But it sure seemed that this woman’s message had touched them in a special way. Touched me, too: in less than fifteen minutes, this speech, along with the proceedings that preceded it, had convinced me that there was a roughly zero percent chance that I would ever be a Republican. Between an open mind and a fool, the line is thin. I have not crossed it. Liberals might have been hypocrites, might have been out of touch. But conservatives—at least those ten thousand I encountered—seemed terrifying, even deranged.
