The Year to Come, in Retrospect

Well, that was a heck of a year. Yessir, 2022 was one for the books. As we tie a bow around the 52-week-thick slab of events, shove it down the trash compactor, and prepare to welcome in 2023, let’s cast our eyes back to what happened.

The Russia invaded The Ukraine. When The Russian Federation flag flew over all The Ukrainian government buildings, Rachel Maddow said, “Well, Trump finally got what he wanted.” President Biden responded by shutting down three American pipelines and pressuring allies to announce that the next time the G-8 meets, Putin would sit on a chair that wobbled slightly and get served dessert last.

A woman was arrested for hate speech in San Francisco when she said, “Let’s go, Brandon!” The phrase had been declared “unprotected speech” in January under the city’s “Hurtful Euphemism Act,” which also prohibited making air quotes when saying “President Biden.” A challenge to the law failed in the Ninth Circuit, where the judges noted that there must be limitations on gestures. “One cannot say ‘Fire’ in sign language in a dark, crowded theater.”

The woman who was arrested defended her actions, insisting she had actually said, “We must endeavor, Brandon, to perambulate with alacrity in a timely manner,” because a San Francisco resident was advancing on her and her son, Brandon, with a machete. A San Francisco prosecutor, who was later revealed to be one of 147 clones of George Soros grown in an Argentinian facility, noted that the rephrasing of the hate-speech expression was indefensible, as the woman was still engaged in harmful euphemistic utterances, and had a duty to rename her child to avoid such situations. Witnesses testified that the woman sometimes referred to her child as “sweetheart,” indicating that she was aware of additional options when trying to get away from the man with the machete.

The man with the machete was released without charges, sued the city for the return of his weapon, was awarded $135,000 for “samurai profiling,” and would go on to hack six visitors into tourist tartare before he was shot by police, triggering fiery nationwide protests that leveled the downtowns of Fargo, N.D., and Charlotte, N.C. David Frum, noting that Fox had spent considerable time on the story, lamented the Right’s addiction to culture-war issues.

In July, noted Chinese Winnie the Pooh impersonator Chairman Xi announced that satellite images of Taiwan had revealed an unprecedented and unacceptable situation. Due to tectonic-plate action, Taiwan had moved 0.2 cm towards mainland China in the last ten years. Xi said computer models showed that Taiwan would eventually enter Chinese territorial waters and denounced this “cowardly sneak attack.”

Hours later, Chinese forces began an invasion of Taiwan, only to suffer complete defeat when every rocket was intercepted in flight and the entire naval fleet was obliterated by a series of small nuclear explosions. While the world was initially appalled at China’s actions, it was soon revealed that Taiwan got its tech from Israel, at which point sentiment shifted. Chairman Xi appeared before the U.N. wearing a keffiyeh to lead the denunciation; prominent progressives insisted that Taiwan had made it “difficult” to support its continued independence. Two hundred and thirty-seven rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel; the Palestinian Authority claimed that Israel had launched an airstrike on an orphanage, and within three days of China’s invasion the subject had shifted to whether President Harris would sanction Israel.

President Biden announced a co-presidency with Kamala Harris, and said that they will appear at the same time for public events, wearing a very wide custom-made suit with three legs.

The coronavirus entered its fourth year, mutating into so many variants that the WHO started naming them after Pokémon characters. The discovery of variant Magikarp, which was found in one patient in the Amazon rain forest, prompted Australia to forcibly quarantine anyone who had watched a documentary on Brazil or been in contact with someone who spoke Portuguese.

Studies showed that the new variant was so mild that few knew they had it. Among Germans, the most frequently reported symptom was “fleeting weltschmerz.” The French symptom was “an almost ephemeral sense of ennui.” Americans described the symptom as “Dude, I was, like, bored and sad for a moment, and then I wasn’t.”

Wrote the New York Times: “The virus has entered a new and troubling phase, for the 123rd time.” Experts called for an extension of mask mandates, and applauded President Biden’s announcement that “we got, we, we have, the vaccine, it’s, you don’t want to be the person who doesn’t not.”

His remarks were backed up by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had his own controversy early in 2022 when video surfaced that seemed to show Fauci in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, squeezing a bat over a petri dish, saying, “Now can you engineer these fluids to make a coronavirus that will be easily transmitted, lethal to the old and fat, but scattershot enough to keep everyone on their toes? I’ll bet we’d learn a lot if you could.” Outrage was soon muted when the video turned out to be a lab visit from 2018, not 2019, the year Covid-19 broke out.

The GOP swept the midterms with an overwhelming popular vote, prompting Don Lemon of CNN to note that “our democracy is dead.”

At the end of the year, everyone on social media agreed it had been the worst year in human history. Maybe even as far back as 2018.