Democrats Normalized the Same Political Violence That Torched PA Governor’s Mansion
By: Beth Brelje | April 15, 2025
Beth Brelje
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Political violence flared again in Pennsylvania on Sunday in another troubling example of an apparent nutjob who seemingly imbibed the leftist paradigm that legitimizes the use of force.
Cody Balmer — the Harrisburg man accused of torching the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion while Gov. Josh Shapiro, his family, and some guests slept inside — was charged Sunday with terrorism, attempted homicide, aggravated arson, and other related charges, according to a Pennsylvania State Police criminal complaint.
State police say Balmer was captured on several security cameras, and a woman contacted police and said that “her ex-paramour, Cody Balmer [38] was the individual responsible for setting the fire.” She told police he confessed to her and “wanted her to call police to turn him in.” Soon, he was outside police headquarters where he approached a state trooper and turned himself in, the complaint said.
Balmer told police he put gasoline from his lawnmower into two beer bottles and carried these homemade Molotov cocktails and a sledgehammer from his house, on a nearly four-mile walk through Harrisburg, to the mansion. Security cameras show he scaled the fence, broke a window, threw one bottle into the piano room, then broke another window, went inside, and deployed the second one to burn the dining room.
Balmer told police he knew it was possible Shapiro could be inside the mansion and might get injured, and when asked what he would have done if Shapiro had caught Balmer inside the home, Balmer “advised he would have beaten him with his hammer,” the complaint said. “During the interview, Balmer admitted to harboring hatred towards Governor Shapiro.”
“This type of violence is not OK,” Shapiro said in a press conference on Sunday, and he is right. But this type of violence is celebrated by Democrats and their left-wing media.
When they called the violent 2020 Black Lives Matter riots “peaceful protests,” as thugs threw bricks in windows, looted businesses, and burned neighborhoods, the left normalized violence. When Pennsylvania authorities responded to the protests with new rules for police, instead of clear punishment for the destruction of neighborhoods, they normalized violence.
At that time, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a column titled “Buildings Matter, Too,” about the destruction of buildings during the riots — a completely valid topic, for the paper’s architecture critic. The Inquirer’s “journalists of color” walked out in protest, the publication changed the column’s title and ran an apology, and Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski left the paper. The incident made it impossible to safely speak the truth there, and the response gave another win — a louder voice — to political violence.
Today, the left continues to devalue life and reward violence.
After another probable nutjob, Luigi Mangione, allegedly assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson (ostensibly to communicate some vague message about health insurance), shooting him in the back on a New York City sidewalk, the reaction should have been universal horror that a father and husband was needlessly dead. But some on the left thought Mangione may have had a “good point” (whatever it was, exactly) and some swooned, “Did you notice how handsome he is?”
Now there are women fangirling over him, and ditz writer Taylor Lorenz, like, totally gets it. In a mirthful CNN interview filled with laughter this week, Lorenz described how those women see Mangione.
“You’re going to see women especially that feel like, Oh my God, right? Like, here’s this man, who, who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart. He’s a person that seems … like this morally good man, which is hard to find.”
Imagine how Thompson’s family feels seeing someone minimize his murder and fawn over the suspect.
When the lines between right and wrong are unclear, our culture drifts into danger, and Democrats should not be surprised when the political violence they normalized happens to one of their own.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
Progressives live on a kind of moral roulette wheel, ready to conform to whatever emotional imperative the ball happens to land on next. It was quite ironic that, during the 2016 elections, progressives launched a campaign to smear conservative Trump supporters as sharing one unique characteristic — a marked tendency toward authoritarianism. Really? This observation came from a leftist electorate so pliable to authority that they can believe even a person’s gender is merely a choice — if their opinion makers so decree. 
their own weak and venal natures. This, too, is why progressive morality is often so amazing shallow — saying the right thing rather than doing the right thing. Keeping the dream of the welfare state on life support decades beyond its demonstrable failure. It does not matter what reality is, but only what the New York Times says reality is. The illusion, not the nation, must be protected at all costs. What is virtue to a progressive but a feeling of being in sync with of the anointed herd?
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