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Terese Bastarache (formerly known as Terese Grinnell) is having a good week — despite the vast global conspiracy working against her.

Monday night, on the eve of Bastarache’s criminal trial over charges of disrupting a state meeting, the state of New Hampshire dropped its case.

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s campaign announced Bastarache, an outspoken anti-vaccination activist and conspiracy theory proponent, will be its Trump 2024 “town captain” in Loudon.

“Today, President Donald J. Trump announced his initial New Hampshire Grassroots Leadership Team with over 150 dedicated activists and organizers throughout the Granite State’s ten counties,” the campaign said in a press release. “These supporters represent the overwhelming strength of the MAGA Movement and will again propel President Trump to win the First-in-the-Nation primary.”

The campaign released an impressive list of 14 county and city/town chairs, featuring respected names in the party like longtime Republican activist Augusta Petrone. They also released the names of more than 100 town and ward captains, including Bastarache.

Bastarache is one of the self-declared “Noble 9,” a group of anti-vaccination activists charged with disrupting the October 2021 Executive Council Meeting. Their goal was to stop New Hampshire from accepting federal funding for COVID-19 vaccines. (The Executive Council voted 4-1 to reject the funding.)

A month earlier, Bastarache and fellow activist Frank Staples shouted down the September meeting so aggressively the Executive Council canceled it, citing security concerns.

“This is bigger than my case,” Bastarache said Tuesday after the charges were dropped. “This is about the corruption, collusion, and entrapment of civilians. This was a violation of every New Hampshire constituent’s constitutional rights.”

Bastarache, a registered nurse, has made her views on the COVID vaccine, government mandates, and public health policy very public since the pandemic began. She has likened the federal government’s COVID policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

“It will take away our Live Free or Die; it will make us unsafe,” Bastarache said at the September 2021 protest. “People are dying from the injections, this is Numenberg [sic] trials!”

The Nazi comparisons did not stop there. In an October 2021 appearance at Christian Revolution in Manchester, Bastarache denounced COVID protocols tied to federal vaccine funding.

“It’s the Holocaust,” she said.

And in an interview with Free State Project leader Carla Gericke, her COVID protests started her down a “rabbit hole” of research, bringing her to believe in the Agenda 2030 conspiracy. That is the theory that a World Economic Forum cabal intends to institute a one-world government through depopulation. Included in the conspiracy claims are the Sununu family, New Hampshire inventor of the Segway scooter Dean Kamen, the Chinese Communist government, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, Harvard University, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Lloyd’s of London, and WalMart.

“Then I find out [Sununu’s] brother works for the World Economic Forum, and they’re being very bold and brazen about accelerating Agenda 2030,” Bastarache said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is truly happening.’”

Bastarache’s Truth Social feed is full of conspiracy memes linking Sununu to Agenda 2030 and links to groups like Grazing The Surface, which purport to uncover the New Hampshire ties to the nefarious world domination plot.

Bastarache also believes the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, and she is part of the ‘We the People’ organization, along with election denier Marilyn Todd, pushing that oft-disproven theory.

It was a hot Thursday morning at the PorcFest Pavilion in Lancaster, and as hundreds waited in the sun to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the air was thick with excitement.

And pot.

And the scents that come with the presence of a large number of dogs.

It also didn’t help that the central bathroom with showers, located near the Norse pagan spiritual village, was out of order. The adjacent port-a-potties were also shut. It was hoped that would all be fixed before Thursday night’s scheduled free couples shower event. 

This was the environment RFK Jr. stepped into when he showed up for Porcfest, the Free State Project’s annual gathering in the White Mountains. Once he took the stage, the air was full of something else familiar at FSP gatherings: Anti-government conspiracy theories.

Kennedy’s appearance at this libertarian event upset Democrats like New Hampshire state party chairman Ray Buckley, who sent the Democratic presidential candidate a plea not to participate.

“Free Staters are nearly universally Republican primary voters; they are highly unlikely to vote in the Democratic Primary,” Buckley wrote. “Free Staters view with hostility our candidates, elected officials, values, and our party as a whole.”

Given the hostility Kennedy’s candidacy has received from his fellow Democrats — including candidates and elected officials — that latter point may have been moot.

And if the state Democratic Party wasn’t thrilled by RFK Jr. showing up at PorcFest, not every Free Stater was happy about it, either. Kennedy’s security requirements involved a ban on firearms in the Pavilion, no small feat at an event that often appears to be a walking gun show.

Guns are everywhere at PorcFest. People brought their AR-15s to the dog meet-up (though there was a conspicuous lack of doggie clean-up bags). They wore rifles on slings when grilling burgers or buying tacos. And so, while Kennedy spoke, there was a small pro-gun protest about 100 yards away at the self-declared “grassy knoll.”

It was a joke that could be considered offensive to a Kennedy family member, except that RFK Jr. believes a government-backed conspiracy murdered his uncle.

And while Kennedy and the FSP crowd may have disagreed on guns, they found plenty of common ground on the overall premise that government is a major part of America’s problems.

In his speech, Kennedy rolled through a tale of CIA operations to create bioweapons, totalitarian attempts to subvert the Constitution, Microsoft founder Bill Gates working behind the scenes with Dr. Anthony Fauci to create a fake vaccine — with a couple of side trips through the dangers of the Patriot Act.

And, because he is Kennedy, there was a long discourse on environmental law administrative proceedings.