In order to put the coming year into perspective — and to understand why so many are eager to flee the last one — peering back over the shoulder at the social, political, cultural, and general malarkey (to borrow a phrase) and wreckage over the 2023 calendar can be an engaging and sobering enterprise.

For fun, let us climb back through the first six months and recall those newsworthy distractions, the political curiosities, and the meandering media offerings. (The second half of the year shall follow.) We will look at those items that delivered important events, trenchant mockery, and distractions away from gravely serious events we were supposed to care about deeply and cling to the press for continued outrage. Let’s recall some of the mayhem.

JANUARY

• The GOP took over the House leadership and showed their prowess at governing by being incapable of selecting a Speaker. It took a laughable 15 votes before Keven McCarthy was chosen.

• Democrats complained when they were removed from committee appointments, seemingly upset that Republicans were using the Dems’ standard practice.

• Joe Biden was discovered to have his own classified document scandal. Oh wait, it was NOT a scandal because the press declared his holding these files, which he was not cleared to possess, kept in multiple locations, for decades is not a problem because — whoops! — he didn’t know about them!

• Gas stoves were a controversy when one Sunday, a Biden official condemned the appliance. On Monday, the press echoed the call to ban the stoves. On Wednesday, the same press called the reactions from the right to be a manufactured conspiracy. By the next weekend, the press was again calling for stoves to be banned.

• Artificial Intelligence came into practice in the press, and many journalists were concerned because it threatened to steal their jobs of creating indecipherable garbage reporting.

• The Tyre Nichols death by police sparked new outrage over racist police enforcement, but the furor did not last — mostly due to the officers involved also being black.

• Journalists sick of Elon Musk and Twitter allegedly migrated to a new social platform — Mastodon — where they congregated to mainly talk about Elon Musk and Twitter.

• A statue commemorating Martin Luther King was unveiled in Boston, and reactions were largely negative with some black commentators calling it racist, despite being created by a black artist.

• In the NFL, Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field following a play. Football was promptly placed in proper perspective for a time.

• Sports reporters became enraged when Ivan Provorov chose not to wear a Pride jersey in Philadelphia. That an entire organization and 24 players celebrated the event was called “homophobic” because it was not 25 players.

• At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the world’s leaders dined in five-star style as they concocted plans for the world to shift to a bug-based diet.

• In its latest Style Guide, the word “the” was declared dehumanizing by the Associated Press. Wait, sorry — “by Associated Press”...

FEBRUARY

• In East Palestine, Ohio, a massive train wreck spilled massive amounts of chemicals in the area. President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg showed their supreme leadership by avoiding the area.

• Tucker Carlson got his hands on the January 6 security footage, and Democrats and journalists insisted granting access to the public was a threat to democracy. 

• A citizen broke the story of the Chinese spy balloon that began to travel across the entirety of the United States, as Joe Biden treated it the same as any other foreign individual crossing our border, by ignoring the issue.

• The video gaming press held a collective outrage-fest at the release of a new Harry Potter video game over the comments of creator J.K. Rowling. Their attempts at canceling the game resulted in it breaking sales records.

• The lie of Florida schools teaching that slavery was a good thing exploded. This was based on a mere two sentences found in hundreds of pages of the curriculum, and the exact same passage is found in the AP African American History courses the very same critics wanted to force into Florida schools.

• At the Grammy Awards, there was a musical performance simulating a Satanic ritual. Many in the press, including Joy Reid, declared this a cultural victory, which was odd to say, considering few others were competing with her over the claim for Satanists.

• A British publisher is going through the works of author Roald Dahl and editing the “unwoke” components for modern sensitivities. Meanwhile, conservatives continue to be accused of fostering censorship.

• A member of the grand jury in Georgia targeting Donald Trump, Emily Kohrs, became a media darling for days until her bat-crap persona led to mockery. Her performances were so embarrassing that some began to speculate she was a plant by the Trump team to derail the case.

• The Wuhan Lab leak became a valid story. The press getting caught off guard led to a new conspiracy — that claims of them trying to silence the lab leak story were false.  

• After the Brit Awards boasted it was going gender-neutral for the nominees there was gender outrage when all of the announced nominees were men.

• In likewise fashion, after years of pledging to have more diversity, the BAFTAs had an all-white winners ceremony.

• The Sam Bankman-Fried FTX scandal erupted…sort of. The press was reticent to report on it since so many outlets pocketed money from the scamming crypto fraudster.

MARCH

• Donald Trump was indicted in New York. Anyone daring to look into the case brought by DA Alvin Bragg was deemed a racist — unless they pointed out George Soros backed Bragg. Then those people were antisemitic.

• Journalists who usually wail about attacks on the press were pretty cool with Democrats on the Hill insulting Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger in a hearing about the Twitter Files.

• A trans individual broke into a Christian school in Tennessee and murdered students and teachers, but the press was concerned more about misgendering the shooter and burying their manifesto.

• In the Tennessee legislature, members of the State House helped stage a protest in the chambers during a session. Not only were there no claims of an insurrection, but the GOP legislature was called racist for daring to punish the members who participated.

• The nation was gripped by the courtroom drama regarding the sentencing of Alex Murdaugh, even though 99.57 percent of people had never heard of the man two months earlier. 

• The Daily Beast broke open the highly important and deeply researched story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis having been spotted in 2019 eating pudding with his fingers.

• The Washington Post was concerned about offending ornithology subjects as it looked into the matter of racism with bird names.

Beer sales plunge to lowest levels in 24 years — largely thanks to Bud Light's disastrous Dylan Mulvaney campaign https://t.co/fQmWvNdfRo via @nypost

— Cara TXZEAL (@Cara_TXZEAL) December 27, 2023

APRIL

• The month kicked off with one of the stories of the year when Bud Light featured Dylan Mulvaney in a promotional spot, drinking the beer in a bathtub. Corporate meltdown commenced within days.

• FoxNews settled out of court with its defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. The rest of the press industry, normally enraged by legal attacks, was disappointed Fox was not brought to court but applauded the “proof” that the outlet fakes its news. 

• Tucker Carlson, as a rumored response to the lawsuit, was fired from Fox News.

• After months of embarrassment for the network, Don Lemon was fired from CNN.

• The intelligence community was rocked by a leak scandal where a 21-year-old named Jack Teixeira exposed sensitive intel on a gaming platform. The news nets reported on his “cache of weapons,” which, when displayed, proved to be Airsoft toy guns.

• Journalists had a collective meltdown when Elon Musk removed the legacy blue checks from all accounts and made it a subscription option.

• Soon after, Elon Musk dropped labels on the outlets backed by tax dollars, describing them as “State-Affiliated Media.” This led to NPR, PBS, and the CBC all quitting Twitter in a snit.

• In Florida, Nikki Fried staged a desperate stunt by getting herself arrested, with the ultimate result becoming those who compared her to AOC’s lame non-arrest.

• The press became consumed with the fact that Clarence Thomas has rich friends. Alvin Bragg pocketing Soros dollars, Justice Sotomayor deciding on cases involving her publisher, and Joe Biden vacationing on the dime of billionaires were not seen as scandalous.

While Joe Biden lays on a beach somewhere in St Croix. pic.twitter.com/CHsWCVRiTU

— joe miller (@joemill37087868) December 30, 2023

MAY

• CNN was rocked after it held a Trump town hall. Internally and externally, people were aghast when they interviewed a political candidate.

• In Hollywood, the Writers Guild went on strike, and people watching scores of existing content on streaming services almost noticed.

• The death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway led the press to praise him as a homeless artist unfairly killed by Daniel Penny, overlooking he was an aggressive attacker who had a lengthy rap sheet.

• Prince Hank and his wife went Smollet-style in a claim they had been chased by aggressive paparazzi in a “near-catastrophic car chase” in which nothing actually happened.

• We had days of drama surrounding a New York nurse and some youths regarding a Citibike incident that nobody could make sense of after all the attention.

• Whistleblowers from both the IRS and the FBI testified in Congress and the press that deified whistleblowers in the Trump years spent their time denigrating these folks for criticizing the Biden administration.

• The NAACP issued a traveler’s warning for the state of Florida – based on a school lesson plan and not on any threats to black persons.

• Target stores were centered in the cultural crosshairs for selling trans bathing suits, and as they denied the apparel was sold, the stores moved to hide the apparel in the back of their stores.

• Abby Grossberg was a fixture across the new networks, which were wildly featuring her when she was going to bring suits against Fox News and Tucker Carlson over sexual harassment and other harsh claims. She took the Fox case down, and her claims about Tucker withered when she was not only shown to have raved about Tucker, but it was exposed that she had never actually met him in person.

• A Miami school was accused of banning and censorship of a work by a young author because it moved the book to a different section of its library.

• In Britain, King Charles was crowned, and Americans quickly shrugged once we learned this meant he was christened as king and did not mean he was hit over the head with a snow shovel.

JUNE

• CNN’s CEO, Chris Licht, was fired after just over a year on the job, and the move managed to fix not a single problem.

• Canada had wildfires and the fact that the smoke traveled down to affect US states was held up as proof that global warming is taking place.

• The Oceangate submersible went missing, and everyone who had no idea about deep sea exploration became an expert on the subject.

• AOC became upset at a Twitter parody account of herself; then she became upset about “The Streisand Effect” as she made the account hugely popular as a result.

• Chuck Todd announced he was leaving “Meet The Press,” and the reaction was muted, mostly due to the size he managed to shrink the audience who might notice.

• The press confounded themselves as they were gleefully announcing that Pride groups were staging “Gay Days” at Disney World, in supposed defiance of a Ron DeSantis anti-gay law that does not exist. It failed to register with journalists that trumpeting “Gay Days” actually proved there was no “Don’t Say Gay” law on the books.

• Trump was indicted in Miami, and the press went wild with the coverage yet again. It does not seem to register that when they have to explain to people how much this matters, it is a sign that it really does not matter.

• The same press that was ecstatic over the Trump indictments sees Hunter Biden become indicted and resorts to either explaining how invalid it all must be or running fawning defense of Hunter and his poor, put-upon father.

• The administration that promised to usher decency back to Washington saw the Bidens hosting a Pride event at the White House where an invited influencer was flashing bare breasts for the cameras.

White House flasher Rose Montoya apologizes: It was ‘unbecoming’ https://t.co/6kAZg45xSj pic.twitter.com/KpvGkdDHuE

— New York Post (@nypost) June 16, 2023