CHICAGO — Dakota Adams is not your typical Democratic delegate.
First, there’s the superficial: His long, blond hair hangs loose about his shoulder. The 27-year-old wears eye liner, and a metal dumbbell through the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows, and black nail polish. He wears a denim vest over a black T-shirt and nearly matching black parachute pants. His tennis shoes are spattered with white house paint.
More notably is what lies deeper: Adams’ father, Stewart Rhodes, founded the Oath Keepers, a militia group instrumental in helping President Donald Trump attempt to maintain his grip on power after losing the 2020 election. Rhodes is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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Adams has since disowned his father, and he’s here in Chicago as a Democratic delegate representing Montana’s 1st Congressional District. Adams says he’s proud to show his support for Vice President Kamala Harris when she formally accepts the Democratic Party nomination on Thursday.
On Sunday, while waiting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago for the rest of the Montana delegation, Adams had been drinking a beer and sewing a patch for a Montana band Barnaby Jones onto a thrift store vest he recently acquired. The vest also sported a pin from former Montana Gov. Steve Bullock’s 2020 presidential campaign — and a larger Harris-Walz 2024 campaign pin.
Having already signed a nominating petition for Harris before traveling to the convention, Adams noted that his job as a Democratic delegate is, for all practical purposes, complete.
But he said he’s looking forward to networking with other delegates at the convention, so that he can take home ideas for building the Democratic Party in a part of the country that — Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) not withstanding — isn’t particularly hospitable to Democrats.
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In addition to serving as a convention delegate, Adams is the Democratic candidate for a seat in the Montana State House. He’s running in the state’s conservative 1st District, located in the northwestern corner of the state — a race that Adams openly acknowledges will be an uphill battle.
While he’s unlikely to win his race against Republican Neil Duram, Adams’ candidacy represents an effort to model progressive politics in bright red part of the country. Adams also wants to assert his own vision of civic responsibility in repudiation to an abusive father who attempted to help overthrow the U.S. government.
Beyond his state House candidacy, which mixes economic populism with support for LGBTQ+ and abortion rights, Adams holds a unique position within the Democratic Party as someone who can speak with unrivaled authority about the dangers that far-right extremism pose to democracy.
After all, he was raised in the far-right militia movement where anti-government paranoia and conspiracy theories defined the reality of the household he shared with his infamous militia leader father, his mother and siblings.
Since then, Adams and his siblings have become estranged from Rhodes. Adams’ mother has also divorced Rhodes. Adams legally changed his name as part of his effort to complete the break with his father, who was an affirmed Trump supporter.
“It is absolutely essential that Trump not win, or we will not have a country,” Adams told Raw Story. “The United States, as it exists today, will not be here in two years if Trump wins.”
Adams said he believes his father betrayed the libertarian principles he previously espoused by offering himself up as a willing accomplice to Trump’s authoritarian agenda.
“He was a captain of brown shirts, and he should have known from studying history that the brown shirts always end up getting burned,” Adams said.
As the son of a militia leader who unsuccessfully attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Adams views the defense of democracy as a two-fold process — winning elections, and then ensuring that they aren’t overturned by militant conspiracy theorists..
“Running the ball forward enough to have a legitimate electoral win is only one half of the battle,” he said. “And the other half is defeating the election overturn attempt and the attempt to steal the election, which I think will inevitably turn violent.”
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Based on that criteria, and when it became apparent last month that President Joe Biden would drop out of the race, Adams said he initially supported Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for president “on the grounds of prior experience defeating a state level legislative coup and weathering a militia kidnapping plot, which were two critical pieces of job qualification for this coming election.”
But after the Democratic Party establishment coalesced around Harris, Adams readily embraced her, particularly when “politically active Black American voters” helped marshal “record-breaking grassroots small-donor fundraising,” he said.
“What we’ve got going now is our best shot, not just for defeating Donald Trump,” Adams said, “but for seeing Trump’s supporting conspiracy criminally charged, and for fixing the problems in this country that have had the existence of our nation imperiled by the results of an election for three elections in a row and the societal problems that lead to people going to a strongman like Trump for protection and for an easy fix.”
