A Frederick County School Board member who bragged about drinking a Coors Light and Fireball inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors in a Washington, D.C., courtroom on Monday.
Miles Adkins, 39, was elected to the board in 2021, running on a promise, surprise, surprise, to make sure that critical race theory would be removed from the local school system.
His election win, as it turns out, came months after he’d breached the U.S. Capitol as rioters tried to delay the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Consider this today’s reminder of why elections matter.
Adkins, on Monday, was sentenced to two years of probation and 12 days of intermittent incarceration to be served over the course of multiple weekends.
In an interview with a Washington, D.C., television station after the court appearance, Adkins made it clear that he won’t be heeding the push from Frederick County residents who have been trying for two years to get him to step down.
“You’re gonna need a bigger wrecking ball to get me out of there,” Adkins told NBC4, echoing a comment that he’d made at a March 19 school board meeting.
According to the Department of Justice, Adkins entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 within minutes of the first breach of the building, as members of Congress were still being evacuated.
Once inside the Senate lobby, Adkins waved rioters into the building, and helped one rioter enter the building through a broken window.
The not-so-humble brag about the Coors Light and Fireball came from among several messages sent over social media to friends detailing his time inside the Capitol during the riot in which he talked about the “need to fight antifa” and used the n-word twice.
His presence in the Capitol on Jan. 6 first became public knowledge in August 2022 when Sedition Hunters, an online network of insurrection sleuths, identified Adkins as a participant.
Adkins tried to distance himself from being outed by casting himself as the victim of a political smear, calling the identification of him as a Jan. 6 riot participant “an attack” that “has everything to do with trying to silence and intimidate me.”
You won’t be surprised to learn that Adkins, by that point, had already come under fire for a tasteless attack on fellow school board members depicted with Adolf Hitler mustaches and devil horns in a photo posted to his Facebook page, and for an April 2022 public-intoxication charge in Prince William County.
Adkins would later face new calls to resign after pleading guilty to reckless driving in a Loudoun County court in September 2023, after the original DWI charge was amended down to the reckless-driving charge.
This is a lot, obviously, but under Virginia law, Adkins can only be removed from office through a wieldy recall process.
Otherwise, it’s up to him, that, or the wrecking ball he keeps talking about.
Adkins, in the interview with the TV station, offered this word salad as his defense for wanting to stay on the school board.
“Well, we’re gonna keep the main thing the main thing. The main thing is, you know, to educate the children and everything. You see our test scores rising,” Adkins said.
This guy is on the school board.
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Chris Graham
