A Christian Beauty Queen Challenges Zionist Power

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The Political Courage of Carrie Prejean Boller

All of us have our personal biases, and I’m hardly free of that failing.

In my case I’ve casually assumed that most beauty queens should hardly be taken seriously. So although they’re certainly very easy on the eyes, anything that they said or did could safely be disregarded.

President Donald Trump seems to have given such individuals some important roles in his administration and as I explained late last year, their performance often tended to reinforce my view: The Israel Lobby and U... Walt, Stephen M. Check Amazon for Pricing.

No sooner had Trump come into office than he demanded his subordinates prosecute former FBI Director James Comey on the rather doubtful charges of giving misleading testimony to Congress. When the experienced prosecutor whom Trump had appointed balked, arguing that the case was too weak to proceed, he was immediately fired and replaced by Trump’s own personal lawyer, a former Colorado beauty queen who lacked any prosecutorial experience. She proceeded with the case only to have it thrown out by the courts.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James had earlier prosecuted Trump, so he demanded that she be prosecuted in return for allegedly filing misleading mortgage documents. That case was also eventually thrown out, with the grand jury refusing to reindict her.

Even more farcical was the example of Kristi Noem, a former South Dakota beauty queen installed as secretary of Homeland Security in the second Trump Administration.

Back in 2024 she had attempted to burnish her credentials by publishing an autobiography in which she described some of her international diplomatic triumphs, boasting of her success in “staring down” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. However, the media soon discovered that those incidents were entirely fictional, merely the product of her inventive ghostwriter. Worse still, Noem was unaware of those claims, having apparently been too lazy to even bother reading the book that she proudly claimed to have written. But when journalists questioned her about some of the remarkable things she had supposedly done, she was unwilling to admit that the falsehoods were any serious problem and she reacted angrily, leading to widespread media ridicule.

Given that background, it’s hardly surprising that Noem seemed equally confused by the operations of the enormous domestic security department that she nominally controlled, instead telling people that she merely followed the instructions of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, whom she theoretically outranked. It’s unclear whether she was aware that her department’s masked and militarized federal ICE agents were clearly violating the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments or whether she was familiar with those important elements of our famed Bill of Rights. Her absurd claim that the two American citizens killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis had been domestic terrorists was also hardly encouraging.

Indeed, the media has widely reported the belief that she had received her important Cabinet post mostly because of her ongoing extra-marital affair with Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

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. The Death of the West:... Patrick J. Buchanan Best Price: $2.12 Buy New $12.46 (as of 06:40 UTC - Details)

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.

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A few days ago, TYT invited Prejean for a lengthy personal interview. Despite never having worked as a professional talking-head, I thought 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.

Video Link

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 to 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 her position 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.

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