Cody Balmer and the banality of U.S. hate | Will Bunch Newsletter

It’s April 15, and I have to say I can’t remember a year when there’s been as little hype about the arrival of America’s tax deadline day. Maybe because the massive everyday tax hike that Donald Trump has dictatorially imposed on the nation with his irrational tariffs is a bigger story? Or is it just that — with daily stories about masked men snatching college students and an American gulag rising up in El Salvador — people don’t want to think about where our tax dollars are going?

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

News that an arsonist had somehow breached the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in Harrisburg and caused significant fire damage while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were sleeping nearby broke around 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.

It was probably 2 p.m. and 30 seconds when the first posts speculating on the motives of the then-unknown assailant hit social media sites like X and Bluesky. Some of that was the totally understandable concern that the arson — coming on the first night of Passover, hours after the Shapiro family had hosted a Seder in the room that sustained the worst damage — is part of a rise in antisemitism in America.

But much of the online chatter — just as when Donald Trump was shot at and grazed also in Pennsylvania, just nine months ago, or with so much other wanton violence across America — aimed to wrap an attempted murder into a tidy little box, ready to be giftwrapped with one’s own political prejudices. The perpetrator had to be one of those left-wing campus radicals, targeting Shapiro for his outspoken support of Israel. Or a right-wing domestic terrorist, energized by a raging president who calls anyone who opposes him “a left-wing lunatic.”

Hours later, 38-year-old Cody Balmer, unemployed auto mechanic from Harrisburg, calmly turned himself into police after an “ex-paramour” ratted him out. He’d left behind a treasure trove of online clues as to what he was all about, satisfying curiosity — yet somehow satisfying no one who expected an easy explanation for an act of pure hatred.

Balmer wasn’t really a political “D” or an “R,” yet he all but wore a giant “L” on his forehead.

Rejected by women and employers, and convicted of forgery, as a deadbeat dad watching his property lapse into foreclosure, a future would-be assassin found the internet as a place to blame others for his problems — President Joe Biden, Biden’s supporters, the female gender — and prove his manhood by embracing weapons.

“Be the light you want to see in the world,” read an embroidered image he posted to Facebook about three years ago, with an image of a Molotov cocktail, just like the flaming Heineken bottle he would eventually toss into the dining room of Pennsylvania’s governor. In another post, he points a handgun directly at the camera.

Balmer’s love for violence as a means to effect change was consistent, even as his much vaguer political clues — libertarian, or anarchist, or garden-variety dude-bro Biden hater — were all over the map. The internet should never have expected the second coming of the Unabomber, a Harvard-trained mad bomber writing manifestos that people are still debating 30 years later. No, Cody Balmer is what the Italian American kids in my late father-in-law’s South Philly would have called a cafone.

A clown. A lowlife.

And yet one can argue that America has a Cody Balmer problem, not because of this one guy with an empty Heineken bottle and some gas from his lawn mower, but because there are so many men — and, yes, we are talking about men — out there just like him. Underemployed. Dumped. Turning to drugs, then the stronger drug of internet “likes,” and finally the most potent drug on the American black market: violence.

And too many politicians and so-called influencers are happy to offer them a lit match.

The current U.S. landscape is littered with the corpses and burnt odor left behind by these lost boys like Balmer, or the Wisconsin teen who police say killed his parents because he believed that would get him the money he needed to assassinate Trump, or 20-year-old Thomas Crooks (forgot that name already, didn’t you?) who researched schedules for both Biden and Trump and googled the JFK assassination, thinking the shots he fired at Trump in Butler, Pa., were a path to glory.

Balmer definitely fit the profile, especially in his drift from woman-hating toward political violence. He liked misogynistic posts online, and had charges pending for an alleged assault after a child called 911 to say “his stepfather was beating his mother.” Balmer’s mother told The Associated Press her son suffered from mental illness, had stopped taking medication, and that her pleas for mental-health help had fallen on deaf ears. That happens a lot in a nation where too many politicians blame violence on mental health right before slashing the programs that address it.

But there’s one more thing about the assassination attempt on Shapiro that really stands out. Instead of fleeing town, Balmer calmly walked into a police station, turned himself in, and even told the cops that he would have attacked the governor with his hammer if he’d had the opportunity. What on earth would make someone think they could commit such a public act of violence and hate, and not fear the consequences?

Oh yeah, right. It was less than three months ago that Trump gave unconditional full pardons to about 1,500 insurrectionists from the lethal Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including men who attacked and injured police officers with fire extinguisher tanks, flagpoles, or anything else they could find. The president set 2021’s arsonists free because he liked their politics.

Was Balmer angling for the next batch of pardons when he posted “Biden supporters shouldn’t exist,” not long before attacking a Democratic White House hopeful? We’ll never know. But we also know that in a moment of deep political division and unrest, a president who calls anyone who disagrees with him “a left-wing lunatic,” or “a terrorist,” or worse, is pushing another gas-filled lawn mower to the party.

With the thick smell of smoke still in the air, Shapiro gave Pennsylvania and the nation his best moment as a public servant on Sunday afternoon — choking up with emotion as he declared: “This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society … We have to be better than this. And we have a responsibility to all be better.”

It was a moment of leadership that stood out in this adrift nation, because it was so rare. It’s getting hard to imagine a government that tackles the root causes of violence or the role of mental illness, rather than taking a chain saw to preventive services, led by people who see our Cody Balmers as a social problem to be solved, not a source of votes in the next election or as foot soldiers in the next coup if they lose.

Until that day, America will keep sending in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.

Question: Why does the Democratic Party leadership continue to rely upon the same consultants and refuse to bring in experts in behavior studies to create effective messaging? All we see is complaints with no plan. — Drew from Michigan (@milawlit.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Drew, I totally agree with your main premise — Dems have relied too much on too many consultants for too long — but I’m not sure if seeking help from a different class of experts is the answer. Ever since it was humbled by its defeats in the Reagan era (which was a long time ago!) the Democratic Party has fumbled repeatedly while scrambling toward whatever pollsters or focus groups claim the voting public wants — when what voters actually want and respect is bold leaders, not timid followers. That’s why you’re seeing an outpouring of support for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Sen. Cory Booker, because they’ve said what they believe instead of waiting on consultants. I hope to see more of that as the crisis of democracy deepens.

It’s no surprise that so many newsletter readers are also voracious consumers of books, with most folks saying they read at least 20 and as many as 100 tomes a year. One of the more avid is Atlantic City librarian Janis Stubbs, who shares my dismay about the decline in book reading among the young. “It has contributed to the diminution of critical thinking skills and leads to accepting lies as truth,” she wrote. “It undoubtedly affected the way people voted in the last election.” Many respondents are optimistic, though, that Gen Alpha can take up the reading habit if we just expose them. “My dad took me to the Olney Library when I was a kid.” Edward Seeling wrote. “I took my two boys when they were growing up and today I take my five grandchildren.”

📮 This week’s question: Traveling internationally feels more perilous for everyone in the second coming of Trump. Has the political situation changed anyone’s personal or family travel plans for 2025, and are any newsletter readers even contemplating moving from the United States? Please email me your answer and put the exact words “Trump travel” in the subject line.

Ten-and-a-half years is a blink of the eye, and an eternity. It still seems like yesterday that my wife and I were driving home from a dog breeder near Lebanon, Pa., with a tiny red creature balled up in the front-seat passenger well. It was like bringing your baby home from the hospital, and I was every bit as terrified as elated — wondering at age 55 if I could handle a red golden retriever’s boundless energy at a time I was losing my own.

What I didn’t expect was Daisy’s oddball personality, her own way of doing things. I still remember our first tentative walks in the neighborhood, and how she insisted on strolling neither on the pavement nor the grass but atop the narrow curb, like a tightrope artist. She and our tiny maltipoo were stereotypical “sisters”; little Bella was smart and cynical, while younger Daisy was beautiful and naive, falling in love with whoever next entered the room. Apparently the runt of her litter back in Lebanon, Daisy adored human beings even as she seemed to have little use for other dogs. She got hooked on daily trips to our local dog park — but only as an excuse to run from person to person, begging to get her belly rubbed.

It was, not surprisingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic that I turned to Daisy as my constant companion, maybe too much so. But as the sun gradually came out, she dragged me every day to the dog park and inspired me not only to better appreciate green grass and budding trees, but to also — just like her — look forward to seeing and getting to know the other humans there, even if they didn’t rub my belly.

Our bond only amplified the pain of knowing that, even with my own medical rap sheet from hell, I was likely to outlive her. Last Wednesday we went to the dog park — where I knew she’d been slowing down... but gradually, I told myself — and then I drove off to the Hudson Valley for my next stint of 92-year-old mom care. I’d never see Daisy again. This little essay is the goodbye I was denied in person — that’s how quickly the end came. What can you say about a 10-and-a-half year-old puppy who died? That she taught me to be a better human being. I will never forget that, or her.

A government declaring that something called “highway racism” was a real problem to tackle, and not a case of “DEI” run amok? A plan to spend as much as $2 trillion on America’s out-of-whack infrastructure, including rebuilding Black and brown neighborhoods that were unfairly ripped apart by post-World War II expressways? Was Joe Biden’s presidency all just a wild dream? Return to those halcyon days when you read this from April 15, 2021: “Philly’s Nicetown was devastated by highway racism. Can Biden’s $2T plan help?”

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.