For the featured “outrageous story” of the week, we direct our attention to the crazy spending being proposed in the Senate’s omnibus spending bill, specifically, we look at N.C. Republican Congressman Dan Bishop’s viral thread drawing the public’s attention to it.

As of the posting of this article, there were over 28,000 retweets and 92,000 likes of just this first tweet in the thread. Elon Musk even responded, twice, saying, “Very informative thread,” and “Worth reading.” Tucker Carlson also had Bishop on his FOX News show to discuss the bill and his reaction to it.

So, what grabbed people’s attention so much from the bill? That’s where we reach the outrageousness. Screenshots from the bill show it:

  • Earmarks money to U.S Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), but says that none of the money can be used for protecting the border
  • But then allocates $410 million for protecting… the borders of other countries, like Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman.
  • Sends $1,438,000,000 to multinational membership organizations like the U.N.
  • Goes on forever about salmon, with 48 references and $65 million
  • Spends $3.6 million on a Michelle Obama Hiking Trail in Georgia
  • Devotes many millions to various LGBTQIAetc projects around the country, like youth centers and $3 million for a museum in New York
  • Creates a a DEI and “structural racism”-focused NIH subdivision using $524.4 million, not to mention a TON of other equity and DEI spending throughout, like a $200 million Gender Equity Fund, $26 million for the House of Representatives Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and gender programs in Pakistan

These are just a small sampling of what is in the bill. Other congressmen, like Chip Roy of Texas, have since started similar threads to point out even more craziness in the bill. The one initiative that disturbed me the most, though, was funding for additional “family planning” in areas that are deemed overpopulated. This language represents a very dangerous view of human beings. It also represents an even more dangerous view of government, that it should be involved in deciding how many people should exist and spending money to eliminate the excess through abortion and sterilizations.

North Carolina was part of a similarly minded eugenics moment in the early 20th century (where our state government paid to reduce populations like minorities, the poor, and the disabled through “family planning”), and it will forever be a stain on our history. Eugenic ideology from the U.S., as many have pointed out, directly influenced the Nazis’ efforts to eliminate the “undesirables” from society and create a master race.

Using language and reasoning like this again — which Bishop called “Malthusian” after an English priest named Thomas Malthus who thought the world (of the late 1700s) was about to run out of resources due to overpopulation — is evil and could lead back to that dark part of our history. Kudos to Bishop for spotting it and calling it out.

The Omnibus bill, and Bishop’s tweets on it, are certainly the most outrageous story of the week, but we should also note a couple of other contenders. As a result of many such spending appropriations in the past on DEI and other left-wing cultural demands, new woke language requirements are spreading throughout the society.

One example that many found amusing this week was Stanford University’s new approved lexicon, which discouraged many common words and phrases. The new guidelines from the college recommended against saying whitelisted and blacklisted (because that makes white sound preferable), using the term American to refer to someone from the U.S. (since there are so many other countries in the Americas), saying something is crazy or lame, and so much more.

But this kind of cultural dominance determining which ideas and words are acceptable does not stop with privately funded higher education on the Left Coast. A publicly funded high school in North Carolina (the N.C. Governor’s School) just fired a teacher for holding an optional discussion where he was critical of Critical Race Theory. Other public school teachers across the state and country hold optional (and often mandatory) discussions critical of the gender binary, the Founding Fathers, capitalism, Christianity, whiteness, and many other targets of the left, and somehow avoid being fired. So, this struck many as just a little unfair.

Well, the teacher in question, Dr. David Phillips, is suing with assistance from the Alliance Defending Freedom. And Carolina Journal may even have an op-ed from Dr. Phillips after the start of the year, so look for that.