18 Apr The Most Important — and Overlooked — Story of the Week
I hate to start a piece with a cliché, especially a cliché that is constantly misattributed, but as Lenin never said, “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” This, unfortunately, was one of those weeks. With the markets being incredibly volatile, the Trump Administration playing a game of tariff-chicken with the CCP, gold surging and portending inflation and other economic turmoil, Democrats traveling to El Salvador to sip margaritas with wife-beating MS-13 gang bangers, Harvard choosing discrimination over federal funding, teen murderers being lionized and subsidized in Texas, Republicans shrugging at the rule of law, and Heaven knows what else, this has been quite the few days. One hardly knows where to start….
As I said, this is unfortunate, not just because so much is happening all at once, but also because the tumult and the pace of the news have a cumulative effect of artificially suppressing the magnitude of some stories that are truly important but get overlooked in the madness. One such story happened this past week in otherwise sleepy Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Indeed, I would argue that the most important story of the week – if not the year or even the decade – took place in Harrisburg this week. And no one seemed to notice, much less care. The Hill has the details:
The suspect arrested in connection to the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D) home cited the plight of Palestinians as his motivation, according to a probable cause affidavit filed by the Pennsylvania State Police.
The affidavit relays details of a 911 call that the suspect, Cody Allen Balmer, allegedly placed to Dauphin County 911 after the arson attack this weekend.
Police say Balmer identified himself by name and told the 911 operator that Shapiro “needs to know that he … ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,’” the affidavit read.
The affidavit continued: “BALMER continues saying he needs to stop having my friends killed, and … ‘our people have been put through too much by that monster.’”
There are several things worth noting here, but let’s start with the fact that the Governor of Pennsylvania has nothing to do with American foreign policy, let alone American policy on the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Sane people know this, of course, which means that the arsonist, Cody Balmer, is quite probably not sane. Balmer insists that he will not “take part” in Shapiro’s “plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.” That’s great. But since Shapiro has no such plans and no power to carry them out, even if he did, a sane person would not have to worry himself about that. But Balmer is not sane. He’s batty.
But that’s not the whole story. Balmer’s battiness is of a specific variety. The Hill continues:
The attack occurred at approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, after the governor held a Seder at his house for the first night of Passover. Shapiro — a rising star in the Democratic party who nearly became then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election — is Jewish.
There it is. Shapiro is Jewish, which means that in Balmer’s mind and the minds of countless millions of Americans, Europeans, and others around the world, he can do anything. He can control the weather. He can get the media to do whatever he wants them to. He can manipulate the financial markets to his benefit. He can build, maintain, and use a space laser. He can fake the moon landing. He can “colonize” lands on which his ancestors lived for some four thousand years or more. And obviously, he can make and carry out plans for the Palestinian people, despite not technically having the authority or capacity to do so. Shapiro is a Jew, which means that he is an outsider, an interloper, a weak and pathetic creature, and also omnipotent.
In the wake of Balmer’s confession, some in the media and the Democratic establishment tried to pass the blame for his actions to the Trump Administration. Trump is polarizing and nasty, they screamed. It’s his fault. Balmer is all worked up. Or, as Senator Cory Booker put it: “The attack on Josh Shapiro and his family did not happen in a vacuum. Incendiary rhetoric, purposeful disinformation — it all helped lead to this hateful and destructive act. Leaders need to be conscious of their words having consequences.”
Booker has a point, but as usual, it’s at the top of his bald head. He is right that the attack did not “happen in a vacuum,” but that’s just about only thing he gets right. This isn’t about “leaders” using “incendiary rhetoric” or “disinformation.” What does that even mean? In truth, this is just the logical progression of actions in the ongoing rebirth of violent antisemitism. This is the inevitable outcome of the anti-realist ideology that dominates the political Left (and parts of the political Right) today and is sanctioned by much of the political, media, and educational establishments (Harvard and Columbia, for example). This is the result of the Democratic Party winking and nodding at antisemitism for years, if not decades.
Last summer, just after Kamala Harris picked Richard Simmons Tim Walz as her running mate, I wrote that her selection bore significant ideological undertones:
[B]y choosing Walz, Harris does not “bolster her left-populist flank” but instead makes this yet another election in which the winner will be determined by turning out “the base” rather than appealing to undecideds and independents….
Most notably, in addition to being a cultural leftist, Walz is one other thing that demonstrates that Harris intends to run a base election. He is a Lutheran….
Right now, the media are playing up the idea that Harris chose Walz over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because she felt that she got along better with Walz than Shapiro. That may be true, but it’s also true that Walz’s last name isn’t Shapiro.
If she wanted to have a chance, Harris knew she had to distance herself from Shapiro and his Jewishness. She knew her base would never stand for a Jewish running mate.
Over the last few years, I have written extensively about the increasing danger posed by the intellectual and political Left’s embrace of antisemitism. Antisemitism is an evil in its own right, but also, historically, a harbinger of even greater social, political, and economic upheaval. As of this past week, we are officially in a new stage of the rise and acceptance of antisemitism in this country. No longer is antisemitism merely rhetorical or the practice of campus radicals alone. No longer is the violence against Jews restricted to isolated incidents in large cities, carried out mostly by violent street thugs. A Jewish politician has been targeted for assassination, specifically because he is Jewish. This is something new, something different, something radically unlike what we have seen up until now.
Sure, the would-be assassin is crazy, but it’s impossible, in this case, to separate the craziness from its cause and effect. They’re all bound up together. Hitler was crazy. Hamas is crazy. The Ayatollahs are crazy. Candace Owens is crazy. You have to be at least a little bit crazy to believe the things that antisemites believe. And yet…here we are.
This will not end well – no matter how hard the media and political establishments try to convince us it didn’t even happen.
