Tim Walz walked onstage in flannel and opened his mouth to cast a word-spell on the world.

He took their curse and did something alchemical.

"They call us radicals. You're damn right we've been radicalized — radicalized by compassion, radicalized by decency, radicalized by due process, radicalized by democracy."

Instead of arguing with the word radicalized, he owned it and claimed its power.

Five times he repeated it, like an incantation, the refrain of a resistance song. He took a word designed to frighten and filled it with the gentlest, most principled values in human civic life.

By the fifth repetition the word didn't mean what it meant before.

That is how you break a curse. You alchemize it. 💜