His dad led the insurrection. Dakota Adams is a DNC delegate.

Inside the Montana Democrat's long, difficult journey

Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.

The Democratic National Convention is now underway, and as I mentioned last week, I’m going to host live chats on Substack throughout the event. We’ll launch tonight at 8:45 ET and run through President Biden’s speech, then pick up again tomorrow. It’ll be available to paid subscribers, who will receive an email when we go live in less than an hour. You can also check it out by clicking the link below:

There will obviously be a whole lot to discuss over the course of the next four days, from policy and polls to speeches and strategy. So, in tonight’s edition of the newsletter, we’ve got the first part of an interview that is a little bit different than anything I’ve done before. I think it’ll prove really insightful for anybody who wants to understand the rest of the country, how we’ve splintered, and what can be done to chart a new course forward.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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Dakota Adams describes Jan. 6th as the event that finally awakened him to the truth, even if he initially slept through a vast majority of the armed insurrection at the Capitol.

“I was actually drugged up after wisdom tooth surgery, and I didn't learn anything about what happened until well after the fact,” Adams told me during a long conversation over the weekend. “My first indication that anything was happening was the QAnon Shaman carrying the podium around.”

Whereas most Americans watched in astonishment as the ultra-reactionary Viking cosplayer and hundreds of other Trump acolytes stormed Congress, Adams wasn’t totally shocked by the chaos that slowly came into focus. After all, he’d spent the prior two months watching the far-right movement cope, seethe, and talk about overthrowing the government — a plot led by his father, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. 

Not even four years later, Adams will be at the DNC in Chicago this week as a delegate from Montana and a candidate for state legislature. It’s one of the most unlikely left turns in recent American political history, done not out of ambition but instead a sense of personal accountability: Adams is running in a deep red district where no other Democrat bothered to even try to get on the ballot. 

He’s hoping that his unique experience and studied insights can help him make some political inroads with the sort of people who may have once followed his dad. In a region that counts camouflage and work boots as key fashion staples, that begins with not allowing becoming the party’s de facto nominee to alter a still-fledgling sense of self, including his work as a drywall worker, part-time student, and volunteer firefighter.

It also includes his decidedly anti-political personal style — leather jacket, black nail polish, long blond hair, 28-year-old Alice Cooper vibes. 

Deprogramming and Decoding

Thus far, Adams found that the aesthetic is actually an asset, because it connects with voters who are desperate for authenticity. It also helps that Adams knows how to speak his far-flung constituents’ language, even if he no longer shares their political partisanship. What’s more important is understanding the broader skepticism of power, which transcends any particular policy and offers an onramp to redirecting energy toward America’s real villains. 

“In an effort to push back against the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, because people tend to organize themselves and their thoughts and beliefs along party lines, there is a tendency to overcorrect,” Adams says. “Especially for centrist liberals, the tendency is to jump to the defense of the status quo or argue against any of the fundamental truths that underlie conspiracy theories, and that's where there is a lot of distance that is created.”

This is the argument for progressive populism as the centerpiece of a political campaign and broader identity, acknowledging and combating the very real yet often legal conspiracies that control our day-to-day lives. Think corporate monopolies and housing collusion, public corruption, and the judiciary’s alliance with billionaires and business interests — systemic imbalances of power that people intuitively understand as intractable realities even if they aren’t particularly familiar with the details.

The cost of housing is the dominant issue right now in Montana, where people are moving in from out of state and pricing out longtime residents. There are many different ways to approach that problem, but for Adams, Wall Street firms’ control of so many single-family homes is an important entry point for conversation.

“If you're trying to talk to somebody and you're coming at them with a completely opposing worldview that doesn't even adhere to the same basic facts as theirs, they are not going to be available to be persuaded,” he says. “But if you know that BlackRock is evil, then it's like, okay, so this guy knows a little bit, and you establish an anchor point of shared reality that you agree on as fact. Having that is absolutely essential, or you might as well not bother talking at all.”

In being an unapologetic ally to the LGBTQ+ community, Adams is refusing to cave to cultural pressure, as well as betting that the fear so many red district Democrats have will prove to be unfounded.

As Stewart Rhodes’s oldest child, Adams grew up in the center of the neo-fascist militia movement, whisked away from mainstream civilization at around the age of nine and steeped in his father’s paranoias and delusions of grandeur. Before that, he lived a somewhat normal life, in Virginia and then Connecticut, where Rhodes attended Yale Law School and played the role of the outsider.

Adams says that his father was investigated for a bombing on campus in 2003, one that his mother suspects he committed, and ran a shooting club called the Yale Law Gunners.

He ultimately went to work for Ron Paul’s campaign for president, bringing an adolescent Adams along to events and providing an early education in libertarian extremism. The seminal event that changed everything was Rhodes’s founding of the Oath Keepers, a group of gun-toting anti-government extremists emboldened by the election of the first Black president. 

As the militia movement gained purchase on the right and seized hold of the mainstream of the Republican Party, Rhodes amassed more and more influence, with the conspiracy theories that shaped his son’s childhood going mainstream. The national right-wing metabolizing of his lies sent American politics — and his family — to the cliff’s edge, which if nothing else gave Adams an inherent understanding of people most readers of this newsletter try to avoid.

“It's a basic fact that they all believe in the Illuminati — in fact, I would say it's gone mostly mainstream in modern American conservatism,” Adams said. “The vast majority believe in the Illuminati. They think that Bill Gates works for a couple of secret, literal vampires — literal, actual, physical vampires. You have to acknowledge that you're in that environment.”

In 2018, Adams, along with his mother and siblings, broke free of that environment and the isolated home where Rhodes often left them alone for weeks at a time, living in near-poverty and in fear of his physical abuse and emotional terror. It was a daring defection, complete with a legal order of protection. 

After more than two decades of indoctrination, the fringe politics, constant dread, and internalized prejudices were that much harder to shake. But over time, the relentless carousel of supposed existential threats left him exhausted and disillusioned, and his experience is pivotal to understanding how the iron grip of these extremist ideologies can be broken.

“The thing that eventually got me to say ‘maybe this isn’t true’ was the constant, nonstop [claims that] ‘the end of the world is a year away,’” he remembered. “Eventually it didn't seem feasible that the promised end of the world that was perpetually eight-to-14 months away was delayed over and over and over again when the initial cause was different each time. People just seamlessly switched to the next one and the next one and the next one to keep the high of being perpetually in fear.”

Without that doomsday clock ticking in his ear, Adams found it harder and harder to reconcile what he’d been raised to believe with what he was seeing with his own eyes. For a time, he remained a loyal Trump supporter, but it became clear over time that the president was as much a scammer as Rhodes. The feeling accelerated as Covid spread and right-wing violence took root in the summer of 2020. What was for many a gateway to the far-right conspiracy mindset served for him as a precursor to the insurrection day awakening. 

Soon after Jan. 6th, Adams recalled something said in a podcast dedicated to monitoring Alex Jones, the craven alt-right con artist who regularly amplified Rhodes’s call to arms. Back in 2019, during an episode discussing the Boston Marathon bombing, one of the co-hosts of Knowledge Fight predicted that the Oath Keepers would one day commit a major terrorist attack themselves.

“I looked at that and I went, ‘So now what else was I wrong about but was dismissing out of hand? Because I was clearly the one who bought the lie and did not see reality for what it was,’” Adams explained to me. “That has been an ongoing process of finding out how many of my unspoken assumptions that I've absorbed from my environment came ultimately from right-wing disinformation campaigns.”

Now, less than four years later, Rhodes is serving an 18-year prison sentence for his role as chief choreographer of the insurrection, and Adams, who goes by his mother’s maiden name and only refers to his father by his first name, will be officially voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Note: Adams and I spoke for well over an hour on Saturday in a conversation that touched on a wide array of subjects, each of them with enough depth that there would be too much left on the cutting room floor even if I wrote a longer piece.

Instead of doing that, I’m going to the rest of the interview in another newsletter later this week. I’d also love to run the whole thing as a podcast, but need some help with some audio touch-ups, if anybody is interested in lending a hand.

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