"American Supremacist" Capitol Rioter Sentenced to 100 Days Behind Bars

     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 these cheating leftist democrats and I will never comply with their decrees and mandates. People are finally waking up to these globalist tyrants who really got their asses handed to them in this election and the fraud and cheating is so obvious and over 72 million Americans owning this election was a sham. Friggin dementia joe and a hoe. You got to be kidding me. While republicans picked up massive numbers of seats and not one incumbent lost in the house for the Repubs. Yeah, I'm sure dementia joe won this election." I've never seen such a rant of playground insults, sexist slurs, lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, missing apostrophes and contractions, and false information. The fact that a 46-year-old man wrote this and not a 15-year-old boy with anger issues who whittles away his days playing video games is embarrassing. He was wrong about the elections for Congress, as well: sure, House Democrats actually lost seats, but there were a number of incumbent Republicans who lost seats, and Democrats would go on to win nominal control of the Senate.

     On January 5th, 2021, Sidorski wrote: "Wait for the patriots from MD/PA/NC/VA (where I'm from) get there. It's going to be wild. See you all there!!!" He then upvoted a comment that read, "Those idiot lawmakers in the Capitol building have no idea what civil unrest is till we the people march into that Capitol building and drag him out by the hair of their heads and boot their buts back home. That is the people's house of representatives. They're about to get served eviction notices." What is it with Trump supporters and terrible grammar? Sidorski is lucky he merely liked that comment instead of posting it himself: if he had, he would have likely faced a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Instead, he was charged with four misdemeanors: entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, and parading in a Capitol building, for his actions on January 6th.

     On that fateful day, Dennis Sidorski wore his trademark shirt and a green hat with "III" printed on it, the symbol of the far-right Three Percenters militia. He spent about 40 minutes inside the building, and, for a period of three seconds, put his hand on the shoulder of a Capitol police officer scuffling with other insurrectionists, something that could have and should have earned him a felony civil disorder charge.

     It's been difficult to keep track of the sentences for misdemeanants on January 6th unless they are notable people who did, said, or even wore something outrageous on January 6th or in the time that preceded or followed the insurrection. The DOJ doesn't publish articles about misdemeanor guilty pleas or sentences, nor do most national news outlets pick up on them. Sidorski is a relatively low-level defendant. In this case, however, it was what he wore that made him notable. Sidorski's "America supremacist" shirt quickly sold to the tune of thousands of shirts online after he was turned in to the FBI. Not only that, but the reason he was even turned in was because three former or current coworkers recognized his shirt. The evidence against him was overwhelming, so, on January 21st, 2022, one year and one day after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to disorderly and disruptive conduct in the Capitol building, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year behind bars, in exchange for having the remaining charges, including picketing in the Capitol building and entering and remaining in a restricted grounds, dropped. 

     Because his case was about as serious as it could be while still being a misdemeanor, Sidorski faced an estimated sentencing range of 12 to 18 months in prison for his actions. On July 11th, 2022, a judge gave him a much lighter but still weighty sentence of 100 days in jail (just under 3.5 months) followed by a year of probation, 50 hours of community service, and $500 in restitution. As the DOJ did not update his "Capitol Breach Cases" entry, I turned to Sedition Tracker, a volunteer-run website that tracks these cases, and I was able to locate his sentence.

     Do I think Sidorski learned his lesson from this? No. Going by the name @dnice2814, he has 3,300 TikTok followers and a description that reads "Love freedom , family , country , and its time to take it back from evil." Well Mr. Sidorski, we do need to take this country back. However, it is, in fact, people like you who represent the evil.