Baked Alaska might be the most prototypical 21st-Century American personality. It’s all about branding–getting attention in any way possible rather than focusing on substance. And it’s also about displays of monumental assholery and idiocy being the surest route to getting attention. The latest idiocy in the Baked Alaska saga is him seeing his plea deal blow up because he refused to admit guilt.

His real name is Anthime Joseph “Tim” Gionet, and he’s already in trouble for macing a bouncer and tearing down a Happy Hanukkah display back in December 2020. He was recently sentenced to 30 days in jail for the former incident.

A right-wing internet personality who livestreamed himself storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was set to plead guilty to a federal charge Wednesday as part of a plea deal reached with federal prosecutors, but the plea deal went up in smoke after he declared himself innocent.

Anthime Joseph Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska,” was set to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count in which he would admit he “willfully and knowingly paraded, demonstrated, and picketed” inside the Capitol. Gionet was charged just one day after the Capitol attack and arrested in January 2021. He originally faced charges of entering or remaining on restricted grounds without lawful authority and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

But the deal went out the window at a hearing Wednesday after Judge Emmet G. Sullivan asked Gionet whether he was pleading guilty because he was, in fact, guilty.

This is a basic formality. You agree to plead guilty to lesser charges in exchange for seeing more serious charges dropped. All you have to do is admit guilt. But Mr. Gionet decided to tell the judge instead that he was innocent and only pretending to take responsibility for his actions to avoid felony charges.

And…poof! His plea agreement was gone and the felony charges were back on the table. No matter how incompetent Baked Alaska’s attorneys may be, there’s no way they didn’t instruct him to just accept guilt when asked by the judge. Now they’ll get paid to clean up the mess or represent their client at trial. Of course, since most of the evidence in the case is the result of Baked Alaska’s own livestream of his excellent insurrection adventure inside the Capitol Building, it’s not likely that even good lawyering can help him beat the rap.

I’m not interested in telling the story of Baked Alaska’s life, so suffice to say that he started out wanting a music career before he discovered a gift for social media. He’s been a supporter of both Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, marched at both the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally (chanting “Jews will not replace us”) and at Black Lives Matter protests. and has been an extreme Alt-Right personality before trying his hand at being an ex-Alt-Right personality and then going back to being an Alt-Right personality again. He once worked for BuzzFeed but he’s also run with Neo-Nazis. He has a tattoo of Trump’s face that Trump once signed.

Sometimes I reproach myself for not doing the little self-promoting things necessary to increase viewers and revenues, but then I look at the other extreme and am grateful that I’m somehow free of the compulsion to seek attention at any cost. I’m kind of fatally a 20th-Century personality working in a 21st-Century media environment. But I’ve got a moral compass. I wouldn’t trade places with Baked Alaska. Look at where he is now.