John Connolly

There were no crime writers really writing about Maine.

It was a virgin landscape.

Cautious when I go over.

Most of my neighbors, Maine is an interesting state in that way in that it has a couple of very, very liberal cities, but most of it is a red state.

So once you get outside, it's very, very conservative.

Most people just don't talk about it.

You're often told, don't talk about religion and politics at the dinner table.

And I think that's extended to American society.

You're not going to change anybody's mind.

You know, the two extremes are too far away.

And all you're working with is that little group in the middle who swing with each election, seemingly according to the economic wind or whether they just detest whatever the current regime is, whether they detest it enough.

Well, I was in Maine in April and so many of the stores there had signs in the window saying, if you see ICE, call this number.

It was a central number you could call so that they could alert other people and it went out on social media.

And a lot of them had warnings to say, you can't come in here unless you've got a warrant.

Because Maine, being a vacation state, runs on immigrants.

You know, it runs on people who come in and work for low wages and clean hotel rooms and work in fast food joints and lobster shacks.

And so it's destabilizing that economy because a lot of people who are even legitimately entitled to be there...

Or we're afraid to go out to work because, you know, the profiling is racial.

They're not stopping white middle-aged guys like me and asking me what they're ahead of themselves.

They're stopping black people and Latinos and saying, well, you know, do you have a right to be here?