Insurrection Detection

     The people from the Center who continue to insist that what happened on January 6th was a riot but not an insurrection are dangerously ignorant, be it intentionally or unintentionally. On January 12th, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III; his chief lieutenant, Edward Vallejo; and nine other Oath Keepers militia members who had already been indicted for their roles in the Capitol insurrection were indicted by a grand jury on charges of seditious conspiracy, which means they plotted to use force to take over the government. Two of these Oath Keepers, Joshua James and Brian Ulrich, have pleaded guilty to that crime as has a third Oath Keeper, William Todd Wilson, who was not one of the original 11 indicted. At least a dozen other Oath Keepers have been charged with conspiracy without the sedition aspect, including Jason Dolan, Caleb Berry, Jon Schaeffer, and Mark Grods.      Then came the indictment of the Proud Boys. It started when Proud Boys Matthew Greene and Ch...

     Once again, it's Landon Manwaring . This Utahn is a relatively minor figure who pleaded guilty to the class B misdemeanor charge of picketing, parading, or demonstrating in the Capitol. However, sheerly numerically, he managed to be significant in two different ways in the course of the investigation into the January 6th insurrection. Arrested and charged on August 10th, his guilty plea came at his first court appearance on August 26th. He was the 10th Utah resident charged in the insurrection. Now, Manwaring has become the 400th Capitol insurrectionist to be convicted.      This is a major victory for the U.S. Department of Justice and their partners at the FBI. Since the first trial on February 28th, 2022, a total of 18 Capitol riot defendants have been convicted at trial, while one (Kyle Fitzsimons of Maine) has had his trial and is awaiting the verdict. Of these trials, eight have been before juries: Guy Reffitt, Thomas Webster, Thomas Robertson, ...

     Landon Manwaring had just set a benchmark for Capitol riot cases in his home state of Utah by becoming the tenth to be arrested when he decided to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of picketing, parading, or demonstrating in the Capitol. While federal sentences are almost always well below the maximum, especially with guilty pleas, he could face up to six months in prison and five years of supervised release when he is sentenced. Manwaring joins a relatively small group of Capitol suspects who appear to have agreed to a plea deal before being arrested. An offer was extended all the way back in May, and he was only charged with a single count via information, the one he pleaded guilty to. Because most defendants who plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge are initially charged with two to five, this only further demonstrates that he, in all likelihood, was arrested after a deal with the DOJ was reached.       As he awaits sentencing, here ar...

     The consequences insurrectionists are facing for their actions on January 6th, 2021, are growing more severe virtually by the week. From his sentencing in December 2021 all the way until the end of July in 2022, Robert Scott Palmer of Florida held the distinction of the longest January 6th-related sentence, 63 months for assaulting law enforcement in the Lower West Terrace with a fire extinguisher. That record was tied in July 2022 when Mark Ponder, a career criminal, was given 63 months for assaulting law enforcement with a hockey stick. In August 2022, Guy Reffitt, the first Capitol insurrectionist to be convicted at trial, was sentenced to 87 months in prison for leading the charge during the Capitol siege before threatening to kill his son for turning him in. Later in the month, Thomas Robertson, a former Virginia police officer who stockpiled weapons after being released on bond, was sentenced to 87 months in prison.      We've seen a rapid escala...

      Derek Sulenta , a Long Beach, California, man who posted his intent to go to the Capitol before the insurrection and bragged about being there after the fact, was arrested on four misdemeanor counts with a combined maximum penalty of three years behind bars.       Jeramiah Caplinger , a Michigan man, became the first insurrectionist to plead guilty to a class B misdemeanor of climbing on U.S. Capitol grounds and received a sentence of 35 days in prison, two years of probation, 60 hours of community service, and $500 restitution. He was most infamous for quoting Game of Thrones to justify calls for political violence.       Kasey Hopkins , a Kansas City, Kansas, man, was charged with the same four misdemeanors as Sulenta after he spent 18 minutes inside the Capitol building, including inside the office of Senator Jeff Merkley.       Lisa Homer , a former Yakima County Commission candidate who wore a bulletproof vest and go...

     Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Dennis Sidorski exemplifies this perfectly. Born on June 30th, 1974, the Ashburn, Virginia, resident attended Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, from 1996 to 1998. After this, he worked as an operations manager at the ADESA Auto Auction company in Sterling, Virginia, from November 2000 until January 2021, when he was fired in the wake of the insurrection. He did, however, manage to keep his job in golf maintenance at the Bowling Green Company Club in Front Royal, Virginia. (If you don't like an insurrectionist working in such a fine establishment, please make your opinions heard.) He was arrested on August 19th, 2003, on a DUI charge and later convicted.      On November 20th, 2020, Sidorski posted on Parler, a far-right social media site: "I will never unite with today's leftist insane democratic party [Sic sic sic... apparently he's also never heard of a misplaced modifier.]... It's all out war against the...

      Guy Reffitt , a recruiter for the far-right Three Percenters group and the first Capitol insurrectionist to be convicted at trial, was sentenced to 87 months (7.25 years, or seven years and three months) in prison followed by three years of supervised release and a $2,000 fine for five felony charges, including bringing a gun to Capitol grounds and threatening to kill his own son for turning him in.      Judge Amit P. Mehta refused to delay the September 26th start date for the trial of the Oath Keepers, including founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, on seditious conspiracy charges.       John Douglas Wright , a Canton, Ohio, man who organized two charter buses that carried over 100 people to the Capitol, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstruction of an official proceeding and faces a sentencing range of either 15 to 21 months or 41 to 51 months in prison on November 28th, depending on the opinion of a judge.       J...

     Robert Keith Packer is a worthless piece of shit, even if he wasn't accused of any property damage or violence on January 6th. This 57-year-old Virginia man made national headlines for wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" shirt to the U.S. Capitol insurrection; he said he wore it "because [he] was cold," ignoring the obvious question. While it was falsely claimed that a separate rioter wore a "6MWE" (Six Million Weren't Enough, a reference to the Holocaust) shirt (a picture actually taken at a different far-right event), Robert Packer was simply the most visible example of the rampant Nazi ideology present on January 6th. While no sentence will feel like enough for his misdemeanor guilty plea, exposing and punishing the other Nazis there that day will help bring about justice.      Due to be sentenced this week is Bryan Betancur, a white supremacist with a long criminal history who FBI agents claim wanted to be a "lone wolf killer." Sadly, bec...

     He is the most-charged Capitol insurrectionist that few people have heard of. If you ask Americans to identify the face of the Capitol insurrection, a few that might come to mind would be Aaron Mostofsky, the man who wore fur pelts and carried a walking stick; Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman;" Doug Jensen, the man in the QAnon t-shirt who chased Officer Eugene Goodman; or Kevin Seefried, the man who carried a Confederate flag. In the notoriety tier just beneath them, those Capitol rioters who are known to people who closely follow politics, Dominic Pezzola finds his home. He is worse than some of the more famous people, those who deserved felony convictions for obstructing Congress that day but were not involved in plotting to overthrow the government. Pezzola was involved in this despicable act, however, and the course of his case reflects that. These are all the reasons Dominic Pezzola of Rochester, New York, is the worst January 6th insurrectionist: He has been ...