Fears of WWIII: On Jan. 2, the Pentagon announced that President Trump had ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed via drone strike. In the hours that followed, Iran threatened “harsh retaliation” and “traffic to the U.S. Selective Service, the agency that would be responsible for any eventual military draft, spiked so high that the website crashed,” CNN reports. Meanwhile, jokes about the beginning of World War III proliferated on social media. Vox even published a piece about “coping with war and crisis through memes” — ah, how young we were then
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced they are stepping down from their senior roles in the royal British family.
8th January: A passenger flight from Tehran to Kyiv operated by Ukraine International Airlines was shot down by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, killing all 176 passengers and crew members on board.
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February 5: The Senate acquitted Donald Trump following his impeachment in December.
February: Donald Trump congratulated the “Great State of Kansas” for Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win.
February 29: First death from coronavirus reported in Washington State.
March 2: Chris Matthews abruptly resigned live on air.
March 10: Italy becomes the first country to implement a nationwide lockdown. China previously put a lockdown on Wuhan on January 23.
March 18: Celebrities gave us the “Imagine” video, the very last thing we needed.
Britain leaves the EU.
March 16: Worst drop on Wall Street since 1987 amid coronavirus fears.
March 24: The 2020 Summer Olympics postponed until 2021.
April 2: Global coronavirus cases surpass one million.
April 2: People in the UK began burning down 5G towers because of a conspiracy theory claiming that 5G causes COVID-19.
April’s 420: 420 was a sad state of affairs this year as stoners everywhere grappled with unknown risk factors of smoking during the pandemic.
April 27: The U.S. Navy published three UFO videos and no one cared. The Department of Defense released footage captured by Navy pilots which shows physics-defying flying objects, which one astrophysicist who briefed the department described as “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
While being unidentified aerial phenomena is enough to classify the objects in the videos as, technically, “UFOs,” there’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that they’re the work of extraterrestrials — yet. Just a few months later, the Pentagon quietly formed a task force to investigate UFOs
May 2: Murder hornets arrived and immediately became a meme.
May 30: We saw someone walking away with a whole cheesecake after the Cheesecake Factory was looted, but it was unclear where they may have gotten it.
May 4: Elon Musk and Grimes named their baby X Æ A-12. Grimes explains:
The Voice of America becomes the Voice of Trump with the installation of a new CEO and the purge of journalists and editors.
May 28: The world watched the Minneapolis Police Department burn.
May 30: Like the UFO Story, this came and went and nobody noticed: Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its first spaceflight carrying astronauts. For the first time in nearly a decade, NASA sent two American astronauts into space this spring using a launchpad on U.S. soil. The event marked the first crewed mission by Elon Musk’s private space company, SpaceX.
July 8: .People honest-to-god believed in a baseless conspiracy theory about Wayfair sex trafficking children through cabinets
August 4 : One of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history occurred when 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored improperly in a warehouse at Beirut’s port exploded. It caused at least 204 deaths, 6,500 injuries, billions of dollars’ worth of property damage, and left an estimated 300,000 people homeless.
August 28: Black Panther” actor Chadwick Boseman died at age 43 after a four-year battle with colon cancer. His death on Aug. 28 shocked fans, since he had completed several blockbuster films while keeping his diagnosis private
October: Former counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway was outed by her 15-year-old daughter, Claudia, as having COVID-19 in October before she could make the announcement on Twitter herself. “Update my mom has covid,” Claudia Conway wrote in one TikTok video, adding in another, “im furious. Wear your masks. dont listen to our idiot f–king president piece of s–t. protect yourself and those around you.”
November: Michael B. Jordon won People’s Sexiest Man Alive
December: Steve Bannon was indicted for stealing Build the Wall donations ❤️️ Also earlier this year, Weinstein was convicted and Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested.
Yearlong: The Weather Went Crazy: In 141 years of climate records, there had never been a hotter January than the one this year. New York City was reclassified as a “humid subtropical climate zone,” a designation shared by … Florida. There were a record-breaking 30 named storms in the Atlantic Hurricane Season, with meteorologists identifying storms with letters of the Greek alphabet after running out of prepared names.
Sources: NYPost, Vice, Glamour, The Week, The Conversation and Mashable