[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
This past April, a man named Cody Balmer tried to murder Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, by setting his house on fire. Shapiro and his whole family were inside at the time, but managed to flee. Now he has pleaded guilty, and will spend from 25 to 50 years in prison. More on his hatred of Jews because they were, he insisted, “killing his friends” in Gaza, can be found here: “Pennsylvania Man Pleads Guilty to Arson Attack on Governor’s Mansion,” Algemeiner, October 14, 2025:
A 38-year-old man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to attempting to murder Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro in an April arson attack on the governor’s residence in which he scaled a fence and ignited part of the house with gasoline-filled beer bottles as Shapiro and his family slept inside.
Cody Balmer also pleaded guilty to terrorism, 22 counts of arson, 21 counts of reckless endangerment, burglary, aggravated assault, and loitering, according to records from the Dauphin County Court in Pennsylvania.
A Pennsylvania judge sentenced Balmer to 25 to 50 years in state prison, according to Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo, who prosecuted the case.
The April attack was part of a surge in political violence in the United States. There were about 150 politically motivated attacks in the first half of 2025, nearly double the number from that period last year, according to political violence researchers.
In an emotional press conference on Tuesday, Shapiro said the attack had taken a profound toll on him and his family, and that despite rising levels of political violence in the US, nobody should “grow numb” to it.
“We need real accountability for acts of political violence, and today is real accountability for the violence that came here to Pennsylvania,” said Shapiro, who is seen as a potential candidate for his party’s presidential nomination in 2028.
After the attack, Balmer told police he “harbored hatred” toward Shapiro and would have beaten him with a hammer if he had encountered the governor inside the residence.
Balmer is not only a deep-dyed antisemite and supporter of Hamas; he’s also a homicidal maniac.
According to a police search warrant released in April when Balmer called 911 to confess, he told police he believed Shapiro, who is Jewish, was encouraging the war in Gaza, and that he “needs to stop having my friends killed,” and “our people have been put through too much by that monster.”
When Cody Balmer refers to “my friends,” he means the people in Gaza, who are of course not his friends, except insofar as they share his desire to murder Jews. When he says that “our people have been put through too much by that monster,” he is identifying completely with the Palestinians, whom he calls “our people.” And because Shapiro is Jewish, in Balmer’s eyes he is “a monster,” responsible for everything the IDF does. Every Jew is in his view part of a single, malevolent whole, and Cody Balmer was determined to do his part to rid the world of this semitic plague by killing at least one of the most prominent Jews in America together with his entire family.
How is it, one wonders, that Balmer was sentenced to a regular prison instead of to life in an institute for the criminally insane?
