Full text: https://www.unz.com/runz/a-christian-beauty-queen-challenges-zionist-power/
Table of Contents
The Political Courage of Carrie Prejean Boller......
But ironically enough, I recently discovered that another far more successful former beauty pageant winner from my own state fell into an entirely different category.
In 2009, Carrie Prejean had won the title of Miss California and was then voted first-runner up in the Miss USA competition later that same year, an achievement far beyond those Colorado or South Dakota competitors. The year after that national triumph, she’d married former NFL quarterback Kyle Boller, and soon had a couple of children, thereby fulfilling the storybook dreams of so many young girls across America.
Although she has described herself as merely a stay-at-home California mom with two children, she had been widely celebrated by conservatives over the years for her deep Christian faith. So it was hardly surprising that Trump appointed her last year as a member of his newly established White House Religious Liberty Commission, which was otherwise heavily stocked with individuals who were deeply immersed in the worlds of politics and public policy.
These sorts of government commissions rarely attract much visibility, and until the last week or two I hadn’t even been aware it existed. But a public battle suddenly drew considerable media coverage and brought it to the attention of many millions, myself included.
Over the last couple of years, ideological controversies over anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become flashpoints in American society, notably leading to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and several of our other top Ivy League academic institutions. And Prejean and other commissioners suddenly clashed over exactly that same issue.
According to her Wikipedia page, Prejean had attended a Christian college in San Diego, worshipped at the local Rock Church, and then volunteered for a ministry, with all of these institutions affiliated with Evangelical Christianity, which apparently represented her own religious background.
Although not all Evangelical Christians in America consider themselves outright Christian Zionists, many do, and even the remainder have almost always been quite supportive of the Zionist State of Israel. There was no indication that her own views had ever departed from that longstanding religious consensus.
But she seems to have been deeply disturbed by the horrifying scenes of death and devastation coming out of Gaza over the last couple of years, and she may have even shifted her own religious affiliations as a consequence.
After having spent her entire life as an Evangelical Christian, less than a year ago she converted to Catholicism, only a few weeks before she was appointed to that religious commission.
The most recent public hearing focused upon anti-Semitism and some of the commissioners shifted the entire discussion to Israel and Zionism, prompting her to declare that as a Catholic, she completely rejected Zionism. That totally outraged several of her most vocal fellow commissioners, who followed the current party-line that anti-Zionism was a form of anti-Semitism and they immediately denounced her.
Our media has spent generations conditioning Americans to immediately back down whenever accused of harboring anti-Semitic sentiments, but that former California beauty queen was made of sterner stuff and she refused to be intimidated. Instead, she declared that her own Catholic Church had always rejected Zionism so she asked her critics whether they were accusing all 72 million American Catholics of being anti-Semites. They notably refused to directly answer that very telling question, merely repeating the statement that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism. She also asked whether they approved of the horrific massacres of innocent women and children that Israel’s Zionists had been committing in Gaza during the last couple of years, and aside from some obvious gnashing of teeth, they also avoided answering that question.
Prejean had spent her entire life as a staunch religious and political conservative, so her views were mostly polar-opposite to those of American left-liberals such as The Young Turks (TYT) podcast, the leading progressive channel on YouTube. But TYT co-host Ana Kasperian covered her story and expressed enormous admiration for her outspokenness on that very important issue. The segment attracted hundreds of thousands of views and over 5,000 overwhelmingly favorable comments.
A few days ago, TYT invited Prejean for a lengthy personal interview. I thought that despite never having worked as a professional talking-head she did extremely well, being very smart, articulate, and poised. The progressive hosts seemed just as impressed, and that segment again attracted hundreds of thousands of views with more than 7,000 overwhelmingly favorable comments.
As Prejean told the story, six months ago some White House staffers had demanded that she stop posting her views on Gaza on social media, then tried to persuade her to resign, but she had refused. Just before the start of the recent session of the commission, the chairman and a couple of the other members had pressured her to remain silent, but she’d firmly rejected their demands.
Her subsequent public exchanges about Zionism and anti-Semitism attracted media coverage, leading to massive waves of angry attacks by prominent Zionists. The chairman of the commission was Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and he’d quickly announced that he had fired her. But Prejean explained that although he had apparently assumed that she was just “some dumb blonde bimbo” from California who would be intimidated and go quietly, she had absolutely no intention of doing so. Instead, she pointed out that she had been appointed by the president and only he had the authority to remove her, while Patrick certainly did not, a legal conclusion that she had confirmed with lawyers.
She emphasized that Trump had received the votes of 56% of American Catholics, a far higher percentage than his Protestant support, and removing the only Catholic female on his religious liberty commission would be an outrageous blow against that huge religious community. Large numbers of Catholics had rallied to her defense on social media and were lobbying the Trump Administration on her behalf. So although she was disappointed that Trump had not yet publicly supported her, she was hopeful that he would ultimately do the right thing.
Personal courage is notoriously in very short supply among those who inhabit the political world, and she later mentioned that numerous members of the Trump Administration—and perhaps even some of her fellow commissioners—had privately texted her, saying how much they admired what she was doing and entirely agreed with her. But they were unwilling to publicly say so.
One of her hosts noted how strange it was that American government officials were so fearful of speaking out regarding a foreign country, apparently being sure that they would be fired if they did that. So he raised the question “Is this our government or Israel’s government?” The courageous California mom he was interviewing agreed that was the crucial question.
Prejean explained that she’d researched the history of Israel and had been shocked to learn that during its founding some 700,000 helpless Palestinian civilians had been brutally driven from the homes and villages their families had inhabited for centuries. In her journey of discovery, she was following in the footsteps of the very distinguished academic Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who in 2023 had explained how he had recently been forced to “unlearn” so much of the supposed history of that region that he had casually absorbed over the years.
Prejean had begun discussing this true history of Israel with knowledgeable individuals who had spent decades as critics of Zionism. She requested that the commission invite some of them as witnesses to provide the other side of the story, suggesting Norman Finkelstein, Israeli dissident Miko Peled, and an anti-Zionist rabbi, as well as a couple of representatives from Palestinian organizations. But the commission hadn’t allowed any of them to attend............
......In her TYT interview, Prejean said she had little respect for most of her fellow commissioners, nearly all of whom had kept silent during those angry exchanges, and she explained why they did so:
“They worship money and power and fame more than they have a soul. They are slaves rather than free people…Too afraid to speak out.”
But although many Christian groups in America had been brainwashed into blindly worshipping a foreign country no matter what horrible crimes it committed, she would “rather die than worship Israel, a genocidal state.” She made that same point in a Tweet that has been viewed more than 600,000 times:
Many of our country’s leaders claim to be devout Christians. Prejean may or may not be aware of just how completely they have turned their backs upon their own religion because of their service to Israel and the powerful lobbyists in its camp. In a 2024 article, I had described some of these striking political developments.
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, the obvious intent is to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.
While I doubt that we will see any arrests that would survive legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.
Although it received very little media coverage, the implications of this proposed legislation are certainly dramatic. Put simply, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly represent a remarkable legal development in our society.
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby..........
