Jake Lang showed up to the New York City mayor’s house on March 7 with a dead pig, a live goat, a bulletproof vest, and a camera crew of twenty. He was there to save America from Islam, he said. He screamed the n-word at teenagers. He waved bacon in people’s faces. He called Muslims “violent, disgusting people” and told them they were “chimping out.”

Then somebody threw a bomb at him.

Two somebodies, actually. Two teenagers from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, one from Langhorne and one from Newtown, who drove up that morning with mason jars packed with TATP explosive, nuts, bolts, and screws. The first device sailed through the air, hit a barricade, and fizzled out. The second was dropped near a cluster of NYPD officers. Also a dud. Nobody was hurt. Nobody was killed. And the two kids, before anyone even asked them a question, started pledging allegiance to ISIS on camera like they were reading from a script.

The FBI called it an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism. The Attorney General called it a threat to American citizens. The national media ran the headline and moved on.

We’re not moving on. This story has a Pennsylvania zip code. Actually, it has several. And the closer you look at it, the less any of it makes sense.

Act One: The Con Artist

Let’s start with the man holding the dead pig.

Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang graduated from Delaware Valley High School in Milford, Pike County, in 2013. Before that he attended Honesdale High School in Wayne County. He grew up in Narrowsburg, New York, just across the Delaware River, where his father Ned Lang served on the Tusten Town Council. After high school Jake went to Hunter College in Manhattan on a wrestling scholarship, dropped out after a year, and spent the next six years selling vapes, custom baseball caps, and hoverboards on the internet. By his own account he was broke, directionless, going nowhere.

Then came 2020 and a transformation Lang attributes to faith. He says he found God, got baptized, became an entirely new person. Whatever happened internally, the external results were wild: by January 6, 2021, his newfound Christianity had led him to the U.S. Capitol, where federal prosecutors say he beat police officers with a baseball bat and a riot shield. He spent the next four years in federal prison until President Trump pardoned him along with roughly 1,600 other January 6 defendants on his first day back in office.

Since his release Lang has reinvented himself as a Christian nationalist influencer with 422,000 social media followers, a longshot Florida Senate campaign, and a cross-country schedule of anti-Muslim provocations that would cost a small fortune to maintain on a former vape salesman’s income. In November 2025 he traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, where he tried to burn a Quran and slapped it with bacon in front of a crowd of Arab Americans. In December he held up a severed pig’s head outside a mosque in Plano, Texas. In January he rolled into Minneapolis to antagonize the Somali community. In March, Gracie Mansion.

Where’s the money coming from? Nobody’s asking.

Here’s the other thing nobody’s asking about.

Jake Lang has a Jewish mother. He was raised with at least some connection to the faith. There’s a photograph of him as a kid holding his bar mitzvah certificate at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, which means he celebrated one of the most significant rites of passage in Judaism at one of its holiest sites. His sister reportedly served in the Israeli Defense Forces.

He now says he renounces all ties to Judaism and has burned a copy of the Talmud on camera, alongside a Quran and a book promoting Christian Zionism, as if performing a clean break from every religious tradition at once. He calls himself a white Christian nationalist and in Dearborn he said the quiet part out loud, on video: “I am a racist because I don’t want other races taking over my country.”

Not everyone’s buying it.

Tim Hale shared a cell with Lang in federal detention after January 6. His assessment: “He’s a plant. His family served in the IDF. Antifa member and BLM rioter years ago. He’s a stalker, con artist, and junkie. He pretends to be a white Christian so he can incite racial and religious conflict with blacks and Muslims. He’s a rat and a fraud.”

Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Anthony Hudson went to Dearborn planning to back Lang’s claims about Sharia law. He visited the mosques. He talked to actual residents. He came out the other side saying, “We’ve all been lied to with the propaganda. Everything you’ve been told or taught about Dearborn is a complete fabrication.” When Hudson called Lang out publicly as a Zionist agitator, Lang spray-painted his bus.

So here’s the picture: a Pike County high school grad with Jewish heritage, family IDF service, and Israeli connections who has built a Christian nationalist persona to travel the country picking fights with Muslim communities. A guy whose own former cellmate calls him an infiltrator. A guy running a one-man provocation operation that requires travel, logistics, legal support, and media infrastructure that a bankrupt vape salesman couldn’t fund with a GoFundMe.

Who is paying for Jake Lang?

Act Two: The Bombers from the Burbs

Now let’s meet the teenagers with the mason jars.

Emir Balat is 18 years old and technically a senior at Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, Bucks County, though he hadn’t shown up for in-person classes since September. He’d enrolled in a virtual program instead. No known history of radicalization. No mosque attendance on record. No social media trail of extremist content. Nothing. His father, Selahattin Balat, came to the United States from Turkey in 1998 on an asylum grant and later became a citizen. In a 2009 bankruptcy filing the elder Balat listed his occupation as a house painter. The name Selahattin reads as Muslim, but Turkey has Jewish communities, crypto-Jewish communities known as Dönmeh, and large secular populations. We don’t actually know what the elder Balat’s religious background is, what he was fleeing, or why he qualified for asylum. No reporter has asked.

Ibrahim Kayumi is 19, class of 2024 at Council Rock High School North, one of the best public schools in Pennsylvania. The kind of school where kids go on to Penn State and Villanova, not to federal terrorism charges. He was enrolled part-time at Bucks County Community College. His parents emigrated from Afghanistan and became U.S. citizens in 2004 and 2009. Afghanistan historically had Jewish communities as well as its Muslim majority, and the circumstances of the Kayumi family’s departure have not been reported in any detail. We are told these are Muslim families. But we were told Jake Lang was a Christian, too.

The Kayumi family lives in Newtown, Bucks County. Their street is lined with 4,000-square-foot brick homes and manicured lawns. A Mercedes sits in the driveway. The family owns and operates multiple Popeyes franchise locations in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Atlantic City.

Stop right there.

Opening a single Popeyes franchise requires somewhere between $400,000 and $2.5 million in startup capital. The Kayumis own several across three states. That’s millions of dollars in investment from a family that arrived from Afghanistan around 2004, during the height of the war on terror, when the U.S. government was granting immigration status to translators, cooperators, and intelligence assets.

Twenty years later they own a fast food empire and a mansion in one of the most expensive suburbs in the Philadelphia metro area. That might be the most remarkable rags-to-riches story in American immigration history. Or it might be something else entirely, and no reporter covering this case has bothered to pull the financial thread.

The attorneys say the two teenagers may not have known each other long. Authorities haven’t explained how they connected. They lived about four miles apart in Bucks County and neither had any documented radical affiliations before March 7.

And yet these two kids, with no known extremist history, no mosque radicalization pathway, no public trail of any kind, somehow learned to synthesize TATP. Triacetone triperoxide. The same explosive used in the 2005 London transit bombings, the 2015 Paris attacks, and the 2016 Brussels airport bombing. It is notoriously volatile. Trained chemists have blown themselves up making it. It requires genuine knowledge and careful handling.

Where did two suburban teenagers learn to cook military-grade explosives? Who taught them? And why did both devices fail to detonate?

This publication has been tracking homemade explosive cases across the region. In September 2025, just six months before the Gracie Mansion incident, a man in Jackson Township, Monroe County, was arraigned on weapons of mass destruction charges after police and the FBI discovered he’d been building bombs in his basement and detonating them in his neighborhood for over a year. Neighbors told reporters the explosions had become a weekly occurrence, growing stronger each time. When authorities finally responded, they found enough explosive material to require a controlled detonation by the Pennsylvania State Police Hazardous Device section, the FBI, and the ATF.

That case got a few paragraphs of local coverage and disappeared. Nobody reported on who James Niedosik was building bombs for. Nobody asked who taught him. Nobody reported on whether the FBI investigation produced connections beyond the immediate arrest, or whether any of the materials or methods overlapped with what showed up in Bucks County six months later. The Jackson Township bomb lab sits about 60 miles north of Langhorne, where Balat lived and where the FBI found explosive residue in a storage unit after the Gracie Mansion incident. That’s not proof of a connection. But the fact that two separate bomb-making operations were discovered in eastern Pennsylvania within six months of each other, both involving the FBI, and nobody in the press has publicly asked whether they’re related, is its own kind of failure.

The ingredients for TATP are commercially available at hardware stores. Balat’s own notebook, recovered by investigators, contained handwritten notes listing “hydrogen peroxide,” “sulfuric acid,” and “acetone.” Is somebody in this region is teaching people to build these things, or is there knowledge and materials are circulating through a network that nobody is connecting the dots on? It’s fair to ask such questions.

Then there’s the performance afterward. Both kids, before being questioned, before being Mirandized, before seeing a lawyer, started pledging allegiance to ISIS on camera. Balat wrote out a statement declaring allegiance to the Islamic State. Kayumi blurted out “ISIS” to someone in the crowd. On the drive up they were allegedly recorded on their own dashcam talking about killing sixty people to “start terror.” The whole thing plays like a confession that was planned before the crime. Real radicalized individuals don’t typically narrate their own terrorism in real time for the cameras. That behavior looks less like ideological conviction and more like someone executing a script designed to establish a specific narrative before the lawyers and investigators arrive.

The entire ISIS framing of this case rests on the boys’ own performed statements. There is no independent evidence of mosque radicalization, online extremist networks, or contact with any foreign terrorist organization. Just two suburban kids who showed up with bombs, said “ISIS” on cue, and gave the federal government exactly the story it needed.

Balat’s own defense attorney didn’t mount a radicalization defense or claim his client was brainwashed by online propaganda. Instead he told reporters his client had “complicated stuff going on” in his personal life. That’s an extraordinary thing for a lawyer to say about a client facing terrorism charges. “Complicated stuff” isn’t a legal strategy.

Act Three: The Whole Thing Stinks

Step back and look at the full picture.

A provocateur with concealed Israeli connections stages an anti-Muslim protest outside the home of New York City’s first Muslim mayor. He brings twenty supporters. Over a hundred counter-protesters show up, which guarantees a confrontation, guarantees cameras, guarantees chaos. Into that chaos walk two kids from wealthy Bucks County families whose parents came to America through wartime immigration pipelines. They throw bombs that don’t go off. They pledge ISIS before anyone asks them to. The FBI gets its biggest domestic terrorism case of the year. The news cycle gets “ISIS attacks New York.” Jake Lang gets to play the victim on social media.

The Ghost of Elohim City

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Readers of this publication will recall our investigation into Andreas Strassmeir, the man at the center of the Oklahoma City bombing who was never investigated (“The Man Who Wasn’t There: Dismantling the Andreas Strassmeir Cover Story,” Pocono Review).

For those who missed it: in the early 1990s a German national named Andreas Strassmeir became head of security at Elohim City, a white supremacist compound in rural Oklahoma. He talked openly about bombing federal buildings and was connected to Timothy McVeigh in the weeks before the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children in a second-floor daycare.

The official story was that Strassmeir was a right-wing drifter who fell in with extremists. The evidence told a completely different story. Strassmeir was fluent in Hebrew, a language he started learning as a teenager in Berlin, and he spent three summers on a kibbutz in Israel’s Jezreel Valley where he was armed with an Uzi and deployed on military patrols along the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank. Under Israeli law that kind of assignment requires either citizenship or a formal relationship with the security establishment. He was photographed with a senior Israeli general. He described himself as “a very staunch Zionist.” When asked directly about contact with the Mossad he didn’t deny it. A retired CIA official later confirmed to journalist Russ Baker that an internal agency study identified Strassmeir as a German intelligence operative whose information on McVeigh had been shared with the FBI. The FBI never meaningfully investigated him and he was ultimately flown out of the country by a CIA-connected pilot while federal agents looked the other way.

The legislative aftermath of the bombing, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, was used not to target white supremacist terrorism but to designate Palestinian organizations as foreign terrorist groups. A bombing by white extremists became a legal weapon against Palestinians.

Now look at Jake Lang. A guy with a Jewish mother, a bar mitzvah celebrated at the Western Wall, a sister in the IDF, and documented Israeli connections, performing as a white Christian nationalist while traveling the country manufacturing confrontations between Christians and Muslims. He creates the exact conditions under which a violent incident can occur. And on March 7, one did.

Strassmeir posed as a white supremacist to embed himself in the 1990s militia movement. Lang poses as a Christian nationalist to provoke the 2020s culture war. Both concealed Israeli connections. Both manufactured conditions for violence. Both were, or are, shielded from the kind of scrutiny that would expose what they actually are.

One hundred sixty-eight people died in Oklahoma City. Nobody died outside Gracie Mansion. Not this time. But the machinery is the same and the questions we failed to ask in 1995 are the same questions we’re failing to ask now.

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