into every part of the country. Like, everywhere I go, I always hear Linkin Park.

DA:

I think Stewart might have listened to the Thousand Suns album on repeat more than anybody else in the country. I think he just wore it out. He was kind of like an emo teenager sometimes where he'd put on the album in the car. He would talk about how he identified with a certain track or another as representing his emotional state.

LS:

I mean, I’m gonna be honest, there was a moment in my life when I liked Linkin Park. But I was 18.

DA:

He deeply, deeply, deeply emotionally identified with the Thousand Suns album. But we've sidetracked dramatically.

LS:

It's interesting what speaks to people. I mean, do you feel like Blind Guardian speaks to you?

DA:

Hansi Kürsch will write songs about just any book that he's reading, but usually missing enough specific references that it seems like it's a song about a real thing. So it also creates an emotional effect that resonates with people based on just the experience of reading the original thing. Like people have found in difficult times in their life, they’ve talked about finding emotional resonance within songs about fantasy novels.

Whatever media he's been consuming in the lead up to the album being released, it's going on the album.

There was also a really weird cross-connection with Blind Guardian I didn’t realize until later. The lead vocalist, Hansi Kürsch, was in a side project band with a guitarist from Iced Earth, another metal band. That guitarist sent Stewart fan mail all the time. We got copies of band merchandise and an early release of an album in the mail one time, and then Stewart completely blew him off. And, as far as I know, never got back to him. But he fanboyed endlessly over hanging out with Aaron Lewis from Staind.

LS:

Oh my God. What.

DA:

Aaron Lewis used to wear an Oath Keeper's hat while performing.

LS:

Wait, wait, wait. I think what you're about to tell me should not surprise me, and somehow I've never thought of it. I know about white supremacy in the black metal scene. But are you saying that there is like a subset of people in metal that are like into the Patriot movement? The Oath Keepers stuff?

DA:

Oh yes.

Leah:

Like who? Go ahead. Ruin bands for me. Let me hear it.

DA:

<laugh> Oh, I don't have a list of names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of people in the metal scene who are still supporters of the Iced Earth guy. But he went into the Capitol on January 6th because he was a Stewart fanboy.

That broke up the side project band that he had with Hansi, who's my favorite vocalist of all time and formally disavowed him⁴. Their side project was Demons and Wizards. They had an entire concept album that was about Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. They had a song adaptation of a portrait of Dorian Gray and just a bunch of really cool stuff like that. He was a really, really good guitarist. And it's tragic to me that Stewart dissed him. Like he didn't even get to be the favorite guy of the guy that he went into the Capitol for. He got dissed for Aaron Lewis from Staind.

LS:

I mean, I'm not surprised. Like I feel like metal obviously has all these egregiously terrible people in it.  The great example is Varg Vikernes from Burzum — total white supremacist.

DA :

Yeah. There has always been that element.

LS:

So obviously you’re running for office. Talk about what you're running on, what your stances are that you feel are important.

DA:

Yeah. So I have a three point platform and one is reversing the property tax debacle from this last legislative session. It's absolutely necessary. And it's also a huge hot button issue right now.

Then the second point is protecting the inalienable rights of all Montanans. That is across the board because you can't selectively allow trespass against one group of people without weakening everyone's rights.

And then the third point is to build a future for working people in Montana. And that's the largest scope and least specific part. And a big part of that, in my opinion, is affordable housing. Emergency measures for affordable housing. And that's stopping corporate landlords — that ties into my first point. In my opinion, the property tax was done deliberately to force poor families that own their land, and especially seniors on fixed-income, off of it to free up more property for sale.

LS:

But do you think the label of Democrat will get in the way for local people who have voted Republican for a long time?

DA:

Well, I'm certain that some people are just not willing to listen just because I’m a Democrat. In fact, I've had that experience. Not as many as I would've thought. And then also, really, to be perfectly honest, I’m trading a lot on the name and the backstory.

I've kind of been kind of surprised by how many people know me locally. Because, after a childhood of complete isolation and being like weird insular anonymous people in every community we were in, I've been out and active as an adult doing stuff in this community. Just a little bit ago, we went to a little banquet and got a certificate for seven years of service to the volunteer fire department. Got little pins. My spikey jacket is out of reach, but I put the seven year fire department pin and the little American flag pin that I got on the lapels of the band jacket.

LS:

Amazing.

DA:

That is just that first step to get past the immediate thought-terminating cliche, the shutting down and not paying any attention after they see ‘Democrat.’ I have an entry point I have leveraged to get past the initial shutdown and start talking that other people might not.

1. Leah: what is it you’re offering here? I’m so glad you asked. Read this explainer.

2. Leah: why are you doing so much free stuff? Two reasons: because I like you and I like journalism. Please subscribe and don’t make me regret my life choices.

3. Related: I have a new book coming out on this topic in March. Preorder here!

4. He has recently said his insurrection-y bandmate “deserves a second chance.”