The militiaman’s son | The Press

Interview with the son of the founder of the far-right militia Oath Keepers

(Kalispell, Montana) Dakota Adams walks into Sable Café apologizing: her car has been in the garage for a week. He caught a deer. The kind of thing that happens on the campaign trail in this remote corner of Montana where he has settled.

I should say “resettled”, because this is where he lived part of his childhood, when his father, Stewart Rhodes, set up the base of the “Oath Keepers”, a far-right militia which participated the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Rhodes, along with several other members of his organization, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in the penitentiary – of the approximately 900 people already sentenced, only one received a heavier sentence.

Dakota, the eldest of Rhodes’ six children, disowned his father two years ago and took the name of his mother, who was granted a divorce last year. And as if to even better exorcise his past, he launched into politics. At 27, he is the Democratic Party candidate for the State Capitol, in very Republican Lincoln County.

Kalispell is nestled in the Flathead Valley, framed on either side by the Rocky Mountains. But it is not for the spectacular landscapes that so many extremist groups have come to hide there. It’s because you can survive the apocalypse better there.

“All my childhood, even before my father founded the Oath Keepers, I lived with the idea that the apocalypse was imminent,” the candidate told me.

“It’s still difficult for me, I constantly struggle with my childhood fears, programmed into me, to the point that it’s difficult for me to read news about global warming,” Adams emphasizes. The political state of our country causes me enormous stress. And I decided to dive into politics instead of letting it destroy my life. »

There was obviously no question of going to school, a place of state indoctrination. Everything that is mainstreamwhether it was the school, the government, the media, for Rhodes they were instruments of state persecution.

Schooling was therefore done at home – and not very diligently. Rhodes had warned his children to keep anything that happened at home a secret, even if they only hung out with people in the “right-wing libertarian militia bubble.”

“He said the other kids might have bugs and that maybe the FBI was spying on them. »

Because for his father and everyone around them, the American government is actively working to create a Marxist state.

Rhodes is from Las Vegas. His father disappeared from the map and he was raised by his mother, Dusty. Dakota describes this grandmother as something of a con artist, sometimes running a church based on the powers of dolphins and crystals, sometimes tricking someone into telemarketing or real estate sleight of hand.

Stewart Rhodes enlisted, and after his military career, he studied law at Yale on scholarship. He practiced for a few years, until he was disbarred. “He never kept his jobs, he wasn’t serious,” said the son. Rhodes even interned for Congressman Ron Paul.

Rhodes met Tasha Adams while taking dance classes at her studio. This devout Mormon considered that God had given her the mission of showcasing her husband.

Dakota was 12 when her father founded the Oath Keepers. The basic creed was the oath to the true Constitution of the United States. Because for this group as for the multitude of small groups in the anti-state nebula, the American federal government has perverted its original meaning and is persecuting citizens.

Montana, along with northern Idaho and eastern Washington and Oregon, offers ideal terrain to come and resist, or to wait out the end of the world.

“In complicated mountainous terrain, with low population density, there are conservative people, usually armed,” says Dakota Adams. A small armed group can stand up to a conventional army with guerrilla techniques. You can also be autonomous by using ancestral cultivation techniques. »

As early as the 1960s, survivalist magazines had identified the best sites in the United States to escape decadent civilization, survive a Russian nuclear attack, rebuild a “Caucasian” (white) country – because all these groups share to varying degrees an ideology racist.

“One of the first houses we occupied belonged to people who came to protect themselves from the Cold War in the 1960s,” Adams recalls. There were the remains of a nuclear shelter. »

How to prepare for the apocalypse? By storing food. Weapons. And military equipment.

“We moved every two years because my father had to escape debt, or lost his job, or cut ties with someone. But one thing never left us: survival equipment. Jackets. Night vision goggles. Thermovision glasses. Guns. Ammunition. A medical kit. Provisions for 72 hours. »

Rhodes only had legal weapons. “Only idiots have automatic weapons: it allows the authorities to search the house and arouses suspicion. And turning a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon is not very difficult,” says Adams.

The group mainly recruited former soldiers and even members of the army or police. He was preparing for an attack. When ? How ? No one knew it. But you had to prepare.

In 1993 there was the siege of Waco, Texas, where a sect stood up to the FBI for 51 days, before an assault that ended with the deaths of 86 people. And the year before, that of Ruby Ridge, in Idaho, where a farmer refused to pay the million dollars owed to the government for having illegally used public lands. Two family members and a police officer were dead. These two events are founding moments of the armed militia movement. As a sign that the federal state can persecute “free” citizens.

The Oath Keepers, some of whom were Marines capable of setting up a decent camp, began going to the sites of confrontations between citizens and federal agents that cropped up here and there. Supposedly to offer food and first aid. But above all to advertise and recruit.

“FBI guys called my dad to an Applebee’s near here and warned him he was playing a dangerous game. He reoriented his interventions towards relief. He went from preparing for the end of the world to preserving civilization after a major disaster; If a disaster or terrorist attack ever occurred, the group would be ready to take control of the situation and, they believed, send a signal to law enforcement to join their movement against tyranny. Because for them, disasters were pretexts for the State to strengthen its control over citizens.

The family lived on donations, and each major rescue operation made it possible to request donations. “We maintained a facade for Stewart, but we were between misery and poverty, we had rotten teeth, a rotten education…”

And they were moving to more and more isolated places.

“He wanted to create a domain, but it never worked out. At the end, there was a rotation of five, six weirdos sleeping in the yard. At one point two of them had 50mm machine guns. Stewart was interested, but it’s tricks to get arrested…

“We knew we weren’t normal, because we were pretending to live up to the ideal that Stewart claimed to be upholding by preparing us for the apocalypse. Stewart, he’s a scammer. »

As a teenager, Dakota began recruiting and “evangelizing” on the internet. “But I slipped into a depression, I told myself that this lousy life waiting for the apocalypse would never be better…”

Then he realized that federal agents’ threats of a raid never materialized. Nor the apocalypse. “I was the last one to have doubts in the family. But I realized that my father was an impostor.

“For me, January 6, 2021 is the natural evolution of all this. Already the Oath Keepers had reached the bottom of the barrel, he had gotten burned along with everyone else. This was the time when the band was like a traveling spectacle that attracted the media to raise money. If it had happened before, it could have been a very different day…”

Around twenty members of the group were still arrested in the days following the assault on the Capitol. Dakota had distanced himself, but was not yet fully politically detoxified.

“After January 6, I reevaluated a lot of things, and I realized that the so-called “radical feminists” and social justice warriors that we were laughing about on YouTube were totally right: Trump aspires to be a dictator. I didn’t even see it coming, but it was visible from a million miles away. »

Now he’s fighting against “corrupt” state Republicans who let developers dispossess Montanans of their land.

“It won’t be easy, I’m facing a popular elected official who is less affected by maneuvers, it would be better if I was against a truly corrupt politician…”

But even if he loses, it won’t be the end of the world. It’s like the beginning of a new time.