The Wolfboro-Tuftonboro Democrat Machine
TL;DR:
- We arrived first at Pickering Corner with U.S., Gadsden, and Appeal to Heaven flags.
- A larger crowd surrounded them, blocked retreat, and pushed them toward the street.
- This is mid-level provocation: crowding, sign/flag blocking, umbrella, dog, and an elbow to the back.
- The “peaceful/nonpartisan” branding is false; Canadian and pride flags were prominent, U.S. flags scarce or upside-down.
- Playlist and past events treated Republicans as fascists/Nazis; one man said Trump “needs to die now.”
- We stayed, didn’t retaliate, and filmed.
- These are organized space-occupation tactics, and I am filing complaints for enforcement and a Saturday police presence.
“Peaceful,” to most, means the purposed avoidance of aggression. The Wolfeboro Area Peaceful Protests claimed that word, but they appear to be using an esoteric dictionary. They have claimed it every Saturday since winter. They list the hour as “non-partisan” (an interesting piece of language that aligns with federal laws for 501 organizations…). They tell the passersby that they are defending American democracy.
Photograph from inside the line at 12:21: the cloth between us and the green, the street in front of us.
Pickering Corner is the junction of Routes 28 and 109 — South Main and Center — the Civil War memorial on the green — The Loyal Men of Wolfeboro — and a strip of public ground. About ten of us were there first, arriving between 10 and 11am. American flags. A Gadsden flag. An Appeal to Heaven flag commemorating Christian founder George Washington. I filmed as able on my cell phone.
The flag they decided meant a death-wish on our President. The monument behind it is to men who actually died.
They arrived forty to fifty strong. They hung their sign next to us. Then they surrounded us. Then they infiltrated between and within us. Then they worked our line the way professionally trained people work a line: a holding operation against a smaller group that had the same right to stand there. The large banner — WOLFEBORO AREA PEACEFUL PROTESTS — went up on yellow poles and ropes behind us, tied off illegally to a wooden utility pole at the sidewalk. This banner blocked out retreat to the rear. They then forced our line forward toward the street by physical contact from behind, on both sides, and by jumping or holding their signs in front of ours so the flags we were holding disappeared behind theirs.
Mid-level violence is the act of utilizing small-scale violence and harassment to try to provoke a larger response that can be recorded and used for propaganda. Mid-level violence was their expertise all day long.
What they said they were
Non-partisan. American democracy defenders. Peaceful.
They list the hour on Indivisible as “a local non-partisan Indivisible event.” Same hour on Mobilize. Same hour on Women’s March. The Wolfeboro-Tuftonboro Democrats post it as non-partisan. The branding is a lie.
Government steel as a flagpole. The town’s sign hooded in black. No American flag on their post.
Canadian flags dominated their ground. A progress pride flag — the pervert-and-mutilation banner — stood in the place of honor. They lashed both to a city traffic-sign. The Peaceful Protests banner and a Liberty & Justice For All panel were guyed to a wooden utility pole that already carries a highway directional sign for locating a hospital – clearly not important to them. Tables, a speaker, a cooler, more maple-leaf flags on the public way. American flags among them were scarce to the point of absence, save for a handful flown upside down.
They say America. They fly foreign colors.
What they did
The music started friendly. Ramones had me quite literally singing along aloud. Crowd-pleasers. I was jamming with the rest of the early hour. Then the set changed. The stack included Charlie King’s If You Want Peace (Work for Justice) — “No justice, no peace” — the implicit threat that if they don’t get what they want they will not be peaceful. Then the label: Resistance Revival Chorus, All You Fascists Bound To Lose, Woody Guthrie’s wartime anthem relocated onto a lakeside corner and aimed at neighbors. Then the rest — tracks about terrible Republicans, including a rap that said Republicans take your rights. It was one niche anti-Fascist anthem after another, one would tell us that Republicans are the real fascists, the next would demand Fascists be killed.
The set is a cult mythos — justification for violence against people they have already named fascist. A permission structure for criminal violence directed, on that green, at us. But, in the wise words of our current President, they are really after you, we are just in the way.
The weekly “Peaceful” series already has a public record on this point. In September 2025 this same corner was documented singing Chumbawamba’s The Day the Nazi Died — we’ll never rest again until every Nazi dies — while signs treated Republican neighbors as the Nazis in the lyric. Letters in the local paper have named 8647, Hitler drag, Gestapo, Brown Shirts, gulags, and 1789 France. The 8647 signs were out today, mixed in with our own group as they applied pressure to us. Saturday did not invent assassination culture in Wolfeboro. Saturday said the quiet part out loud.
It started even before their main contingent arrived at noon. Around 11:30am a woman about seventy years young walked behind me in a wide-open green with room enough for a marching band. She threw an elbow into me – right into the small of my back as I held up my 9’ flag pole. Then she called me a racist!
A woman would later walk before our line, in the street, displaying a Progress Pride flag. She utilized the breeze so the perverted cloth would strike the faces of our team as it passed.
I raised a camera on a protester putting up a drone — to document a possible unlawful flight over a crowd. A woman in their colors charged the lens with a painted umbrella. Same umbrella she used to hide her own face. The words, from the tape: “you want something to look at, look at this!” Their people and their equipment were already well inside our defensive line — personal space treated as theirs to enter at will, as we occasionally would find these pieces of equipment striking us from the side or rear – not hard, not doing injury, just attempting to provoke us, and to cause us to fear through such things as blocking our vision and defeating our defensive bubble. This was a direct import of tactics from the named terrorist group Antifa, and further as can be found in the Communist protest manual Beautiful Trouble.
The umbrella obstructed the camera and hid the face.
A handler steered a golden retriever at our line. The dog barked at us from within striking distance – a tactic particularly unwelcomed by me given my history of severe injury by strange dog. Then the handler kept the animal behind us — at our backs — while he cursed and challenged us, thereby assisting their effort to push our line forward toward traffic. Same decision-dilemma as the umbrella: defend forcefully and provide propaganda footage to them, or do nothing and hope that the object is not hiding an incoming attack. We took the dangerous path of doing nothing, and giving them nothing.
Participants invoked “Good Trouble” tactics. Of course, a Communist staple reference to violent direct action on behalf of a “good” cause.
Through the hour they stayed in the gray zone. Enough force to provoke, and certainly serially in violation of NH criminal statutes against assault. Not enough, on camera, to hand us a prosecution locals are likely to run with. Operational discipline is what I recognized in this. Real professionalism, of the theater-kid sort.
The strongest line of the day was spoken matter-of-factly.
A man came from behind, looked up at the Appeal to Heaven — Washington’s pine tree, the petition that goes over the magistrate’s head to God — and asked whether the flag meant I wanted heaven to take Donald Trump.
I answered as a Christian. I would want the man to give his life to Christ, and to go to heaven if he does.
The reply: it needs to happen sooner. He needs to die now.
It is a death-wish, spoken on a public green, aimed at a named political figure, next to music that treats Republicans as fascists and fascists as legitimate targets for preemptive lethal violence. Assassination culture. Charlie Kirk. Donald Trump. Gorsuch. Etc, etc. The series of threatening letters and actions against my home. A permission structure. A hero archetype applied to he who would pull the trigger in anger.
What we did
We stayed.
There first. American flags. No matching mid-level violence. No attempt to exclude them from the corner.
We did not elbow back. We did not walk a flag into their faces. We did not put a dog at their heels. We did not try to drive them off the corner. We filmed as we could. We held the ground we had taken first, even while entirely enveloped by them. We declined the gift they were keen on receiving — the overreaction for their cameras.
They claim the First Amendment as a one-way street – perhaps even as a conspiracy against rights given the technical proficiency, professionalism, organization, and organizational backing of their group.
The playbook — not the membership card
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (1971): ridicule; keep the pressure on; the real action is in the enemy’s reaction; pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.
They froze a Christian flag into a death-wish about Trump after naming it as a “hate symbol” and “white nationalist flag.” They elbowed, flag-slapped, umbrella-charged, and harassed their way through the day.
Beautiful Trouble — Andrew Boyd, Dave Oswald Mitchell, and the toolbox at beautifultrouble.org — is the front-facing published pattern language. Occupation: physically occupying contested space. Decision dilemma: force the target to choose, and write both choices to your advantage (in this case, they either win by drowning us out and demoralizing us, or they win by provoking a reaction on video). Play to the audience that isn’t there — the camera. Maintain “nonviolent discipline,” which on Saturday meant stay just below the threshold of being caught crimeing on camera. Escalate strategically. Saturday sat in the gray between that respectable “discipline” and militant anti-fascist practice.
Mark Bray (Dartmouth College), Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (2017): no-platform; physical confrontation when necessary; deny opponents space; call ordinary conservatives fascists so the confrontation arrives pre-justified.
Call the mechanism by its rightful name: political warfare of the Maoist flavor. Trained mid-level provocation, space-holding, and exclusion, used against a counter-protest that was there first and did not take the bait.
The corner is not theirs
A traditional public forum does not become private property because a recurring group likes the hour. Ten people standing first are not trespassers on forty people’s feelings.
Two groups may stand in the same forum. One group may not digest the other and call the result peace.
What does not need a request: they used government steel as a flagpole. Wolfeboro’s sign ordinance prohibits signs in the Town right-of-way except permitted business directional signs. New Hampshire law forbids affixing political advertising to highway signs and utility poles. A Canadian flag and a pride banner lashed to a traffic-sign post is not a permitted directional sign. Blocking twenty-feet of access behind us with a banner and rope is not “first amendment.”
The point
I have written before that leftist “non-violence” is a tactical lie — death to our enemies, just not here and now, where it would damage the brand. Saturday a man courteously confirmed it for me. Sooner. Die now.
Persistently violent. Feeding assassination culture. Importing Antifa tactics. Approaching a conspiracy against rights in a public space. Pure anti-1A activity.
A trained occupation of a public corner, run against neighbors who arrived first, who they label with IFF (military friend/foe) targeting language.
A republic that treats a spoken death-wish, a press-rights attacking umbrella, jabs from all directions, a dog at your back, and serial invasions by people, signs, and equipment within inches of our body and face as ordinary Saturday recreation and “speech” has already conceded the public square. The concession is the point. They do not need to win the argument if they can make standing there expensive.
Note: I am in the process of sending official complaints and requests to relevant government agencies including the town, local police, and federal civil rights officials, requesting investigation, a permanent Saturday police presence at these protests, and enforcement of all relevant laws.
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