This could explain why threats related to TMC weren't taken as legit, which XC's excuse back in 2019 was that he was a 'troll' without actually intending to do a school shooting:
She said Cisneros said he put the Bethel Park High School contact information, principals’ information and their emails on a message board “in hopes that others would ‘troll’ the school,” explaining that might entail “flood(ing) them with emails, calls and threats to cause a disturbance in the school.”
According to court records, Cisneros eventually admitted to “posting the threat on 8chan that he was planning a school shooting,” but he denied having a plan to commit a school shooting or possessing a weapon.
An 18-year-old man is accused of making threats against Bethel Park High School and its principal in multiple anonymous emails. Xavier Cisneros of Bethel Church Road, Bethel Park, faces a felony count of terroristic threats and misdemeanor of retaliation against a witness or victim, according to...
www.observer-reporter.com
TMC could have been viewed as hanging out with a group of outcast gamers who weren't actual threats of carrying out a school shooting, like he might have been a 'troll' then or at least used the same excuse as XC. It also wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that TMC had accessories to some degree, like how with Columbine there was accessories who didn't know what they were helping out in.
Also from the lockdown training, that could have also encouraged TMC, like this is a comment from a Bethel Park High School parent in 2019 who pointed out that the school drills actually show that school shooters can be successful if they try it:
"Do you really want it to be your kid who's the one who takes the bullet and winds up with a plaque in the lobby of the school saying he went down as a hero?" asked Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, parent Nanette Adams, who disagreed with the decision to adopt a widely used safety protocol during a September drill at her 15-year-old son's high school. The protocol is known as ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.
"To me, this just seems like an indirect admission on the part of the schools that they really have no control over who gets into the building, and the school security officer isn't enough to keep the place safe so we need to hold the kids accountable for doing it," she said.
Parents are increasingly questioning elements of school shooting drills, including whether they traumatize kids.
www.wgbh.org
I think he may have been radicalized, but not in the political sense. His life experiences might have taught him that if you're a sufficiently motivated shooter who hides your tracks, you can become famous. Perhaps his original plan was to bomb and shoot up his old school but then he became more ambitious. 2019 may have taught him he could do a famous shooting/bombing if he wanted to and then 2024 post-high school is when he decided to actually carry it out. This that was said in 2019 about shooting up schools was apparently confirmed to shooting up political events, like you could just change the school shooting words around from 2019 to say this about the 2024 Trump event where he saw local LE couldn't guard a building with line of sight to Trump:
"To me, this just seems like an indirect admission on the part of the Secret Service that they really have no control over who gets onto the building, and the local police aren't enough to keep the place safe"