Mike Reynolds. Brian Hubbell. Annlinn Kruger

Carrie Jones

Feb 22, 2026

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It’s Official. He’s Running.

Okay, It’s official…. I’ve gathered the requisite number of nominating signatures, and am now on the ballot for Select Board in Tremont. If you don’t live in Tremont, feel free to turn your attention to another letter.

If you do live in Tremont, though, you’re probably beginning to ask yourself some very important questions: “Who is this Guy?” “What’s his background?” “Is he from around here?” “What does he believe in?” “What does he plan to do?” “Has he ever done anything to help the people in Tremont?”, and most importantly—“Why should I trust him to make decisions that will affect my family, my property, my business, and my quality of life for the next few years?” In this, and in my next three letters, I hope to begin answering some of those questions.

Let’s start with the basics…. I’m Mike Reynolds. I’m a retired high school social studies teacher living in Seal Cove. Though not an islander, I am certainly a local, and have relatives in Tremont whose families go back generations. Since my wife Kim and I moved up here permanently, I’ve been getting to know our neighbors and the issues that affect them by working part time as a substitute teacher at Tremont Consolidated School, publishing opinion pieces in these pages, attending town meetings, talking with people, and doing A LOT of listening.

I come here from Chicago, by way of Washington, DC, Tuckahoe, New York, New Haven and Meriden, CT. In Washington, I worked as a Congressional staffer, then as a reporter for the Illinois General Assembly newsletter, informing state legislators on issues in Congress. I was then hired by IBM, who moved me up to New York, then Connecticut. There and for 10 years afterward, I worked as a public relations producer and speechwriter for Fortune 500 corporations. I then worked as a media studies professor at both Quinnipiac and Sacred Heart Universities, before becoming certified and teaching high school civics, history, and psychology in Hartford in a career lasting another twelve years. In Meriden, I was elected to two terms on the board of education and had a narrow defeat in a run for city council. Though I’ve not lived here long by MDI standards, I’ve grown to love this place. I’m here to stay and I don’t plan on going anywhere. My aim is to help the community as best I can in as many ways as I can.

Maybe it’s easy to see how with this experience I strongly value education, community, responsible citizenship, and a view of local government that sees it as the art of working hard, listening intently, and brokering compromises that bring the greatest possible good to the greatest number of people. If you’re surprised by my using the word “compromise” to describe the job of local government … good. I find that surprise inspires curiosity. I’ll describe my political beliefs in my next letter, but for now let me just thank you for your time and attention.

Mike Reynolds

Tremont

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Pingree’s Proven Skills

At a time when Maine needs steady, thoughtful leadership, I am proud to support Hannah Pingree for Governor, not only because of her depth of experience but also because of the kind of person and leader she is.

When I first met Hannah in 2007, I was an MDI school board member and she represented our district as House Majority Leader and then as Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

Those of you involved in that turbulent period of school consolidation will recall how Hannah’s belief in the integrity of Hancock County communities greatly aided our schools’ ability to retain collaborative self-governance and improve educational excellence.

In truth, whatever successes I found subsequently in my own eight years in the legislature were modeled on Hannah’s exemplary conviction that Maine people as a whole are decent and that our communities are resoundingly capable of solving difficult problems together.

Then, over the past seven years, I had the privilege of working closely with Hannah when she was Director of the Governor’s Office of the Future with a portfolio of the state’s most complex policy challenges—affordable housing, clean energy, climate infrastructure resilience, childcare, nutrition, economic entrepreneurship, and integration of new Americans into Maine’s aging workforce.

Again, within the executive branch, I saw firsthand her work ethic. She genuinely respects people, listens carefully, values differing perspectives, and treats colleagues and constituencies with fairness and decency. Moreover, Hannah is sharp on policy. She understands complicated details within their larger context and she knows how to turn good ideas into workable solutions.

That focus and discipline earns the confidence of the people around her. Her record repeatedly shows how that respect builds trust into diverse coalitions, even on the toughest issues. That combination of people skills and policy strength is rare and it is exactly what we need from our next leaders.

Maine will be stronger with Hannah Pingree as our next governor. I encourage you, my friends and neighbors, to join me in supporting her to ensure that our state benefits from her integrity, her experience and her proven skills.

Brian Hubbell

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What’s In A Name? A Shared History

Many are offended by comparisons of our Republican administration with the Third Reich. Some have claimed ICE and Border Control agents are justified in reacting violently to being called Gestapo. I’ve found contrasts more useful than comparisons. But we have moved beyond that—with official shattering (and shuttering) of our government institutions and terrorizing of our communities. What’s in a name? A shared history.

State intimidation and violence is not unique to Nazi Germany. We can look back to our American South and forward to Republican darling Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are not the only legitimately elected executives who then used their office to undermine the free and fair elections which put them in power. So why identify the Trump administration with the Hitler regime? Because of a shared and specific history—a cross-pollination—of state enforced injustice. Nazi racial laws were modeled on our disenfranchisement of African Americans. Our government is favoring the White race, Christian religion, and European ethnicity to turn us against each other.

Adolf Hitler set out to Make Germany Great Again by eliminating an “alien and parasitic” population. Jews (like immigrants) were an easy target. In practice, a wider net was spread. A popular American magazine dismissed concerns about the Nuremberg Race Laws as “making too much of how Germany is dealing with its little race problem.” And no wonder, nothing seemed especially foreign. Nazi racial laws were based on Christian antisemitism and Jim Crow segregation familiar to Americans.

The Nazis did not set out to be, or be seen as, monsters. Their initial plans did not envision the Final Solution. They thought social pressure, and the denial of civil protections and economic opportunity, would lead to self-deportation. Early on, Jews who were arrested by the police and processed through the courts had a better chance of survival than those taken by the Gestapo. Even during Jim Crow, Black Americans had a better chance of surviving White police than they did KKK lynch mobs. We are now witnessing the same discrepancies between law enforcement by local police and the actions of lawless ICE and Border Control agents. We hear news of massive Department of Homeland Security detention centers here in the United States, with more to come. We hear of deaths in deplorable conditions. This is where we are.

After twelve years, the Thousand Year Reich was near collapse. The Germanization of Europe—sustaining military actions, mass removals and detention, maintaining the surveillance state and propaganda machine—became an unsustainable drain on Germany. We are under a similar threat from Trump’s drive for the “Americanization” of all South and North America, including Greenland. We have no accurate accounting of what Republican terror and Trump spectacle—DOGE, DHS, military adventurism, and the Trump juggernaut of retribution and vanity—is costing.

Hitler had American accomplices in the American German Bund, and among ordinary Americans and elites, including in Congress. Before Tucker Carlson pushing The Great Replacement Theory. Before the Neo-Nazi Unite the Right tiki torch parade to reconsecrate Confederate national traitors as American heritage heroes. Before the racist White House meme factory, the Young Republicans’ Hitler loving chat group, and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Jewish space lasers”—there was American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell and the party’s comic book Here Comes Whiteman— “fighting an interplanetary duel with diabolical fiends, the Jew from Outer Space and Super Blacks.” And before there was Christian Nationalist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, there was Neo-Nazi David Duke’s White Youth Alliance. The generally underrated Duke—Hitler fanboy, KKK Grand Wizard, Republican gadfly, and promoter of Great White Hope Vladimir Putin—is one of the most successful American influencers of racist right wing extremists working for a traditionalist, authoritarian, and Christian ethnonationalist state—through the Republican party.

Proponents of Project 2025 want us to identify it with American precedents of foundational greatness—rather than of foundational iniquity and aspirational authoritarianism. It is important to note the shared derived characteristics of their Christian Nationalist America and Nazi Germany. Recent events have brought this into focus. Images of Federal agents’ ritual humiliation of an Hmong American elder dragged into the Minnesota Winter in his underpants and the taking of a 5-year-old Hispanic boy in his bunny hat—resonate with images of Gestapo actions. This is happening. Here. It is fair to call it by its name.

Annlinn Kruger

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