Dakota Adams, the son of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia leader, is running as a Democrat in a local election.
His father, Stewart Rhodes, is currently serving an 18-year jail sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
“It served as a sobering wake-up call in terms of how much danger we are truly in and how the Republican Party enabled a president to become an active threat to this republic,” Adams told the Associated Press of his father’s involvement in the riot.
“I had to reassess many of my beliefs and confront challenging questions about my true values.”
Adams, 27, has launched a longshot candidacy for Montana’s House in a Republican-dominated district.
He uses his mother’s maiden name and told the AP that he is still “figuring myself out” and has been to treatment to deal with the “long-term effects of living in a toxic or dysfunctional household.”
He stated that he intends to sell the weapons, body armor, and tactical gear that he used to wear during anti-government protests alongside his father.
A difficult childhood with his conspiracy theorist father
Adams described a tough childhood with his conspiracy theorist father, who kept the family in continual fear of the government spying on them and believing that the apocalypse was approaching.
“Basically, until I’m an adult, it’s all one continuous gray time of survival and moving boxes,” Adams told me.
“We lived in extreme isolation in one particular cultural bubble in increasingly paranoid and militant right-wing political spheres everywhere we moved in the country, until eventually we ended up in Montana.” Adams said they split from Rhodes in 2018, when Tasha Adams filed for divorce.
His separated wife and two of his children, including Dakota Adams, previously told Business Insider that the family tolerated Rhodes’ “violent outbursts” and claimed that he was abusive to them.
They recalled an instance in which he pulled out a gun on their dog and another in which he choked his daughter Sequoia.
Rhodes earned a law degree from Yale before founding the Oath Keepers in 2009, following Barack Obama’s election as president.
The long-haired Adams refers to himself as an “honest weirdo” and campaigns in band t-shirts and black nail varnish.
“I have refused to tone any of this down since deciding to run for office,” Adams told the Associated Press of his appearance, “because I spent so long as a child conforming to a little character to enhance my father’s political ambitions and image that I refused to do it ever again for any reason.”
Democrats are backing Adams’ campaign, and he has appeared at rallies alongside Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse, according to the AP.
According to Scott Rodich, vice chair of the county Democratic Central Committee, party leaders are pleased to see Adams on the ballot because Democrats have been reticent to compete in the heavily Republican area.
