Dakota Adams grew up in the machine. His father — he calls him Stuart, never “dad,” rarely anything more generous than that — founded the Oath Keepers, the militant far-right organization that put armed men at Bundy Ranch, deployed in a stack formation to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and whose leader now sits in federal prison on an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, a sentence since commuted but not pardoned by Donald Trump. Dakota was inside it from the beginning. He handled Oath Keepers member correspondence as a teenager, working under an assumed alias for theoretical pay. He attended militia musters and Three Percenter protests in body armor, slung AR-15s at courthouse steps. He watched his mother run the back-end operation that kept the organization functional while Stuart collected the glory and the donations.
He got out. He corrected, as he puts it, a flawed version of the facts of that struggle, piece by piece, across years. Now he lives in Lincoln County, Montana — once the heart of Oath Keepers country — and is running for state legislature on a platform of housing affordability, civil rights, and the abolition of ICE. He is the kind of witness history rarely produces: the insider who survived intact, with his moral reasoning sharpened rather than destroyed by proximity to the thing he is now opposing.
We spoke for nearly two hours on The Wire Tap. What follows is a comprehensive account of that conversation — Dakota’s own words, at length, on the man who raised him, the organization he built and degraded, the DOJ that convicted him and is now trying to erase that conviction, and the fight ahead in Montana and nationally. Dakota did not ask me to soften anything. I did not try.
The Philosophical Zombie
Before we could talk about Oath Keepers as an organization, we had to talk about the man at its center. Not as a public figure — Stuart Rhodes has been analyzed to death in a thousand news cycles — but as a household presence. As a father. As a performance.
Dakota had been thinking about this for a long time. He came to the conversation with a framework that is precise and unsentimental.
Stuart has had very few original thoughts, I think, in his entire life. But what he is amazing at is copying. This was true even of his art career, where he was fantastic at copying — intricate photorealistic sculptures and art styles from references in art books — but he never had his own independently derived art style in painting or in sculpture. He could only replicate, and he could replicate very, very well and seamlessly. And he did the exact same thing with his persona. He was always always on, even in the home, even when it was just us and there was no other audience to perform for. He was portraying a character with traits that he had picked up from somewhere else.
The implication of this, as Dakota traces it, is that the patriotism and the honor and the integrity that the child received were not real. They were copied behaviors, performed consistently enough to be transmitted — but not believed by the performer.
What was transmitted to me was the perfect mimicry of patriotism, integrity, honor. And once I understood that Stuart was always portraying a character and never believed in it, it was easier to reconcile the contradictions of my childhood, and made it not very surprising to see what became of Stuart when — like with so much of the rest of the country — Trump allowed him to let that facade fall. And he was really, all along, on the inside... the great permission.
He describes growing up in a household with what he calls “almost a philosophical zombie” — a concept from academic philosophy describing an entity that mimics human behavior so completely that the difference from genuine consciousness is undetectable. Stuart Rhodes could perform patriotism, perform honor, perform fatherhood. But the performance was never grounded in conviction.
He was so able to mimic human behavior that you generally can’t tell the difference.
This framework — the copy without original, the performance without belief — would come to define not just Dakota’s understanding of his father but his analysis of Oath Keepers as an institution, and ultimately of Trumpism itself. The authoritarian follower dynamic, the grievance fundraising model, the cult mechanics — Dakota reads them all through the same lens, because he watched the template get built in real time, in his own house.
Inside the Household
Stuart Rhodes grew up poor, working-class, in New Mexico and Nevada. His family were originally migrant farmworkers. His mother married and divorced, by Dakota’s count, upwards of ten times. There was no stable father figure. There was a great deal of generational trauma.
Stuart grew up in this semi-criminal, deeply, deeply traumatized and highly dysfunctional family environment with no stability whatsoever. And as much as I hold sympathy for the child that Stuart was, he would go on to use this traumatic childhood as an excuse for all of his worst behaviors throughout his entire life without ever, ever trying to be better, and would use his traumatic childhood as a cudgel to beat people down — like in particular me — if we had any arguments or conflict and guilt trip... like, “how could you trigger me like that by arguing with me, or by squaring up when I challenged you to a fight in the driveway, or like by getting mad when I slapped you.”
The physical abuse, Dakota says, was calibrated. Stuart knew that going over a certain line would endanger his control over Dakota’s mother, so he stayed just below it.
The majority of Stuart’s abuse in itself was psychological, because he knew that going over the line into regular physical abuse would endanger his control over my mother. So we were not physically abused to the extent that Stuart very likely was. There was just a lot of beatings with hairbrushes and belts in that family. But it was the guilt tripping over making Stewart angry enough to explode at us that would last for weeks. And that was the majority of the impact — just having to hear about Stewart’s traumatic, neglectful childhood and how he didn’t have a father, all the time, anytime Stewart did something wrong, until I became the bad guy, or whichever sibling was being targeted became the bad guy.
The book that helped Dakota understand this most clearly was Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That — the standard reference work on the psychology of domestic abusers. It gave him language for something he had watched without being able to name.
It is in that book, Why Does He Do That, that taking refuge in childhood abuse is a very common excuse for domestic abusers, because it sounds right. And it can, in many cases, hold weight — allow professionals and allow them to go through couples counseling and court-mandated counseling programs — without taking full ownership of what they have done, because they can displace that responsibility. And it really helped me put into context that Stewart absolutely did not have to be the man that he was. He just reaped many benefits in his personal life from being this person. Didn’t want to change because he thought he was great the way that he was.
But the book gave Dakota something else too. One of his greatest fears, growing up, was that he might carry the pattern forward — that whatever made Stuart Stuart was heritable, inevitable.
One of the books that was most useful to me was Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That — where it was invaluable for me in understanding that there was nothing inside me that would make me inherently like Stuart, which was one of my greatest fears as a teenager and a young man. Which is that these domestic abusers have the same basic psychology as a right-wing authoritarian. They have the same basic psychological underpinnings as somebody who joins a secret police force, or a sexual predator on the street. In fact, they’re very often the same people. The Venn diagram is an enormous overlap of white van molester and kidnapper, and secret policemen.
The link Dakota draws between domestic abuse psychology and authoritarian politics is not rhetorical. He means it analytically. The abusive family is a small cult. The mechanisms of control — fear, guilt, loyalty enforcement, the displacement of blame — are the same mechanisms that run militia movements, that run Trumpism.
An abusive relationship is a very small cult. The abusive family dynamic is a very small cult. And we are now seeing domestic abuser dynamics carried out on a nationwide level. Which is why people who grew up in these environments — that’s why we’ve been able to navigate Trump world while other people who are allegedly experts are falling behind.
The Origin of Oath Keepers: Bundy Ranch and the Peak of Human Capital
Oath Keepers was founded in 2009, during the first wave of Obama-era anti-government paranoia, the blogtalk-radio-and-Ron-Paul moment when the militia right was reconstructing itself for a new media environment. Stuart was well-suited to that moment. Dakota’s mother ran the back-end operations — the memberships, the logistics, the communications — while Stuart performed the brand.
The organizational peak, Dakota says, came at Bundy Ranch in 2014.
Oath Keepers rolled up to Bundy Ranch with very serious men. Oath Keepers rolled up with army infantry veterans, Marine Force Recon, with a logistics tail, with a medical trailer, communications trailer — pulling on all of these connections, especially from Montana and Idaho, to turn up with... they were the only people who showed up with organizational capacity. They showed up with logistics, backing, infrastructure. Everybody else was just a pickup football game of guys getting into their car, walking away from their jobs at the Walmart to go camp out at Bundyville. And only Oath Keepers showed up as a professional, organized force, to my knowledge.
That moment also marked the beginning of the organizational decline. Bundy Ranch worked as a fundraising event, and Stuart saw it. He pivoted Oath Keepers toward a traveling-preacher model — showing up at standoffs, generating urgency, keeping the donations flowing.
Bundy Ranch kicked off this kind of traveling preacher era of the history of Oath Keepers, where Stewart figured out that all of these organizational foundational necessities that had been neglected — because everything was being routed through him — he could compensate for by doing a kind of traveling show. Standoffs with federal agencies to keep the donations coming in, keep numbers up. And that kept the numbers stable even as many old-guard members — what I call the digital vanguard, the guy who’s out here like, “I’m at the barricade of freedom for you, Bobby” — were bleeding out.
The quality of personnel followed the trajectory of the mission. As serious men with actual skill sets grew disillusioned and left, they were replaced by a lower grade of true believer.
Stuart was losing these career-level men in exchange for lower-level true believers. He was increasingly surrounding himself just with... and yes, sounds just like the Trump administration... fascism always ends up purging all first-rate talents from government and replacing them with flunkies. Stuart eventually accomplished degrading the quality of the men around him, because he was creating an environment where only docile, very zealous, gullible people would be in it with him. And people who did not like the direction of the organization and saw no way to meaningfully change it left. And by the time of the insurrection, even the very hardcore from Bundy Ranch — all those competent militants who were willing to go to the arms standoff against federal agents — had bled from the organization, and he was down to dregs.
Stuart’s personal management style accelerated the rot. He has never, Dakota says, maintained a stable peer group. He runs on hierarchy, not friendship. He needs a favorite — someone who can do no wrong, who will inevitably fall from favor — and he uses that dynamic to keep everyone off-balance.
Stuart has never been able to keep a consistent peer group of men in his own age or social status. He’s never been able to maintain a group of guy friends, ever. He thrives in very hierarchical environments where he can have a pedestal boy that always dramatically falls from favor — who can do no wrong — kind of like the king’s favorite in early modern Europe. Whether they were complete crackpots or not — like stolen valor [individual] — everybody tried to warn him about that guy for months before he would stop bringing him to things. They got matching tattoos and all of it.
The financial structure of Oath Keepers reflected this same logic. Opacity was by design.
Stewart created a burdensome, inefficient, complicated organizational structure — in my opinion, to facilitate graft. And it very much got in the way of the mission. But it was opaque and blurred lines, very much the same way that Trump’s campaign and the Trump organization had no true distinction between them. With Stewart, Stewart the person and Oath Keepers were always enmeshed and overlapping, deliberately, so you could not have Oath Keepers without Stewart in any way.
The financial records that survived tell part of the story. The Oath Keepers EPIC server — which Dakota has archived on his desktop — documents the pattern.
In the surviving financial records for Oath Keepers, there was a lot of cash withdrawals at the times of all these major standoffs, that were never fully accounted for. A lot of gear purchases that ended up in weird caches or in people’s houses, intermixed with Stewart’s personal belongings. The Oath Keepers’ financials were kept deliberately opaque and incredibly complicated.
The Eye, the Army, and the Character
A viewer question surfaced the question of Stuart’s military background. Dakota answered it carefully and with evident precision.
Stuart was enlisted in the 82nd Airborne, and he spent a lot of time in the hospital. While he was in the army — I, from his personality later on in life, suspect a lot of malingering, just from what I saw as a child in the household and how he conducted himself later in life. I can’t prove that, but it’s a suspicious amount of hospitalization that very much fits the pattern he would establish later: of malingering on injuries and milking injuries and personal life tragedy for sympathy to cover for professional failings.
The signature physical feature — the missing eye — has its own story, and it is not the story most media outlets have run with.
He fell from a tree during a night jump training exercise, a parachute drop, got entangled in a tree, dropped 80 feet, broke his back, had to have his back reconstructed with metal rods. And he did blind himself. That was much later while he was in Las Vegas. He claims to have dropped a pistol that he was giving to a friend who was being threatened by gang members. My mom’s personal theory is that he was very likely trying to run security for this friend who was also a known crack dealer and pimp in the time that they were buddies, and was trying to run security for him on some kind of shady business, and got shot — with an unregistered firearm — either with his own gun or somebody else’s.
The glass eye that replaced the socket eventually got infected and was rejected. Now there is just the socket. Dakota describes, without particular affect, having seen his father without the prosthetic many times.
I have seen Stuart with his prosthetic eye removed. There has been, for my entire childhood, very much an empty eye socket that was for a long time held in shape by a prosthetic eye — a glass eye that was eventually rejected when it got infected. And so now he’s just rocking with the collapsed, with the collapsed empty socket. Smells like, last I interacted with him, smells abhorrent at close range. I don’t imagine it’s gotten any better.
Stuart’s relationship with his own military record tracked his relationship with everything else: he inflated it, performed it, and used it to order around men who actually outranked him.
Stewart definitely conducted himself as a field general and got off on the authority of ordering around men in his own age group who would have outranked him in the real military. And the way that Trump — he says it with tears in his eyes and you know that he’s lying — Stewart, telling people that people kept calling him General Rhodes and you wish they would stop. I never heard anybody say that. I heard Stewart complain about all the people calling him General Rhodes. I never heard it firsthand, ever. So he was just trying to get that going. He was just trying to workshop it and see if we could make “General Rhodes” catch on.
Trump, the Great Permission, and the Collapse
Before Trump, Oath Keepers existed in a specific political ecology — Obama as existential threat, the black Muslim Communist antichrist — that suited Stuart’s operational model perfectly.
Stuart had this brief heyday where he was able to operate at 100% efficiency as a grifter under the administration of a president that a bunch of people thought was going to be the antichrist — the black Muslim Communist antichrist. And being able to call upon his past criticism of the Bush surveillance state and the overreaches of the Bush administration as a fig leaf against being called racist. He was able to exist in the best of both worlds, and borrow a kind of cloak of concealment from back in the day when the Ron Paul Republican wing and the Tea Party had significant overlap on opposing foreign wars with like occupied Democrats.
Trump changed the ecology. An anti-government militia whose enemy suddenly controlled the government had nowhere to stand.
Part of what changed when Trump took office is that they were no longer dictating that environment. They were no longer creating the instability to their advantage. And they were having to play in the same landscape of instability as everybody else.
The organizational collapse, Dakota argues, had multiple causes that converged. Stuart’s mother had modeled a specific form of personal-brand reinvention — moving through circles, reinventing identity whenever necessary — and Stuart had built his entire career on that mobility. When he tried to plant roots in Montana, he lost the escape hatch.
Because he was stuck in the same area for upwards of five years, which it turns out he was not capable of sustaining... And then the third factor was very much something that we’re seeing play out now in Trump too: a combination of the fear of what will happen if a vengeful Democrat administration retakes control of the United States government. Coupled with Trump and Trumpism taking oxygen out of the room for anti-government right-wing militants. Obama and Hillary Clinton were a heck of a lot better for fundraising than Trump was.
By 2020, without Dakota’s mother running the back end — she had finally escaped — and without the Obama-era fundraising environment, and without the ability to relocate and reinvent, Stuart had degraded his own organization to the point where the January 6 operation was mounted with, in Dakota’s assessment, the dregs of what had once been a coherent paramilitary force.
By the time of the insurrection, even the very hardcore from Bundy Ranch — all those competent militants who were willing to go to the arms standoff against federal agents — had bled from the organization, and he was down to dregs. That’s why he had just a bunch of weirdos, mostly from an Oath Keepers affiliate militia in Ohio, instead of a team of like former special operators.
January 6 itself, in Dakota’s reading, was not a triumph for Oath Keepers. It was the moment the operation spent them.
Oath Keepers got tasked with the dirty work and failed to accomplish their objectives on the day of January 6th — of going for the Speaker of the House, and the ballot boxes, as I see it. And they were expended and were burnt. And Stuart has just not been useful. The Proud Boys were Trump’s favorite. They’re the ones who got the shout out. Oath Keepers got the dirty work.
The DOJ Reversal and What It Means
The conversation turned to what brought Dakota onto the program in the first place: the Department of Justice’s current effort to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions that put Stuart Rhodes away for 18 years. The sentence was commuted by Trump early in the second term. A pardon was not issued. Stuart has been on supervised release, showing up at the Capitol repeatedly to beg for the pardon that hasn’t come.
Dakota watches this with a particular kind of cold attention.
You should know that the brown shirts get knifed. I really don’t know what else to say. Stewart’s — again, this is why I think that Stuart doesn’t actually learn anything instead of just copying and replaying stuff. If he were capable of fully internalizing lessons of history, he would know that he was going to get long-knifed at some point, or at the very least hung out to dry.
The vacating of the convictions is something distinct from a pardon, and Dakota is precise about why that distinction matters.
Although it doesn’t erase that they were convicted, what it does is essentially just remove all consequence of those actions in the end. And the judge that has it back, from my understanding, can decide no, and then send it to the appeals court for reprocessing — which is possible from what I understand from Glenn Kirshner’s last reports. That’s a prerogative that the judge can do, but also might not do — considering essentially, if the executive branch comes up and says, well, we’re not interested in holding on to it anymore, there is also a court precedent that shows that the court has gone along with such requests, just not in this context that I know of.
The financial dimension compounds the legal question. The DOJ move would not merely vacate consequences — it would potentially trigger cash settlements. This is where Dakota’s personal stake in the matter becomes concrete.
If Stewart gets a significant cash payout — like with something on the order of the settlement that was awarded to General Flynn — then overnight millionaire Stewart, running around with a gun legally for the first time since his conviction, is a problem for me. Where up until now, Stewart did not receive his pardon. He got his sentence commuted. So up this whole time, he’s been on supervised release.
Stuart has already attempted to use the current political environment for cash extraction. He filed a lawsuit against Dakota’s mother and USA Today — representing himself, attempting to force a quick settlement in the same wave of capitulations that had swept through universities and media organizations.
He thought he could get in on that train, and they refused. And he was, I believe, too broke to afford a process server. So right off the bat, getting back his $500 in restitution plus processing fees means that he might be able to pay a process server to finally serve this pending lawsuit that’s been hanging in purgatory in the Texas court system for about a year now. And a cash settlement from the Department of Justice opens the door to an entire world of vexatious lawsuits and harassment that he’ll be able to levy against us.
The systemic failure is not just about Stuart. It is about the architecture of accountability that was supposed to hold.
There are a lot of people who did not game plan what does it look like when the highest levels of power are fully taken over by a fractious criminal enterprise. Only because evil people tend to be stupid have we made it this far. And that’s where we’re kind of leading out into the present day.
The witness protection question came up — the DOJ had raised it before the loyalty purge. Dakota’s assessment of its value in the current environment is characteristically direct.
I told my mom that if anybody offered witness protection, it probably wouldn’t be worth it, because — well, for one thing, that’s a little bit extreme, but like, that’s my own threshold for danger being blown way out the window where other people in this situation would probably be freaking out. But also, who’s to say that people on witness protection are safe if, like, who is going to stop the Attorney General of the United States — or acting Attorney General now — and the director of the FBI, if they show up at a secure storage site with a pry bar and start breaking into document storage on witness protection? Is anybody going to arrest them? Probably not. So there’s a bunch of safeguards in the system that really unwisely do not account for having a completely criminal administration in charge of the White House and with criminal appointees in federal law enforcement and the justice system.
The Paramilitaries Trump Chose Not to Use
One of the sharper analytical threads in the conversation was Dakota’s argument that Trump made a strategic error by going the uniformed secret police route — ICE operations, Homeland Security, the masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles — rather than continuing to outsource violence to deniable paramilitary assets like Oath Keepers.
The Trump administration has decided to go the prestige route and do a uniformed, masked secret police officially under Homeland Security, instead of outsourcing their violence against immigrants and dissidents to deniable gray area paramilitaries like the Oath Keepers, which would have been — I think would have been the better strategy and would have provoked less backlash upon the administration itself, because ultimately you can... they’re deniable assets. You can hang them out to dry and expend them without damaging yourself. That’s why autocrats love them.
The practical result of choosing the official route over the paramilitary route has been to create ideological fissures within the very constituency Trump needs.
This grotesque overreach by ICE has resulted in cracks with right-wing dissonance — can’t show up at a rally with guns. I can’t show up at a rally with guns. Which means that all the Three Percenter protests I went to as a teenager — especially the one where we went up on the courthouse steps somewhere, I can’t remember where, with Mike Vanderboegh, in body armor, with our full plate carriers and our slung ARs, with range flags in, but that was more to underscore the threat than anything else, on radios on our squad frequencies, waving at cops looking down at us from the courthouse roof and roofs of adjoining buildings — by the logic of these Trump defenders now, we should have all been gunned down on the steps of that courthouse.
He draws the logical extension clearly.
You can’t say that the ICE killings in Minneapolis were justified without it being the same as saying that the Obama administration should have hit Bundy Ranch with a drone strike. Because to believe one is to believe the other. Which very few people — except, again, Ammon Bundy — seem to have realized even a little bit.
The Cult Language and the Way Out
Finding the language to describe what he had been living in was, Dakota says, not straightforward. He found it eventually in an unlikely place: the memoirs of people who had left high-control religions.
It was very useful to find the language to describe what I’d been dealing with. And I found a lot of the most useful language in the memoirs of people who had left high-control religions, had left cults and other extremist political movements. Because the U.S. Patriot militia movement has so much overlap and in common with the religious evangelical movement — that is also the foundation of Trumpism alongside the more secular militant conspiracy theory aspect of it — there is a commonality where you are just directly trained to not examine the contradictions and the hypocrisy. There are not very many people like — again, survivors of cults around the world would be able to identify with it. But in contemporary America, it has mostly been former evangelicals who have offered the language that was the most useful to me, in untangling my own past, despite the fact that my upbringing was largely secular and non-religious, and theirs was extraordinarily religious. But the authoritarian right-wing culture underlying it was very much the same, and the mechanisms were the same.
The breaking point, when it came, was a foreign policy question — of all things.
My personal experience breaking point was a very odd, very niche interest for me, which was being a foreign policy wonk on the internet. And I, in particular, had been following the fight of the Syrian Kurds for autonomy and independence very closely. And our complete betrayal and abandonment of the Syrian Democratic Forces to Turkey, and then to the advantage of Russia, it made no sense to me. It was the most boneheaded foreign policy decision in the history of the United States up until that point. We have well surpassed that by now, but that point will be different for everybody.
The mechanism of that collapse — one support beam pulled loose, the structure beginning to buckle — is something he generalizes outward, as a model for how people leave these movements.
From that one single support being weakened and undermined, the weight of my personal moral convictions, crushing down on the belief system that had been standing up to them, became unbearable. It began to buckle. The structure of falsehoods could no longer sustain itself once that one flaw began.
He cites Steven Hassan’s formulation — once you know Dear Leader can lie, what else did he lie about — as a parallel. The entry point varies. The mechanism is the same.
Where right now for a lot of people, if it was not the Epstein files — because it was possible to just not think about it, or to ignore it — it was this war in Iran, which has been getting to a lot of diehard conservatives that I know who don’t understand why we would be doing something like this, what the point is and for what possible reason.
Running for Office in Oath Keepers Country
Dakota is running for House District 1 of the Montana State Legislature in Lincoln County. He is explicit about what that means geographically and historically.
I am running for state legislature here in Montana, in Lincoln County — what was once the heart of Oath Keepers country. And I am running for House District 1 of the Montana State Legislature for my second run — the “I know what I’m doing this time” edition — on the platform of fixing the housing crisis and property tax crisis in Montana, of protecting civil rights and restoring community autonomy, and of building a functioning and workable, livable state for the working class and the middle class in the last best place, instead of being run over — as Montana is now — by this tide of out-of-state money that is coming into our politics and buying up, frankly, all of the desirable land.
The opponent he expects to face in the general — assuming he wins the primary — is a Trump-aligned transplant whose entire platform, Dakota summarizes with some precision, is enthusiasm for Trump and enthusiasm for logging.
She likes Trump and she likes logging. And that running with the correct letter next to her name will be enough to win. And maybe it will be. Because there are a lot of people who — I believe there was one contractor who saw one of my debates with my opponent in the last time around — who said the performance of my incumbent opponent was embarrassing, and that I was the one who came prepared and read and educated for the debate. And he was not. But he still had to vote for my opponent in the last round, because correct party — party loyalty stayed paramount.
The logging issue is not dismissible; it represents a real cultural anchor in that corner of Montana. But Dakota’s analysis of what it would actually require to restore a functional logging industry illustrates the gap between his opponent’s slogan and the underlying material reality.
A lot of our sawmills shut down because they couldn’t keep workers because workers couldn’t afford to live here. So affordability and housing are way back on the priority list before opening up those forests and getting logs going again. Logs going where? Without workers, without sawmills, without processing, it’s not going to do anything. It’s effectively an empty platitude when the basis of it is protecting civil rights, keeping people being able to live in this state instead of being forced out and forced to go somewhere else where they can make a living, instead of fighting as hard as they can just to tread water. And you can’t get there by saying, “just bring back logging,” even though it sounds good and simple as a slogan.
Montana’s resource wealth is real. The question is who captures the value.
Montana has, to begin with, some of the best wind power potential in the entire country. We have also a great deal of geothermal power potential. We have some of the most advantageous green energy potential in the continental United States, especially in the Western states. And we have, frankly, some of the most beautiful and desirable landscapes in all of the Western United States — world famous, in fact — on top of endless tracks of timber and quite a bit in the way of fossil fuels. And what we’re seeing now is a mass kickback scheme to thank the fossil fuel industry for supporting right-wing causes, by subsidizing the failing coal industry and attempting to expand it in Montana — over potentially very profitable and advantageous alternate energy — and to help keep our economy centered on resource extraction and on catering to luxury homes for the wealthy.
The Yellowstone TV show comes up, and it is worth noting that this appears to be one of the few points of bipartisan consensus in Lincoln County.
There is one thing I can agree with even the most diehard right-wing Montanan on, which is: fuck Yellowstone. Right. Fuck that TV show. If anybody in this audience ever visits Montana, do not wear Yellowstone — the TV show — merchandise out of the airport. They will spit in your food. Nobody here likes that show.
The deeper issue is what that show represents: a marketing campaign that imported a specific vision of Montana as billionaire fantasy territory, which translated into real estate pressure and cultural displacement.
Dakota connects his personal journey — from the inside of Oath Keepers to running against its heirs in the same county — to a specific political capacity. He understands both what it looks like to come into a community to seize power and what it looks like to represent one.
When my family moved to Northwestern Montana, it was as part of a planned and orchestrated far-right takeover of politics in Northwestern Montana. And the wave that we were in did not succeed, but later waves did. And we came in under the strategy of taking over local institutions, local politics, and establishing ourselves — in Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters — in local communities to seize influence and control and pave a way for a post-American, survivalist state. And being on that side of it, and then later, after leaving Oath Keepers, going into volunteer emergency services, becoming part of the community outside of militia world — I understand the difference between going in to represent people and fight for them in the halls of power, and being a transplanted outsider who is coming in to seize control of a low-population state for the sake of gaining political influence.
Abolish ICE, Ukraine, and the Opposition Party Question
Dakota is backing a candidate named Russell Cleveland — the only abolish-ICE candidate in the Montana Democratic primary — for the congressional race, and his argument for why this matters is not a soft one.
What turns lawless and criminal elements within law enforcement into a secret police is the feeling of impunity. And we can’t abide that. And ICE is barely old enough to rent a car in its own name in the United States. We can get rid of it as easily as we made it. And it has to be done.
The framework he applies to the Democratic Party is similarly unsparing. The choice, as he sees it, is between an opposition party and a junior partner in an authoritarian state.
The time is now to decide whether we have a junior partner party in an authoritarian state, or an opposition party. And that is one of the lessons I took from studying the fight against authoritarianism from other countries — that having an opposition that is willing to fight and oppose is necessary for the critical moment when the lawmakers are climbing over the barriers.
On Ukraine — knowing that his interlocutor lives in Kyiv and holds Ukrainian press accreditation — Dakota is direct. He holds two positions simultaneously that the American left has until recently treated as incompatible.
We have unlimited resources for a war of choice going in on behalf of a genocidal ethnostate, but none for a country that we are treaty obligated to defend in exchange for their nuclear disarmament. Which is again — get in your primaries and support a candidate who has the common sense opinion of no more stupid wars in the Middle East, but also hold to our word on supporting Ukraine. Because it was not that long ago that you couldn’t find anybody capable of holding those two truths simultaneously, especially not in the DSA with us. Like it’s a leftover weird, a Stalinist hangover — Russophile baggage that we’re finally, finally dropping.
The Muscle You Practice For
At the end of the conversation, Dakota talks about what he has learned from watching the current wave of intimidation — the neo-Nazi street gang operating in his county, the Proud Boys agitating at No Kings protests, the Groypers in the state legislature, the MAGA transplants running in primaries. And from watching himself be tempted, at various points, to simply not make himself a target.
I got a little bit of a slap in the face from your piece on the retrospective from our 2023 conversation, where I had felt the temptation to not attack Stewart publicly anymore and just avoid the conflict. Just like a lot of people feel the temptation to stay quiet and not make themselves a target. And I got hit in the face with my own words from 2023. And I had to hold up to my own past ideals. And I had to be consistent in what I am publicly and what I do.
The argument he makes for resistance is not primarily moral. It is functional.
It is one thing to oppose the resurgent, uniformed, neo-Nazi street gang that we have going in my county right now, that attempted to infiltrate my fire department very recently. It is one thing to oppose out-of-state transplant politicians serving the MAGA agenda. It’s one thing to oppose Groypers in the state legislature and everything else, and to get in between self-described Christian nationalist and Proud Boy — card-carrying, dues-paying Proud Boys — trying to agitate fights at No Kings protests. But it is also important to practice taking the risk of saying out loud, that guy — that guy who is trying to control my life or my country through systems of coercion, violence, and intimidation and fear — and to practice saying: fuck you, fuck your secret police, fuck your thugs, fuck Stuart Rhodes, fuck the Proud Boys. Because you want to practice flexing that muscle for the day when you really need it.
Dakota Adams can be found on Substack and across the internet at Dakota V Adams. His campaign for Montana House District 1 is underway in Lincoln County. The DOJ effort to vacate the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy convictions remains before the courts.
The Wire Tap is published on Substack by Chris Sampson, an investigative journalist and war correspondent reporting from Kyiv since January 2022.
The Philosophical Zombie — Dakota’s core framework for understanding Stuart: a man who copies rather than originates, whose performance of patriotism and honor was never grounded in conviction
Inside the Household — The abuse dynamics, Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That, and Dakota’s fear that the pattern was heritable
Oath Keepers at Peak: Bundy Ranch — The organizational high-water mark, the turn toward traveling-preacher grift, and the deliberate degradation of human capital
The Eye, the Army, and the Character — Stuart’s military record, the missing eye (and the real story behind it), the “General Rhodes” self-promotion that never caught on
Trump, the Great Permission, and the Collapse — How Trump changed the political ecology for anti-government militias and accelerated Oath Keepers’ implosion
The DOJ Reversal — The vacated convictions, the cash settlement threat, witness protection in a compromised system, and what it means for Dakota’s family personally
The Paramilitaries Trump Chose Not to Use — Why the uniformed secret police route was a strategic error, and what ICE has cost among the right’s own base
The Cult Language and the Way Out — Ex-evangelical memoirs, the Syrian Kurdish betrayal as breaking point, the single load-bearing beam that collapses the structure
Running in Oath Keepers Country / Abolish ICE / The Muscle — The Montana campaign, the opposition party question, Ukraine, and the closing argument about practicing resistance
