They hadn’t come to ask questions; they came to deliver a sentence. While Pelosi and Krugman tried to stage a calm, cerebral evening, the audience ripped away the veneer, dragging every buried consequence into the light. The accusations were clumsy, furious, and sometimes unfair, but they carried the weight of lives permanently altered by decisions made far from their reach.
Pelosi’s attempts to regain control only highlighted the gulf between the language of power and the language of pain. For a brief, jarring stretch of time, the usual hierarchy inverted: the stage looked small, the crowd immense. In that shared, uneasy silence after the last outburst, no one could pretend the past was settled. The event resumed, the script recovered—but the room had heard something it couldn’t un-hear, and so had she.
