I went into the heart of Ford Nation with a bull’s-eye painted on my chest.

It was a big white Bristol board sign. On it, in large capital letters that you could read from 100 paces, I had written: “I work at the Toronto Star. Will you speak to me about Rob Ford please?”

The Fordites were nicer than I expected, given all the aggro talk about “boulders” and “maggots” the Ford brothers had spewed over the airwaves this past Sunday. Only two people insulted me while I walked into the Humbertown Mall, and one returned five minutes later to talk.

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We Torontonians are divided. But, outside of gridlock, we are civil to one another when we meet face to face. Kind even.

“OK, I’ll talk to you,” said Robert Tycholiz, a musician, leaning out of his truck. He’s a big Rob Ford fan. He categorically does not believe the Star report of a video of Mayor Ford smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine.

“I have a lot of faith in the mayor. The things he’s done for the city are the ones he promised to do,” said Tycholiz, 54. “I believe him.”

Tycholiz told me he was a druggie 30 years ago. “Anybody on coke, addicted to coke, could never carry weight like Rob Ford. He’s a big man. Those drugs slim you down like nobody’s businesses,” he said. “He’d have to be very, very stupid to have that happen, and I don’t see him as a stupid man.”

Humbertown is on Royal York Rd. just north of Dundas St. W. It’s five minutes from the mayor’s house by car. More people voted for him in this area than anywhere else in the city.

I wanted to see if the polls were right: that Ford Nation was emboldened, not shaken, by last week’s allegations. Since Alberta’s Wildrose Party withered on the vine overnight, I don’t trust the polls. But every single Ford supporter I talked to told me that if there was an election tomorrow they’d still vote Ford.

The only person I met who has changed his mind — and not in the way you’d think — was Ron Jasinski. He voted for George Smitherman in 2010. He moved to Ford Nation last year, after discovering city workers wouldn’t be digging up the lead water pipes on his street for another six months or so. He emailed Ford’s office. The mayor called him back that very day.

“He said, ‘We will have a crew there at 7 a.m. tomorrow.’ And 7 a.m. the next day a crew was there replacing the lead water pipes,” said Jasinski, a commercial real estate agent with a honking black Escalade.

“To me, the media comes out worse in this than Rob Ford does,” he said. “People are making allegations, using unnamed sources … If I’m going to say something negative, I’ll say it to your face and use my name. It’s lazy journalism.”

I heard a lot of this. Ford Nation does not believe the Star and Gawker. Nor do they believe the Globe and Mail, which came out with its own investigation into Brother No. 2 this past weekend. They believe there is a vendetta against the Fords and that we journalists are making money along the way. (I pointed a few to a recent American survey that pegged the average newspaper reporter’s salary at $36,000. I don’t think they were swayed.)

Democracy depends on a strong press to keep power in check. But what if the press has lost the trust of the electorate? We are in troubling times.

I asked many of them what they liked about Ford. Why are they so faithful?

Low taxes, they said. Less bloated bureaucracy. All predictable answers. But I realized something there in the Humbertown parking lot: when we speak about Rob Ford, we aren’t talking about the man himself, we’re talking about the ideology.

To those who want less government, he can do no wrong. For the rest, he symbolizes all that is wrong.

“He gets under people’s skin,” said Pauline Russell, a grocery store clerk. “It’s that smug smile. He has the smuggest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.”

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Russell, as you can tell, isn’t a Ford supporter. And she isn’t alone. In fact, those I spoke to were about evenly matched — in numbers and in intensity of like/dislike.

I began to feel as if I’d walked into a Western movie in which the Sundance Kid is loading his shotgun and grinning while the sheriff’s men gather outside. There is no room for reconciliation. Things are going to end in a blaze.

“I like the guy,” said Joe Grossi, a retired developer, very tanned, wearing dark sunglasses, outside a drugstore at Richview Square.

Just as he says that, Rita Lynham dashes out of the same store, sees my sign and long-jumps into the conversation.

“What’s there to like?” she demanded.

“I just like him.”

“You can’t see through those glasses,” she said, in a fury.

Lynham is a mental health worker. To her, Ford is privileged, power-hungry and lazy. She has always thought that and these latest allegations — well, they just prove she is right.

Stridency shuts more doors than opens them, though. Grossi escapes to his car.

“I grew up on the street these past 50 years. It’s all bullsh--,” he tells me. “He doesn’t look like a guy on drugs.”

Is there one thing that would change his mind?

Well, if the video turns up, he concedes. That will be like a grenade thrown from inside the bunker. It will be the end of Ford Nation.

“He’s the mayor,” he said. “How is he going to do crack cocaine and look after business?”