Skylar’s Naughty and Nice List 2020

Skylar Baker-Jordan
17 min readDec 23, 2020

Welp, here we are. The end of the year that felt like a decade. I quit drinking in November 2019, which at various times throughout this dreadful collective trauma we call 2020 has felt like a mistake. Yet here we are at finish line. We made it, when so many of our fellow humans did not. If nothing else, that is worth acknowledging, mourning, but also celebrating. Despite the pandemic, life lives on.

This has been a shit year, chock-full of endless misery and despair. Yet, there have been some real angels emerge, reminding us that even in the bleakest of times, there are those who will put first their fellow human beings. The bad folks deserve to be called out, while the good folks deserve a moment in the sun. That’s why I compile this list every year.

So, pull up a chair, grab your favourite intoxicating beverage (or, if you’re a teetotaller like me, a cup of tea or coffee), and enjoy as I wax lyrical about the heroes and villains of this most villainous of years.

It’s Skylar’s 2020 Naughty and Nice List!

6. Kate Shemirani

Perhaps the most famous anti-vaxxer in the UK, Kate Shemirani is a former nurse (!!) who has made it her personal crusade to convince the nation that coronavirus is a hoax, vaccines are poison, and 5G is… I don’t know, doing something harmful that is utter bollocks. Here, she represents not only her own particular brand of bonkers, but all the science-denying conspiracy theorists who have politicised and exasperated attempts to fight the pandemic. Shemirani’s narcissistic delusions — she claims nurses only counter her lies because they’re jealous she is thinner and prettier — have so strained her relationship with her son that he publicly spoke out against her. Wouldn’t want to spend Christmas in that home.

5. James Bennet

There was a time when fascism was firmly outside the Overton window, at least in Western democracies. Not so in 2020, and that is in part thanks to James Bennet. His tenure as Opinion Editor of the New York Times was controversial from the beginning, bringing in conservative writers Bret Stephens and professional contrarians like Beri Weiss. That alone isn’t a bad thing; ideological diversity should be the goal of any…

--

--

Skylar Baker-Jordan

Skylar Baker-Jordan has been writing about UK and US politics and culture for more than a decade. His work has appeared at The Independent, Salon, and elsewhere