US Religious Liberty Commission cuts member who asserted ‘Catholics don’t embrace Zionism’ & vowed not to ‘bend the knee’ to Israel

A member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission was dismissed after attacking several witnesses at a recent hearing over their support for Israel and the assertion that Candace Owens, who is widely seen as one of the world’s most prominent anti-Israel activists, isn’t an antisemite.

Dan Patrick, Lt. Governor of Texas and chair of the commission, announced on Wednesday that Carrie Prejean Boller had been removed for “hijacking” the hearing on antisemitism last Monday for her “own personal and political agenda.”

At the commission’s fifth hearing, witnesses from religious organizations, college campuses, and the administration were questioned about their experiences with antisemitism and possible solutions.

Carrie Prejean Boller has been removed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. No member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue. This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our…

— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) February 11, 2026

Prejean Boller, a newly converted Catholic, questioned several witnesses about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, while asserting that “Catholics do not embrace Zionism… So are all Catholics antisemites?”

The former Miss California, who is now a conservative activist, particularly attacked Seth Dillon, the evangelical CEO of news satire website Babylon Bee, as well as Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum.

I testified to the White House Religious Liberties Commission today.

I am deeply disappointed that one member, rather than listening to my testimony on the discrimination against American Christians and Jews, decided to focus exclusively on Israel.

Here's my response: pic.twitter.com/JmZ4wu4Ghu

— Shabbos Kestenbaum (@ShabbosK) February 9, 2026

“Since we’ve mentioned Israel a total of 17 times, are you willing to condemn what Israel has done in Gaza?” Prejean Boller asked Kestenbaum, claiming that Israel killed “seventy thousand innocent civilians” during the war.

During his testimony, Dillon said that “The antidote to antisemitism is not to ignore it or to outlaw it, but to confront it with courage and conviction, and that means not just calling out the antisemites, but the cowards who can’t bring themselves to join us.”

This was an oblique reference to the recent battle raging in conservative media circles over the condemnation, or lack thereof, of ostensibly conservative leaders who have spewed antisemitic rhetoric. Last December, Ben Shapiro, the Jewish founder of the conservative Daily Wire media company, attacked Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon for either promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories or failing to call out those who peddle them.  

What Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) is saying here is profoundly obvious and simple, and the fact that the lady he’s speaking to can’t understand how one can use Christ’s name in vain shows the depth of moral and cognitive rot currently on the Right
pic.twitter.com/2iHnVTQp7D

— Mikale Olson (@realmikolson) February 10, 2026

Dillon highlighted podcaster Candace Owens as an example, prompting a passionate defense by Prejean Boller, who asserted she had never heard Owens utter a single antisemitic phrase.

“I listen to her daily,” she said, “She’s not an antisemite. She just doesn’t support Zionism and that really has to stop. I don’t know why you keep bringing her up, and Tucker [Carlson].”

“Because they’re the two most famous antisemites,” Dillon replied, adding, “You should look up more of her statements,” citing examples like Owens calling Jews the “Synagoge of Satan.”

Last December, Owens urged her followers to read an infamous 19th-century antisemitic book by German author August Rohling that grossly misrepresents the content of the Jewish Talmud and spread the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christians and drank their blood.

Responding to Prejean Boller's dismissal, Owens wrote that "Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers."

Amid mounting criticism of her line of questioning at the hearing, Prejean Boller doubled down and escalated her antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric over the following days.

“I will continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America. I’m a proud Catholic. I, in no way will be forced to embrace Zionism as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. I am a free American. Not a slave to a foreign nation,” she wrote on 𝕏 on Tuesday.

Prejean Boller’s claims about Catholicism run counter to official church doctrine and were immediately contradicted by Father Thomas Ferguson, a member of the commission’s Advisory Board of Religious Leaders.

Father Ferguson pointed to the 1965 conciliar document called Nostra Aetate, saying that, “for our purposes today, the church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews, decries hatred, persecutions and all displays of antisemitism directed at Jews at any time by anyone.”

According to the Catholic website America Magazine, Nostra Aetate holds that “Jesus Christ’s voluntary submission to his passion and death for the redemption of humankind ‘cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.’ The text also declared that ‘the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures’.”

Ferguson also stressed, “Who is responsible for the death of Jesus? We would say all of us.”

On Wednesday, Prejean Boller vowed to “never bend the knee to the state of Israel,” claiming her conversion to Catholicism had “exposed what I was taught in American evangelicalism, a version of Christianity that fused Jesus with a political agenda and called it ‘God’s prophecy being fulfilled’ … No nation speaks for God. No ideology gets a free pass to kill innocent human life.”

She also noted her belief in replacement theology, and claimed that “Christians have been manipulated into believing that God blesses bombing, starvation, and mass killing. That is the opposite of Christ, who came to stand with the suffering and confront power.”

Prejean Boller's performance at the hearing and subsequent screeds on 𝕏 were blasted by various critics, Evangelicals, and Catholics alike.

All Israel News Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg thanked Dillon for his testimony, noting that Prejean Boller’s “defense of everything Tucker and Candace are saying – she sees nothing they’ve said as anti-Semitic – disqualifies her from serving on the White House Religious Liberties Commission.”

Prominent Catholic anti-abortion activist Lila Rose commented, “Using the Catholic faith as a way to denigrate Jewish people (or any people), spread lies and slander, and mock and ridicule others is immoral and antithetical to the Faith you profess. This isn’t representing Christ, it’s representing your own anger and self-righteousness.”

Author Eric Metaxas, who grew up Eastern Orthodox but has attended Protestant churches, said, “This is SO SILLY! No one on the Religious Liberty Commission thinks there is an obligation to be a ‘Zionist’ but being petulantly disrespectful of the commission itself is indeed disqualifying.”