Dakota Adams charts his own path

The estranged son of Oath Keepers' founder Stewart Rhodes is running for the state legislature as a progressive Democrat.

Courtesy of Dakota Adams

Welcome to Big Sky Chat House— a newsletter of candid conversations with movers and shakers in Montana.

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Just a few years ago, Dakota Adams looked at the world from a very different vantage point than he does now.

Adams, who is the estranged son of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, grew up steeped in his father’s far-right militia movement. As he tells it, Adams spent much of his life "absolutely believing" in his father's worldview, which he described to the BBC as a paranoid reaction to a perceived “shadowy, malicious Communist conspiracy seeking to institute a New World Order…aiming to seize total power and institute a one world government that would intentionally sow chaos.”

In 2018, Adams, his mother and his siblings escaped from the hyper-toxic environment that his father had created and started a new chapter of their lives. Now 27, Adams lives near Eureka. He studies political science at Flathead Valley Community College and works in construction. (Rhodes is currently serving an 18 year sentence on charges of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 riots.)

Last November, Adams announced a run for the state legislature in House District 1, as a self-described progressive Democrat. He will face Republican incumbent Neil Duram. (Duram currently represents HD 2, but, due to redistricting, he will be running in HD 1 this November.)

Adams has written at length about his upbringing and his own political metamorphosis. While pieces of his past inevitably found their way into our conversation, I was keen to ask him primarily about his campaign. Read on as Adams digs into what motivated him to run for public office, why he sees the Montana GOP’s majority as “very vulnerable” and more. At the end of our interview, Adams addresses the dramatic differences he sees between left- and right-wing political extremism.

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Max: Tell me about your decision to run for office.

Dakota Adams: In 2022, I decided to step up and do something in-person instead of sitting on the sidelines and fretting. I canvassed for the Democratic candidate for Congress, Monica Tranel. I convinced friends in Eureka to show up to the primary elections, but the Democrat primary was almost totally blank. It was nothing but Republicans running unopposed. It was disappointing and demoralizing.

Combine this with my personal disappointment with my state rep [Duram], who voted on party lines to censor Zooey Zephyr, and said nothing about the atrocious conduct of the Freedom Caucus and their open letter comparing Representatives Zephyr to a school shooter. I had no expectations left of the rest of the Republican Party, but I had enough expectations left in Neil Duram to be disappointed. I do still like Neil personally; he's done good work in emergency services. He's written bills that have been firmly within his area of expertise and highway safety.

But I couldn't ignore both one side of the ballot being blank. And [my] disappointment that Neil chose to just go along with the party line in a situation that demanded a stand on morality or at least consistency. And that is when I decided to run.

Initially I was planning on just printing up some brochures and knocking some doors to make a point and set an example; hopefully inspire more people to do the same. And it's turning into much more of a real thing than I ever expected. The [Lincoln] County Democrats are 100% behind me. I'm getting a lot more support than I ever would've anticipated. I'm not getting the negative pushback that I expected, but it could still be coming.

Do you mean negative pushback from Democrats or Republicans?

Mostly the other side of the aisle. I also have not been getting pushback from within the Montana Democrats over running as a progressive or even running as a pro-Second Amendment progressive, and going against some of at least the implicit party line.

This is an area that has voted heavily conservative the last few go-arounds. It's a lower priority as far as the overall strategic picture is concerned. Maybe if I were in a primary in a highly contested area in a major population center, it would be more of a problem.

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You’ve described the Republican majority in Montana as being “very, very vulnerable” right now. I have trouble seeing that myself, but I'm keen to get a sense of why you feel that way.

It comes down to job performance. The Republican supermajority, being at the zenith of power and holding a trifecta [in the 2023 Legislature], had no excuse for fucking up as badly as they did when it came to running the state government. The property tax debacle seems to be the main thing that is cutting their legs out from underneath them right now. And no amount of last-minute placating with investigative task forces is going to distract anyone from their failure.

There are people in my valley who have owned their land for a hundred years who are in danger of losing their family farm and their family homestead because of the ridiculous spike in property taxes.

The Montana state legislature cut off [the pandemic-related] expanded Medicaid and the expanded unemployment much earlier than they had to under the logic that it would get the economy moving again.

But the issue with the job market is that people working for a wage can't afford to buy a house in this state. Fewer and fewer are able to find somewhere to rent for any price. That's what squeezing Montana businesses, not unemployment payouts and not having expanded Medicaid. But that's not the priority of the state legislature.

[There’s also] the expanded school lunch program that was axed because of a refusal to file the paperwork for free money.

If government is going to justify itself existing, it has to give the people who pay into it a return on that investment. And gouging the state budget to draw in more billionaires who will never speak to anybody outside of the country club that they share with the governor, that's a really fucking poor investment in the future of Montana.

The legislature us, by and large, a good deal older than either of us. I'm curious if there's anything in particular that you think they're really missing when it comes to younger constituents?

While the Republican Party has absolutely no problem embracing its young radicals and utilizing them for a multi-pronged campaign to advance an overall agenda—young Democrats feel much more disconnected with their party.

There is a general sense that the Democratic Party has to an extent been passively occupying a negative space labeled “not Republican,” and trying to—as inoffensively as possible—perpetuate its own existence while making as little fuss as possible. That is the overall perception.

It's generally accepted as a background fact that the legislature and government in general is not going to represent you because it's occupied by old people with established interests, who are generally cast from the same mold and don't particularly care about representing you.

That is a perception that is changing. And we're seeing a lot more Gen-Z activity in national politics and in the state legislature. My task is to set a good example and to try to reach out to and energize young people who are active in good social causes and care about their country and their community, but are frustrated with what they see as the futility of electoral politics.

How would you put that into practice, if elected?

Fundamentally, I'm running on three points: one, that the property tax debacle needs to be reversed. Second, protecting the rights of all Montanans, which includes stopping the state's performative virtue signaling crusade against marginalized people like the queer community and against environmentalists. [We need to] focus attention on doing important things like guaranteeing that senior citizens retiring in Montana will be able to get medical care and have a place to live.

Third, to lay the foundation for a future for working people in Montana. That’s a focus on affordable housing to unlock the currently strangled potential of the Montana economy. [That includes] planning and adequately managing the explosive population growth to keep urban sprawl from consuming every single good thing about the state, to keep our infrastructure from falling apart under the added strain, to keep our schools from going unfunded, to keep access to public lands from being cut off and to preserve the environment for future generations instead of making short term profit off of eco-tourism.

I chew often on the question of whether silence in the face of political extremism, writ large, effectively serves to condone it, or not. I was curious what you think about that.

I absolutely believe that to be true.

[It] has happened on both sides, but it is dramatically worse on the right. I am very intimately familiar with how dangerous the brand of extremism that has taken hold of the Republican Party can be. What we're dealing with now is no longer polarization; what we have now is sectarianism, whose analog is religion, where politics is an arena of combat to assert dominance over an inherently immoral and contemptible opposition.

Since switching teams, I have not had any weird conversations with Antifa dudes advocating for house-to-house death squads to eliminate conservative voters. But holy shit, are people ever ready to tell you about how they're ready to kill all the liberals when the Civil War starts. There's no symmetry whatsoever. The radical right is chomping at the bit to commit extrajudicial murder and cleanse the land of all of its political opponents.

Before we wrap up: do you consider yourself an optimist?

I am choosing to be an optimist out of necessity. I grew up in an environment of severe fatalistic pessimism, and I have seen firsthand how that does not work. It's ultimately self-defeating. And if I gave in to the pessimism, I would ultimately collapse in on myself, psychologically, in a bunker full of freeze-dried goods, refreshing news sites for 12 hours a day. Instead, I choose to lean into the problems and face everything that frightens me about the world head-on to affect all of the change that I can.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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One more thing…

Jon Van Dyke at the Union. Photo: MSL

Rock Lotto is a true A-list Missoula institution: dozens of musicians get randomly placed into bands and assigned an album to cover. Then, for one night only, they play their hearts out to adoring fans. Rock Lotto goes down this Saturday, 3/23, and, for the first time, at the Wilma.

I met up with organizer Jon Van Dyke to talk about this year’s theme (albums from 1991) and the joys of band noobs coming out of the woodwork (and their basements) to shred.

Read the story here, in The Pulp.

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Thanks so much for being here. Have questions or comments? You can always reach me via email, the comment section below, or on the Elon Machine, @SavageLevenson.