>In public and private posts online, court documents say, Pendley claimed to have been at the Capitol on January 6, but not to have entered the building. He expressed disappointment that his fellow protesters weren’t more aggressive.
According to the government he called himself a "patriot" when describing how he would carry out an attack: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.346637... . His goal for the attack was to provoke a big government response that would wake people up about government overreach.
I guess it depends on your personal standard of evidence, but when someone hangs out on far-right message boards, drives to DC with an AR rifle in his car to attend a far-right protest, and plans a bomb attack on behalf of a popular far-right cause in order to show people that the government is too powerful, at some point you probably begin identifying the person as far-right.
It is a fair enough question, as there is a certain amount of bilateral support for bombing data centers. There are conceivable justifications for it from many points on the political spectrum.
That said, he talks like a right winger, not like a radical environmentalist or a militant communist.
Unfortunately, without disclaimers someone is bound to misinterpret the comment. If the comment isn't defensively worded in a way to explicitly prevent bad faith interpretations, someone is bound to come tilting. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine all the ways a given comment might be interpreted. Even seemingly unambiguous passages are construed to mean opposing things.
That's just where we are.
Take a time machine and move him straight from 1978 to 2018, what would he target? My guess is data centers would be on the list.
For a taste of unironic communism in 2021: https://www.pslweb.org/ Some good people, some bad people, all in the throes of some pretty terrible ideology. shrug
To be clear, not endorsing any of these ideological positions, just happen to be familiar with them owing to a misspent youth.
He went after AI researchers back then, attacking their hardware would make sense. I mean, I'm probably just a few years and a few bad turns away from seeing AWS & co ("Surveillance Capitalism, Inc.") as a large harm to humanity that needs to be stopped, so I'd be surprised if nobody is thinking that today. The scale of data centers likely makes them super hard targets for the super majority of groups or individuals, which is why we don't see a lot of attacks on them (yet).
I don't have a problem with communists. I do believe that they're coming from a good place, but are fundamentally mistaken in their analysis which does lead some of them down some very dark paths. It just feels like believing in the geocentric model of the universe (or flat earth, I suppose that's more current), which sounds like lots of fun, but would turn weird if you start to realize the person you're talking to actually believes it and isn't joking.