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.
Just saying Black Lives Matter is not enough.
We must listen 👂 We must take action ✊
These two laws are a down payment on the progress we still need in this commonwealth and in this country. #BLMpic.twitter.com/kX0U57J0oG
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.”
Struggling CNN thinks content like this (Taylor Lorenz salivating over accused killer Luigi Mangione) is going to turn its ratings around pic.twitter.com/fKwA8cA3mt
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.
The unhinged left, fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome and seething hatred for Elon Musk, is trending more violent, according to a new study that finds political violence targeting President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser is “becoming increasingly normalized.” The report, produced by the Network of Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in partnership with Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab, finds a broader “assassination culture” appears to be “emerging within segments of the U.S. public on the extreme left, with expanding targets now including figures such as Donald Trump.”
Less than a year after assassination attempts on then-presidential candidate Trump and the literally explosive violence against Musk’s Tesla electric vehicles, it’s no secret that leftists are ratcheting up violent rhetoric and actions. The more troubling trend is that an “assassination culture” isn’t just coming from the “fringe” left.
“These attitudes are not fringe — they reflect an emergent assassination culture, grounded in far-left authoritarianism and increasingly normalized in digital discourse,” states the report, titled, “Assassination Culture: How Burning Teslas and Killing Billionaires Became a Meme Aesthetic for Political Violence.”
“The reports found widespread justification for lethal violence — including assassination — among younger, highly online, and ideologically left-aligned users,” the authors of the latest study write.
On Friday, a California man reportedly“angry with pharmacies” was arrested on charges of murdering a Walgreens employee just days after the Luigi Mangione Act was filed with the state. ABC 30 reported that Erick Velazquez, the victim, was not a pharmacist, and was a respected husband and father of two.
Source: NCRI data
NCRI accessed the violence zeitgeist with original survey data and open-source intelligence analysis to determine “how normalized and justified violence against the administration has become in public discourse.”
“The findings signal a threat to political stability and public safety,” the reports warns.
Here are some of the troubling numbers, according to the report:
Murder Justification: 31% and 38% of respondents stated it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively. (These effects were largely driven by respondents that self-identified as left of center, with 48% and 55% at least somewhat justifying murder for Elon Musk and President Trump, respectively, indicating significantly higher justification for violence against these figures.)
Property Destruction: Nearly 40% of respondents (39.8%) stated it is at least somewhat acceptable (or more) to destroy a Tesla dealership in protest.
Psychological/Ideological Correlations with Assassination Culture: These beliefs are highly correlated with one another, as well as with the justification of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and hyper-partisan left-wing ideology. (This suggests that support for violence is part of a broader assassination culture, underpinned by psychological and ideological factors.)
Interestingly, the report finds liberal social media platform BlueSky “plays a significant and predictive role in amplifying radical ideation.” BlueSky has seen its new user numbers surge since November’s election, according to the leftist publication The Guardian. Curiously, the “great X-odus” has been driven by liberals “seeking to escape Elon Musk’s X amid warnings from anti-hate speech campaign groups and the EU about misinformation and extremism on the platform,” The Guardian asserts.
NCRI also found that users are increasingly tying the “memification” of Mangione with calls for political violence against Trump, Musk and others, “reflecting the growing cyber-social presence of assassination culture.” Mangione supporters have been using a meme of the Luigi character from the Super Mario Brothers video game/movie franchise as a symbol of political violence. Some of the threats echo the “Deny, Defend, Depose” mantra inscribed by Mangione on the shell casing that killed Brian Thompson, according to the report.
Source: NCRI data
‘We Will Gut You’
In February, law enforcement officials charged 28-year-old David Allen June Cherry of southern Indiana with felony intimidation after police say he posted online multiple violent threats against Elon Musk, including that Cherry would “gut” the close adviser to President Donald Trump.
“You’ve broken the law. You’re on the hit list,” Cherry allegedly declared on the Musk-owned social media platform X, to a Musk post, according to an affidavit.“You’re robbing American people. We will gut you and parade your corpse in the streets,” the leftist allegedly menaced Musk a short time later.
Indiana State Police tracked Cherry at his job at Batteries Plus and arrested him, according to news accounts. Detectives reportedly seized an AR-15-style rifle, a handgun, ammunition and a ballistic vest at his Palmyra home, according to Fox7.
Cherry, who reportedly runs an online business selling anti-Musk merchandise — including an “anti-oligarch” patch with what appears to be an image of a raised-arm Musk in cross-hairs — told officials he merely wanted to make his posts “edgy” to spur social media reactions, and that he meant Musk no harm. He was released on $2,500 bond and faces the potential of six years in prison on the felony counts while he continues his hate campaign against the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX. His trial is set for August, according to court records.
Southern Indiana man arrested after allegedly posting threats towards Elon Musk on X https://t.co/URy7n3vnxu
Cherry appears to be celebrating his alleged intimidation game on his Red Pawn Dynamics page.
“Let it be known that Red Pawn scared the richest man on the planet. What a giant p*ussy,” the webpage boasts.
His GoFundMe page has raised $4,500 of a $15,000 goal, supposedly for legal fees and to get his car out of impound. His supporters claim the First Amendment protects Cherry’s speech and that he is being persecuted because “his opinion was about a billionaire.”
‘Too Far Down the Deep End’
Musk reportedly has been the target of a growing number of threats over his leadership role in Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and his pledge to trim $2 trillion a year from the bloated, wasteful and fraud-plagued federal budget. A Tennessee man reportedly upset with Trump and Musk was arrested on charges of assembling explosives to “burn down” Musk’s artificial intelligence data facility in Memphis. Ethan Paul Early, 25, told police that his friends talked him out of going through with the plan. He said had gotten too wrapped up in politics and had gone “too far down the deep end,” according to the affidavit, KBTX reported.
A recent Fox News analysis found that there have been more than 50 reported targeted attacks on Tesla EVs, dealerships and charging stations in the U.S., and at least 17 internationally.
“The incidents range from minor vandalism, such as keying or graffiti, to more extreme cases like arson and drive-by shootings allegedly targeting Tesla vehicles,” the news outlet reports.
Trump, who was shot and narrowly escaped being assassinated at a Pennsylvania campaign rally in July, is a constant target of threats from members of the unhinged left. On Friday, Jupiter, Florida, police arrested Glen DeCicco on charges of making written threats on his Facebook page a to kill Trump. “The Jupiter Police Department worked in coordination with the United States Secret Service throughout the investigation,” the press release states.
‘Real-World Escalation’
The NCRI report on the growing assassination culture notes support for such political violence on the right, but the prevalence is not nearly as large.
“This report points to disturbingly high levels of support for political violence, particularly targeting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” the authors write. “Across survey responses, nearly one-third of respondents—and a significantly higher share of left-leaning respondents—expressed some degree of justification for acts of lethal violence.”
While threats and acts of violence rise on the left, the silence from Democrats in power is deafening. But we’ve seen this movie before. Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t end well for a lot of innocent people. Attorney General Pam Bondi has rightly called the spate of attacks against Tesla “nothing short of domestic terrorism,” because that’s what it is. Just like the myriad acts of domestic terrorism by the left during the Black Lives Matter riots at the end of Trump’s first term.
“For the last five years, the violent left has run rampant with few consequences for the chaos it has sown,” Karol Markowicz recently wrote in the New York Post.
The NCRI report includes a stark warning.
“Unless political and cultural leadership explicitly confronts and condemns this trend, NCRI assesses a growing probability of real-world escalation,” the report concludes. “Given the current economic volatility and institutional distrust, the online normalization of political violence may increasingly translate into offline action.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren D-Mass. is under fire for her statement to Joy Reid on MSNBC explaining why Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Warren explained that this was a “warning” that “you can only push people so far.” After a public outcry, Warren walked back her statement. Yet, the statement captures the growing radicalism on the left, particularly among anti-capitalist, Democratic Socialists, and other groups. It is also notable how many of the same political and media figures who were apoplectic and unrelenting over the false claim about Trump’s “fine people on both sides” statement are largely disinterested in this and other extreme comments on the left.
Reid has long been criticized for racist and extremist commentary. Warren seemed eager to play to the far-left audience after first noting that “Violence is never the answer,” but then adding the warning to others that “you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
The senator explained that “the visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.‘
“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.”
The comments came after various pundits and citizens celebrated the killing, including the former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz, who expressed “joy” over the murder (only to walk that back like Warren). Some have defended Lorenz and explained how, while they may not express joy, they understand where “she is coming from” in celebrating the murder of a healthcare executive.
Wanted posters have appeared throughout New York with the images of other CEOs (and of Thompson with a red X across his face). It is the same moral relativism that we have long seen in higher education on the left where violent rhetoric against conservatives or capitalists is common.
It is unclear if Mangione’s anti-capitalist views brought him into contact with known violent groups on the left, including Antifa. Just days before the murder, I wrote about how a liberal media site was selling Antifa products in celebration of the anti-free speech, violent group.
The different treatment given the statements of Trump and Warren are striking. Notably, the false claim received endless coverage and is still reported by the media despite being debunked. The Charlottesville controversy occurred at the start of Trump’s presidency and showed how the media was not interested in whether stories were true in the shift to open advocacy journalism.
What was evident to many of us listening was that Trump was referring to the debate over the removal of controversial historical statutes and noting that there were “very fine people on both sides.” As Snopes belatedly recognized years later, “while Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’”
None of that mattered (or continues to matter to some) in the media because the narrative was better than the facts. Many in the media did not even acknowledge that Trump denied the spin given by his opponents and said that he was referring to the underlying issue of the protest. The statement was treated as demonstrably and unequivocally endorsing violence. It is the same reason why the statement of Warren and many on the left have not been given the same level of public condemnation even in the face of an actual murder. It does not fit the narrative.
Many celebrated Warren’s warnings and the implied rationalization for the murder. Others praised her gutsy take. The far-left publication The New Republic reported the Warren statement in positive terms in an article titled “Senator Elizabeth Warren had an awfully real reaction to the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.”
TNR has been one of the promulgators of this story and attacked Trump in 2024 in what it called a “new” defense over his comments despite the fact that he has always maintained that he was referring to the overall protest over the monument. TNR also attacked Snopes for its fact check and “helping Trump.”
As I discuss in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” politicians use rage rhetoric to ride waves of public anger and garner supporters on the extremes of our political system. The same motive has led some Democratic leaders to embrace Antifa in the past. However, these establishment figures often find that being embraced as a revolutionary today often means that you are viewed as a reactionary tomorrow by the same radical allies in these movements.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.