Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) hosted a stacked roundtable discussion with guests deeply involved in “culture war” issues, according to a video of the event first obtained by Breitbart News.
The guests included Virginia’s new lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears (R), and the high-profile conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon, as well as others, who zeroed in on concerns with schools’ influence over children.
“Our message from the very beginning has always been that parents matter, that children are our future, and that if we don’t take care of education in the way that we should, our children are going to lose, but our country is going to lose because we are not on this planet by ourselves,” Sears said, pointing to major U.S. adversaries like Russia and China.
Sears, a black Republican woman and Jamaican immigrant, became somewhat of a star overnight in November after winning her election in a blue-leaning state. “Parents matter” in education, school choice advocacy, and fighting schools that were infusing topics of students’ race and sexuality into their curriculums were the driving messages ahead of Republicans’ victories in Virginia’s election.
Watch:
Dhillon, who has, among her extensive legal work, litigated on behalf of parents and children and against school administrators, opined that “what’s happening in our schools today is perhaps the most critical issue in American politics and American cultural life.”
“There’s been a multi-year effort in our schools … to subtly corrupt the messaging that goes to our kids,” Dhillon said, adding that she has observed a shift in school administrators’ focus “to indoctrinate [children] about sexuality at a very young age … to make this trans ideology, which is, unfortunately there are some people who suffer from confusion about their gender, but to make that some sort of a mainstream civil rights choice, as opposed to what it is, is truly something that was shocking to me when I learned about it.”
Dhillon added, “I think that any American politician today who’s ignoring this issue is being very foolish, and any cultural leader in our country who isn’t paying attention to the fact that the left is demagoguing us for raising these issues by calling us QAnon, calling us conspiracy theorists. This is no conspiracy. It is in black and white. The evidence is clear.”
Others who spoke on the panel included pastor Darrell Scott, who homed in on economic disparities in American communities as opposed to racial disparities.
Chad Wolf, former Trump administration acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also appeared on the panel and expressed concern that his former agency could be “sacrificing some security” to promote a “civil rights” agenda based on some of the agency’s recent initiatives pushed under President Joe Biden.
Blackburn’s roundtable came as part of a long-running series of roundtables and discussions the senator has hosted on issues topical at the time of their occurrence.
One in February focused on concerns with U.S. athletes participating in the Beijing Olympics in a country accused of human rights abuses and run by communists. Another that month zoned in on the Biden administration’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as it was quickly escalating into a Russian invasion.
Last week, the senator hosted a discussion with swimmer Riley Gaines, a female athlete who was forced by the NCAA to compete against Lia Thomas, a man, in the women’s college swimming championships.
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com. Follow her on Twitter at @asholiver.