A conspiracy requires 2 or more people. I am guessing you were using the term loosely but the problem is many cases fall into a gray area. This coast guard guy I mentioned was arrested on drug abuse charges as a legal convenience, but on currently available information, seems to have operated alone in the furtherance of his criminal plan.

Prosecutors like conspiracy charges because it provides evidence of intent. Otherwise any amount of preparation for commission of a crime could be spun in court as harmless curiosity. A common example of this is where people get caught with child pronography and claim they were just trying to research the topic. I know of a person in an extremist political group who was found by police to have a pile of explosives in the garage and was able to explain it away by claiming it was for model rocketry.

The bottom line is that that some people have intentions to do harm at scale, but intentions are tricky to prove, and surveillance sufficiently good to interrupt harmful acts is expensive to deploy. That's why law enforcement uses entrapment strategies so often, although these are problematic int heir own way because they can tilt into encouraging criminal behavior rather than merely detecting it.

This is challenging because few criminals say 'I, John Doe, intend to commit [crime] at [time and place] and I'm 100% serious' in unambiguous fashion. Many obvious-seeming criminal threats are little more than nasty trolling, and although that is a crime it doesn't make it any easier to identify non-confessor criminals. On the other hand someone can legally acquire significant destructive capacity and widely broadcast opinions that correlate with but do not constitute intent, like longitudinal hostility to some individual or group, but you may not be able to formally demonstrate the existence of intent until the crime is actually committed even when there's a preponderance of evidence to suggest it ahead of time.

Let's rephrase it as "when they act in furtherance to committing a crime", then (i.e. the definition of conspiracy sans requiring multiple people).

And yes, it does mean that you won't catch all such people, only most. It's the case of diminishing returns - you have to radically increase surveillance and police state intrusiveness to go after fewer and fewer people, while also affecting more and more people who aren't actually violent.

That's all true, but only considers state-criminal relations. I urge reconsidering this from the point of view of political conflict rather than simple criminology.

But this story is about state-criminal relations - people like these are terrorists, and we have laws against terrorism, so it's just the matter of enforcing those laws.

If you mean, when one should start worrying about one's political opponents, the answer is, and always has been - as soon as their support starts growing for any reason. In that sense, the time for anybody on the left to worry about right-wing extremist politics has been many years ago, as was the time to translate it into action (i.e. vote strategically to defeat them as the highest priority).

That's true, but it's often not so clear-cut, nor does it line up with electoral goals or established political parties in many contexts.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

One thing nobody seems to be putting a lot of attention on is how what he wrote was in a draft.

It was not sent, it was not finalized, it was a thought he laid down in what we can likely presume to be gmail and never hit send.

Is this just normal now?