If there is anything 2020 may be remembered for, other than the pandemic, it is all of the totally bizarre shit people believed. People could make up literally anything, and within days other people would be believing it. Heck, they'd be marching against it. Maybe it was because they were simultaneously bored and freaked out by everything? I don't know!
Personally, I think it was a combination of the pandemic and four years of Donald Trump. Everything has seemed so surreal for the past four years that, really, the best a melting clock is going to get is a bit of a shrug. When extreme things are constantly happening in reality, it's simply easier to believe things that could not possibly be true.
And boy, there was a lot of that in 2020. Let's reminisce!
The time people thought Wayfair was trafficking children in cabinets.
"Is it possible Wayfair involved in Human trafficking with their WFX Utility collection? Or are these just extremely overpriced cabinets? (Note the names of the cabinets) this makes me sick to my stomach if it's true :("It is still a little hard to wrap our heads around this, but fucktons of people this year truly believed that some cabinets that were super overpriced (due to a glitch) were actually children that were for sale, via the Wayfair website. There was no evidence, other than overpriced cabinets. And people — so, so, so many people — felt that this was convincing evidence that they were selling children. It wasn't even just the usual QAnon weirdos, it wasn't even just Republicans. It was mostly regular-ass people going "Well this just seems like some very flawless logic here."
Let's all hope it was some pandemic-related madness, and be grateful that it was over for most of them in about a month and we haven't heard anything about it since.
Mole Children!
Who among us can forget the MOLE CHILDREN. This was another one of those conspiracy theories, like the Wayfair conspiracy, that was pretty much based entirely on one person going "What if THIS thing were true?" and a whole bunch of other people going "Sounds about right to me!"
To refresh your memory:
They believe that the COVID-19 epidemic is a big ruse meant to keep people in their houses while the US military rescues thousands of children from underground tunnels, some of which they claim are right underneath Central Park. These children were, I guess, transported to the Navy hospital ships — the USNS Comfort in New York and the USNS Mercy in Los Angeles. Now, they claim, these children are being treated in all of the tents that were set up in Central Park to treat people with COVID-19.
The mole children, they claim, have lived underground all of their lives, and are thus "deformed" and sensitive to light (cause it's dark down there in the tunnels). They have, of course, been bred for the specific purpose of being sex slaves, but also for being eaten and having their adrenal glands harvested so "elites" can get high on their adrenochrome. Which, for the 47,000th time, is not a thing anyone can get high off of.
People were very into this, and many were in fact desperately searching for information on how they might adopt one of these mole children that they had suddenly decided definitely exist. Then they got all "Hey! Don't call them Mole Children! That's derogatory and cruel, to these children that exist only in our fevered imaginations!" Sadly, after a couple months went by with no glorious announcement that the mole children had been freed, and with COVID-19 still happening, they all either kinda gave up on that theory or decided it was some kind of ruse to make them all look stupid. Which is not hard.
Drinking bleach to cure COVID-19
Back in April, Donald Trump started rambling on about how maybe injecting bleach or other disinfectants might cure COVID-19. It should come as no big surprise that his dumb ass followers quickly followed his lead and hospitalizations for bleach/lysol drinking went way, way up afterwards. Then, this dude in the picture here, Mark Grenon, the pope of the "Genesis II Church of Health and Healing," started pushing his Miracle Mineral Solution (which is actually bleach) as a cure for COVID. He was swiftly arrested for violating a federal order to stop doing that. It is not clear what he's been up to since!
Bill Gates's plan to put a "mark of the beast" microchip in the vaccine
Because the actual origins of COVID-19 were so unexciting, a whole lot of people really wanted there to be some other explanation. One of the things they settled on was that it was created so that Bill Gates could fund a vaccine for it that would contain a microchip that would also be the Mark of the Beast. It seems like an odd choice given that there are so many other ways they could get such a microchip into people, if one were so desperately inclined to make people accept the Mark of the Beast, but there's no accounting for stupid.
Plandemic!
Disgraced scientist Dr. Judy Mikovits briefly enjoyed a lot of fame for appearing in a short "documentary" in which she explained that COVID-19 was actually a plot by evil doctors to, uh, do something. She never explained what that something was. The "documentary" — in which she also claimed that shutting everything down and wearing masks would actually make everything worse — spread on social media like wildfire, because people really, really, really wanted that to be true. It wasn't, and as far as I know, we haven't heard from her since.
Was Google pressured by Black Lives Matter to erase Winston Churchill's VERY EXISTENCE? Devin Nunes sure thought so!
From randos on Reddit to the Daily Mail to Devin Nunes, top minds everywhere were speculating in mid-June about why a Google search for British Prime Ministers had Winston Churchill's name ... but not his picture. The explanation, they were sure, was that Black Lives Matter canceled Churchill and Google was going to erase him from history! The actual explanation was that it disappeared during an update.
Beyoncé is a secret Italian
I don't think I will ever love anything like I love Florida congressional candidate KW Miller's theory that Beyoncé is secretly an Italian woman named Anne Marie Lestrassi. He also claimed that Patti Labelle was a Satanic Deep State Agent involved in a plot to reinstate Barack Obama as President of the United States.
KW Miller lost his congressional bid and has since been suspended from Twitter.
Colloidal Silver cures COVID!
Before all of the looney tunes on the Right were declaring COVID-19 a hoax, they were trying to profit off of it. After all, people like Jim Bakker and Alex Jones have literally been preparing for this for years, selling food buckets and getting ready for the end of the world and what have you. So they were immediately prepared with said food buckets — but also with a lot of colloidal silver.
And they tried selling their colloidal silver as a cure for COVID. This, however, did not work out as they had dreamed and they both subsequently ended up in a bit of legal trouble because of regulations barring people from claiming that things that are not cures for COVID-19 are cures for COVID-19. ALAS.
When QAnoners thought they were "digital soldiers"
The QAnon crowd got their stolen valor on this year by declaring themselves deputized "digital soldiers" (deputized by Michael Flynn, naturally) and taking the oath of office in order to swear themselves in. And they posted a bunch of videos of themselves doing so, very seriously, as Q instructed them to do. Hilarity, obviously, ensued.
Donald Trump won the 2020 election
GiphyTrump himself still believes this. Or at least he's pretending to in hopes that he can The Secret his way into another four years at the last minute.
What a long strange year it's been! Don't forget to give us money, if you are able!
