Robert Stacy McCain warned us about jumping to conclusions before all of the facts were in about Cody Balmer, the man charged with setting fire to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion.

As soon as Pennsylvania State Police announced that Cody Balmer had been charged with setting the fire at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, someone found Balmer’s Facebook page and a deep dive found little evidence to point to a motive. Like most other people — including Gov. Josh Shapiro himself — I immediately assumed the motive must be antisemitism. Like, you attack the residence of the Jewish governor on the first night of Passover, what else could it be?

So when I plunged into Balmer’s Facebook page, I expected to find evidence that the suspect was either (a) a neo-Nazi Jew-hater or (b) a “progressive” pro-Palestinian Jew-hater. But there was no evidence of either inclination. In fact, there was very little hint of political inclinations at all. The guy was a welder and mechanic, with a black wife and four mixed-race kids, which obviously seemed to rule out any neo-Nazi tendencies, but there weren’t any “free Palestine” messages, either, He had a couple of sarcastic posts indicating he wasn’t a big fan of Joe Biden, but there weren’t any MAGA pro-Trump messages, either. Thomas Stevenson of The Post Millennial dug even deeper than I did and discovered that Balmer described himself as a “registered socialist,” so it’s a fair surmise he was a Bernie Bro back in the day, which might explain his disdain of Biden as an “establishment” Democrat. Continue reading →