A particularly violent insurgent during the January 6th attack – one who claims to be a sovereign citizen – was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday.

According to the Justice Department’s website, 40-year-old Taylor Johnatkis from Kingston, Washington, was sentenced to 87 months in prison and will have to pay $2,000 in restitution. U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth handed down the harsh-sounding sentence. A jury found Johnatkis guilty on seven charges in November 2023, including three felonies.

The DOJ went on to explain Johnatkis’s actions that fateful day. He coordinated and helped organize other insurgents to attack the police, who held a line just above a staircase. Johnatkis then used a megaphone to encourage rioters to break through the police line and yelled at the rioters to “pack it in! pack it in!”

DOJ went on to add:

Numerous police officers ran to reinforce the line as the rioters pushed the metal bike racks into the officers. As a result of this attack, at least one police officer was injured.

Try violently attacking a police officer in your town and see how you do.

Johnatakis’s claim that he is a sovereign citizen led him to represent himself at trial, thereby frustrating Judge Lamberth with wild antics, according to ABC News.  He referred to the judge as “gobbledygook” and asked if the record reflected that he repented his sins. Somewhat laughably, the judge informed Johnatakis that he wouldn’t be taking questions at this time.

The sovereign citizen movement is generally made up of a strange kettle of fish. Their primary contention is that the U.S. and State governments have no authority over them, which – as everyone recognizes, would lead to a pretty chaotic “nation.” Axios has a pretty good and succinct description of the movement.

Sovereign citizens are known for their abstruse pseudo-legal arguments, as well as other unusual behaviors, such as inserting gratuitous punctuation marks in their names or flouting motor vehicle regulations while proclaiming they are “travelers,” not “drivers.”

While delivering the sentence, Judge Lamberth blasted Johnatakis for parroting Donald Trump’s claims that the severity of January 6 was “overblown” and romanticizing his detainment as being in a “gulag.”

Lamberth said, “This cannot become normal…We cannot condone the normalization of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot,” US District Judge Royce Lamberth said while sentencing Taylor James Johnatakis to more than seven years in prison.

The judge warned of a “vicious cycle … that could imperil our institutions” if Americans, upset with future election results, resort to the “vigilantism, lawlessness and anarchy” that occurred on January 6, 2021.

The judge declared Wednesday that “the January 6 riot was not civil disobedience,” but instead was a “corrosive” and “selfish, not patriotic” affront to the nation, where Americans were “battling (their) own representative government.”

There is much more at the link for those interested.

Suffice it to say that with all the vigor that sovereign citizens push back against the authority of the government’s ability to keep order, the government has imposed duly passed laws that assert control over lawbreakers, and Johnatkis will spend significant time in a real federal penitentiary.

Sovereign citizens may not recognize the government’s authority, but the view isn’t shared.

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Jason Miciak is features editor at Political Flare and an Editor at Large at Occupy Democrats. He can be reached at [email protected] and on “X” @JasonMiciak