An Arson Attack, a Passover Seder, and the Past That Still Burns

The timing of the arson attack at Josh Shapiro’s home doesn’t seem coincidental. Hours before, the Pennsylvania governor — a serious contender for the VP nomination under Kamala Harris — celebrated a Passover Seder, hosting guests in the room that would soon be engulfed in flames.

Cody Balmer — an apparent deadbeat dad to at least three children, an unemployed welder who was previously accused of crimes like domestic assault and stepping on a child’s already broken leg — broke into the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, armed with a sledgehammer and beer bottles filled with an accelerant. His social-media posts paint a disturbing picture, one full of anger toward the government and talk of violence.

Balmer somehow managed to scale the fence, elude the security team already on watch, and forcibly enter the home, setting it on fire while the governor and his wife, children, and pets slept upstairs.

Josh Shapiro is a man whose launch into public service came when a classmate knocked on his dorm room door asking him to consider running for student government. Shapiro agreed, and has not lost a political race to date. The day after the arson attack, Shapiro spoke to the press, saying,“If this individual was trying to deter me from doing my job as your governor, rest assured, I will find a way to work even harder than I was,” he said.

“If he was trying to terrorize our family, our friends, the Jewish community, who joined us for a Passover Seder in that room last night, hear me on this: we celebrated our faith last night, proudly, and in a few hours, we will celebrate our second Seder of Passover,” he said. “No one will deter me or my family, or any Pennsylvanian, from celebrating their faith openly and proudly.”

Josh Shapiro

Balmer later turned himself in, sticking his tongue out at reporters and informing the judge that he suffered from no mental illnesses. (In fact, he had been committed to a mental-health facility for a period following the domestic-violence incident.) When asked about taking medication, he mumbled, “Medication that led me to different types of behavior.”

Cody Balmer

Balmer’s mother said in recent days she had become concerned for his mental well-being, telling CBS News that her son “was mentally ill, went off his meds, and this is what happened." She said she had reached out to several police departments the week before. “I couldn’t get anybody to help,” she said.

And this brings me to my question: What is it about Americans, particularly white men, that gives them a proclivity toward political violence?

What leads a man in Butler, PA to climb on a farmer’s rooftop and take aim at a then-candidate Trump? What causes more than a dozen men to plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of MI? Why would a man plan to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?

The facts are startling: Nearly one in three Americans say they think using violence is usually or always okay to achieve certain political goals. And some of the political goals people think it’s acceptable to use violence for include “To preserve an American way of life based on Western European traditions,” “To preserve an American way of life I believe in,” and “To oppose the government when it does not share my beliefs.”

Experts acknowledge that the root causes of violence are multifaceted, and include things like loneliness, economic stress, lack of education, finding hate online, and not getting needed mental health care. And all of those are likely partial explanations that contribute to the issue.

But there’s a more hidden answer that I believe is overlooked by researchers. It’s America’s long history of how (predominantly) white men have reacted when they've experienced a perceived wrong. And these beliefs and feelings are then passed on to subsequent generations.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the United States entered a period known as Reconstruction. The federal government tried (quite imperfectly) to give newly freed Black Americans equal rights — to vote, to run for office, to live as full citizens. But many white men (and to be fair, women) in the South viewed this as a threat to their own way of life, to their ability to access the levers of power, and to their status as superior in society.

Unlike what many of our history textbooks have described, white Southerners did not simply snap their fingers with a reluctant, “Rats, foiled again,” when presented with the reality that their valuable “possessions” — the human beings they legally owned — were now no longer theirs. The wealth they had banked on: gone. The free labor they had come to depend on: no more.

Some people today are doing what white men in Reconstruction-era America did when faced with a perceived wrong: resorting to violence.

After the Civil War, white supremacists disguised themselves under cloak and hood, attended secret KKK meetings, used violence, lynchings, and threats to terrorize Black Americans, and attempted to reassert their dominance in society.

Membership in the KKK dwindled under the leadership of President Ulysses S. Grant after Congress handed him new tools to better target members of the group. But making it highly inconvenient — and perhaps dangerous — to continue to meet as an organization didn’t erase the existing sentiment of white supremacy and the anger of the disaffected white Americans.

The seeds of resentment and rage were simply covered with a fertile topsoil, hidden from the naked eye, but rooting nonetheless. When the United States began experiencing a huge influx of immigrants in the early part of the 20th century — millions of people in a short period of time — many in this wave of newcomers didn’t look or sound like the white Americans whose families had been on the continent for generations. They dressed differently. Their voices were accented with the tongues of Eastern Europe. Many of them were Catholics or Jews.

When the seeds of hate finally broke ground once again in the 1920s, the second coming of the KKK didn’t target just Black Americans. Now the circle of who was suspect was broadened. Blacks. Jews. Catholics. Immigrants in general. Gone were the hoods; now members paraded proudly down the streets of Washington, DC.

One-third of the white men in the city of Denver (yes, one-third) belonged to the KKK. The governor of Indiana was a Klansman, and so too were 27–40% of the white residents of Indianapolis. Future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black was a member of what the KKK had become: not just a hate group, but a fraternal organization and a money-making venture.

I can’t say for sure what motivated Cody Balmer to attack Governor Shapiro’s home during Passover. But I can say that the echoes of history continue to reverberate loudly. Political violence as a means of expressing hate or dissatisfaction with one’s station in life is not new in America, but there is a disturbingly upward trend, perhaps propelled by antisemitism, perhaps by a lack of economic achievement, perhaps by untreated mental-health challenges in an America that pays only lip service to offering care.

I think I’ve seen this film before: and I didn’t like the ending.

When Abraham Lincoln quoted the book of Matthew, saying in one of his most famous speeches that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he wasn’t referring only to familial ties.

He was speaking to Americans on the brink of civil war. He was talking to the men who would sooner risk being maimed than acclimate to an America that was true to what it said on paper: that all men are created equal.

Cody Balmer admits — for whatever reason — to hating Governor Josh Shapiro, saying that if he had encountered him in his darkened home, he would have beaten him with a sledgehammer.

And if there is one thing that America’s history has taught us: hate has never led us anywhere worth going.