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Dems! Don’t Look at the Penny!
By Dave Lowry
Oct. 24, 2025
In the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve falls in love with Jane Seymour because...well, who wouldn’t?
The relationship is complicated slightly by the fact that the character Reeve portrays is living in the 1970s; the one played by Seymour died about a century earlier. He has only a single connection to her, in the form of a sepia photograph he comes across while staying at the grand old Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
That minor detail is no impediment to a fellow in love. Especially not when Reeve learns of a technique involving intense, sustained self-hypnosis that can allow him to actually overcome time and space and backtrack to Jane’s era and make the romantic moves to woo her — which, this being Hollywood, is eventually accomplished, in part because Reeve’s character is meticulous in the process, down to dressing in period clothing so he’ll fit in when he arrives back in Jane’s day.
They meet, they fall in love, marriage is in the offing, and it appears to be working out as splendidly as a multi-dimensional relationship can. Then, absentmindedly, Reeve shoves a hand in his pocket, feels something, and pulls out a modern coin from his time that he’d forgotten to leave behind. And the whole shebang goes to pot. It all collapses; Jane’s gone, and he’s whizzed back to the current reality. A real bummerang, so to speak.
For the past couple of decades and with increasing fervor, the left has been engaging in the same sort of concentrated, obsessive self-hypnosis Reeve used. In the face of an obvious reality that is clearly the opposite of their fantasies, they close their eyes ever so tight and wish-cast. They imagine a world of their own making, hard. It’s a world in which boys can magically become girls, poverty can be eliminated with the infusion of just a touch more in cash, crime can be solved with good vibes and heaps of sympathetic counseling. It’s a world where racism can be successfully addressed by changing the names of syrup and boxed rice.
Engage any one of the people who are residing in a pretend world, and he will assure you this is all really, truly possible if only all of us would go along with his visions. Further, you’re hateful if you don’t indulge him. If you don’t think boys can menstruate, it is not because you are recognizing a simple fact of biology. It is because you refuse to buy into his self-invented landscape. If the overwhelming evidence of Antifa as an organization convinces you it’s real, well, you’re just a rumplepuss who refuses to believe that Antifa is merely right-wing propaganda.
Given their numbers and a prevalent stream of thought loosed upon the world today, leftists have been astonishingly successful in their efforts at auto-hallucinations. They’ve concentrated so hard that they’ve made it to the dimension where they literally wish it to be and where the prospect of running straightaway into the finely sculptured arms of Jane is so very, very close. The only impediments are those damned pennies.
Listen to someone on the left explain how violence can be significantly reduced if not entirely eliminated if only we would get rid of “assault weapons.” They really believe in such a universe. Watch their reaction, though, if you ask them who will take these weapons away from those who currently have them, or what will happen if those who have them object to their being taken away.
Those questions are the pesky pennies that ruin the whole wonderful cloudland they’ve constructed. To entertain those questions is to be forced to look at the penny. And as soon as that happens — if they allow it to happen — the entire happiful scenario of a bang-bang-bang-free existence starts to collapse on itself.
Reality is the penny in the grand self-illusion of the left’s reality. The only way to counteract it is for them to close their eyes even harder and to pretend with even more enthusiasm. This is where it becomes a little stranger.
The necessity of maintaining the illusion has reached a kind of critical mass in the first quarter of this century. The pretend has become so important, so fundamental to the psyches of the left, that it has to be kept up even in the face of obvious, foghorn-loud contradictions. To relax the pretense even slightly is to risk allowing reality to rush in and take down the whole castle of make-believe.
That’s one reason the abortion debate has become so extreme. The pro-abortion crowd has pretended itself into a rhetorical corner. Abortion legal up until the moment of birth? Absolutely, they insist. What are their options? To give in even a little to reality — to acknowledge that in fact there is an arguable distinction possibly between aborting a child at six weeks and doing the same, say, a week before birth — is to force them to shove a hand into their pocket and feel that coin. If they admit, well, yes, there is a difference, the pennies come out, and it all goes to hell. If they admit the obvious, that a nine-month abortion might be too much, then they will have to confront the next question: What about two weeks before birth? Two months before? Looking at those coins is deadly to their state of make-believe. It means losing their whole perspective, their sense of who they are.
In the pretend du jour, photos of peaceful Portland or Chicago are posted online to show that, contrary to Dictator Trump’s hysteria, why, these are perfectly lovely environs. Don’t you see? It’s like exhibiting photos of China’s spectacular Jade Dragon Mountain as proof: “What Uyghur concentrations camps? Sure aren’t any in this picture.”
When you correct a leftist who’s conflating legal immigrants and illegal aliens, you are encouraging him to look in his pocket. When he makes a pompous statement that “in a country this rich, no kid should go to bed hungry,” and you ask him how we can feed children of parents who don’t take advantage of already existing government programs, you’re threatening the illusion that guides his life. Entering into a dialogue is as dangerous for these people as that modern penny was for Christopher Reeve. That’s a fundamental reason why debate has been almost entirely abandoned by the left.
If, like any normal person, you have heard or read of some position being taken by a leftist and wondered, “Does he really believe that?,” you are experiencing the basic plot of Somewhere in Time. Moviegoers were asked to suspend their disbelief and accept the premise that it’s possible to go back in time. From “trans bathrooms” to imminent global annihilation, the left is asking you to do the same. Pretend to believe.
The ending of Somewhere in Time has Reeve’s character wrenched back to the present, disconsolate, wandering about the grounds of the hotel until, presumably, he dies from self-neglect. And then — again, this being Hollywood — he and Jane Seymour are finally united in the afterlife, which, in the imagination of Hollywood, is something like a cross between a soft-focus cloud bank and Club Med.
What happens if those make-believers were to be yanked out of their Land of Make-Believe? To be actually confronted with the reality that, for instance, health care for illegals would demonstrably bankrupt the country? Or that Islamic countries are lethal for homosexuals? The results might be gruesome.
More to the point, in the movie, Reeve’s character is motivated by an obsessive love. There is a goal for him, however weird: to build his own contrived reality. One wonders, in the case of delusional leftists: What’s their goal? Suppose they were able to make their pretend world real. Would they be happy?
The sense is that sadly, for the pretending left, there is no Jane Seymour waiting. What’s out there for them in the real world is so brutal, so difficult to deal with, that if they were faced with it, they might just shrivel up and blow away. And all that would be left would be a few shiny new pennies.
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From American Thinker
Link:
https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...the_penny.html
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