All posts tagged "dakota adams"

Rhodes' son fears Oath Keeper will be a threat 'as long as he's loose on the streets'

Stewart Rhodes's estranged son fears for his family's safety now that the Oath Keeper has been pardoned for his part in the J6 riots by President Donald Trump.

"Stewart is going to be an existential threat to my family's safety and to the safety of this country as long as he is loose on the streets, and that's not going to change," Adams said, adding, "the best case scenario is that Stewart stays well away from my family."

Adams produced a documentary on life growing up with the Oath Keeper called King of the Apocalypse, in which he talks about his own indoctrination into the movement.

ALSO READ: 'Driven to self-loathing': Inside the extremist website believed to 'groom' teen attackers

Alex Witt of MSNBC asked him, "You de-radicalized you say, though you could have easily become the leader of another right wing group. What was the process of de-radicalization like, and for others, being radicalized? How can someone on the outside step in to help it?"

"The most important thing is that if people are being directly — if they feel attacked — that is when they will put up all of their defenses and push back harder. That's where you get the deflection and the 'whataboutisms' that you see in so many online arguments, in particular, where people are just not available to be persuaded. And I was like that for a very long time," Adams said.

"What happened was, factually, that cracks began to appear between what I knew to be true and the version of reality that I was getting inside the ideological bubble. And especially after I started to realize that Stewart was not the savior he called himself, or even a really a good person or any kind of father, the more I started to see similarities between Stewart Rhodes and Donald Trump, and that very much concerned me. Because as I started to lose faith in Stewart, it became very worrying to me that the same kind of personality could be in the White House."

Watch the clip below via MSNBC or click the link.

‘Absolutely essential’: Son of Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes is all in for Kamala Harris

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.

ALSO READ: 'Powder keg': Massive security presence on display in Chicago amid signs of trouble

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.

ALSO READ: Democrats compete with ultimate Trump billboard during national convention

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.

Stewart Rhodes (Photo by Nicholas Kamm for AFP)

“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.”

ALSO READ: Does hosting your political convention in Chicago equal victory? History has an answer

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.”

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Stewart Rhodes' son fears Trump or DeSantis will pardon his father

Dakota Adams, eldest son of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, was somewhat disappointed with the 18-year prison sentence a federal judge imposed Thursday on his convicted seditionist father.

Adams considers it too short.

“I was hoping for better than 20 (years), but it still means he's going to die in prison unless he's pardoned, and that's good enough for me," Adams said in an exclusive interview with Raw Story.

Therein lies the rub: unless he’s pardoned.

That’s part of why Adams, 26, said the sentence, for seditious conspiracy at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, did not represent "closure" for him. Prosecutors asked for 25 years.

“I'm no longer in an emotional landscape where I'm thinking about having a relationship with Stewart, where terms like 'closure' would apply,” he said. “Basically, it's just the threat that Stewart presents has been decreased where the only hurdle remaining is if someone insane wins the presidential election and pardons him for political points."

At a CNN town hall earlier this month, former President Donald Trump, who is running for re-election in 2024 amid his numerous legal troubles, mused about pardoning perpetrators of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Trump said, adding that he would take up the issue early in another potential presidency. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

Newly minted Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis — one of several Republicans now vying to run against presumptive 2024 Democratic nominee President Joe Biden in next year's general election — also weighed in on pardoning people convicted of crimes connected to the January 6 attack.

“On day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, people who are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive in issuing pardons,” DeSantis said Thursday on a podcast.

Speaking to the court before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta announced the sentence, Rhodes said he was a “political prisoner.” The judge retorted, “You’re not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. You’re here because of your actions.”

Adams, who wrote in Raw Story about the process of extracting himself from Rhodes’ far-right paranoia, said he’s concerned about DeSantis who, at age 44, is more than three decades younger than Trump.

"DeSantis has been exhibiting all the characteristics of a wanna-be strongman dictator, in his actions as governor of Florida,” Adams said. “And I see inside the mainstream GOP a slow-moving effort to rig the presidential election permanently."

By that, he said he meant gerrymandering and voter suppression, abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaking to the court Thursday, Rhodes compared himself to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

"Stewart is completely obsessed with 'The Gulag Archipelago,'” Adams said of Solzhenitsyn’s book, which described forced labor and show trials in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. “He quoted Solzhenitsyn all the time. It was one of his favorite people to pull quotes from. I'm not convinced he actually read 'The Gulag Archipelago,' cover to cover, instead of the cursory reading you do to kind of 'front,' like you've really absorbed the work."

Rhodes also told the court Thursday that he felt like the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s 'The Trial,' an early 20th-century work that depicted a character who was arrested without knowing the charge.

"That's a really funny comparison because Stewart absolutely knows what he's on trial for,” Adams said. “It's never been unclear. He's certainly delusional enough to see himself as the accused in The Trial."

Earlier this week, Adams’ mother, Tasha, was officially divorced from Rhodes. Raw Story exclusively obtained her 2018 affidavit in which she alleged depraved and paranoid behavior by her then-husband, including beating his children and emotionally abusing them. The court this week unsealed the affidavit and other documents in the case.

Dakota Adams said that reading that Raw Story article brought back horrific memories.

"I've been in therapy for over a year now and I'm exorcizing a lot of ghosts by writing about my childhood,” Adams said. “It is nice that there are finally consequences (for Rhodes), but mostly it's the cold calculation that Stewart is no longer a potential short-term threat, roaming loose in the world and trying to rebuild his private army."