(The Jason Jones Show) — As the CatholicVote outlet Zeale News reported, Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic member of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, “cited multiple Catholic scholars, scripture passages, and Jewish leaders to argue that opposition to political Zionism and criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza should not be labeled as antisemitism” this week at a Commission meeting. Now, just three days later – and as if to prove her point – she has been removed from the panel.

Let’s review.

Despite her taking the trouble to thoroughly ground her questions in well-known and respected sources, the panelists and witnesses Prejean Boller addressed at the Commission treated her line of inquiry as bizarre and out-of-the-blue. Worse, her intelligent, well-researched, and grave questions were a matter of contempt to them.

READ: Catholic woman ousted from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after denouncing Zionism

They responded with talking points so obviously canned that they didn’t even directly correspond to her questions. “The only genocide ever carried out was by Hamas on October 7,” said activist Shabbos Kestenbaum when she asked if he would condemn Israel’s bloodshed in Gaza. They responded with clumsy and religiously insensitive jokes – again, canned, and unresponsive to the substance of her questions. “We worship a Jew!” exclaimed Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, ridiculing some conceptualization of Christian anti-semites in general rather than directly addressing Prejean Boller’s incisive question about a specific Scripture passage.

Their feigned dumbfoundedness betrayed an inability to defend their position with directness and intellectual honesty. It is clear they are in the habit of lazily relying on others to honor an unspoken rule – the rule that allows Zionists to run roughshod over objections and smear dissenters. Prejean Boller’s offense was precisely treating Zionism as something to be examined rather than as a universally binding article of faith. After all, we are not a theocracy – and nowhere should that point be more freely insisted upon than on a U.S.-government-appointed religious liberty panel.

Woke Zionism vs. religious freedom

The fury unleashed against Prejean Boller online after the hearing – and the first-ever removal of a religious liberty commissioner that it precipitated – were even more telling.

In fact, Prejean Boller showed all of us this week that there is an obvious cumbrance to religious freedom that has made itself right at home in what ought to be the last place it should ever be found: a Religious Liberty Commission established to advise the White House on threats to religious freedom.

She confronted a nasty ideological cult and forced it to reveal itself. And what it revealed about itself should alarm all of us: that it operates with all the methods that we associate with the infamous behavior of the “woke” mob:

• Conflation: no challenge to the approved narrative is entertained or engaged – just dismissed as vile and racist.
• Purity tests: repeat the liturgy, use the approved phrases, condemn the approved villains – or you’re out.
• Destruction: it’s not just “You’re wrong,” but “You’re disqualified.” Not just “Ah, I see you disagree,” but “This person should never be allowed influence again,” “This person’s beliefs are beyond the pale and should not be welcomed in polite company,” and “This person’s past should be held up for public ridicule and condemnation.”

In other words, the familiar woke ritual we’ve watched devour reputations and livelihoods across the digital landscape for the last decade has now found its way into the world of MAGA. Only this time it comes not in the form of rainbow flags and HR memos, but in the pious language of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s well-funded U.S. PR campaign to shore up the reputation of a regime now almost universally hated for its crimes against the Palestinian people.

Let’s call this vicious ideology what it is: woke Zionism – the same tactics, the same cruelty, the same demand for submission that we’ve always expected of the woke Left, but now redeployed in the heart of the GOP to defend a foreign policy orthodoxy that is (according to every public opinion poll) on its last legs.

Profiles in cowardice

Catholics more than anyone should call woke Zionism out by name. Because we’re watching the same woke machinery – the same vindictiveness, same moral theater – get repurposed and pushed on us from the political right. And not just on the right – but on a panel specifically assigned the task of protecting religious Americans from litmus tests like the one Prejean Boller is being punished for refusing to take.

But instead, after the hearing, a virtual who’s-who of well-connected DC Catholics rushed to distance themselves from Prejean Boller and aid in the woke Zionist campaign to cancel her.

It’s worthwhile to document a quick rundown of profiles in Catholic cowardice from this week. My purpose is not to cancel these people, but to note that they have declared, directly and indirectly, that they can be relied upon to cancel others – even fellow Catholics – when woke Zionism calls upon them to do so.

Mary Rice Hasson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center quickly responded to a post on X smearing Prejean Boller as one of “many” people who “convert to Catholicism and then lose their ever loving minds about the Jews.” “They do not represent Catholics,” Rice Hasson wrote. “They’re a small network of unbalanced people who poison each other.”

Dr. Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation and the Discovery Institute wrote that Prejean Boller is just “somebody trying to increase their followers on X.”

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner similarly wrote that “Carrie Prejean does not speak for Catholics,” suggesting that “influencer-economics seem to be rewarding right-wing anti-semitism these days….”

Lila Rose of LiveAction condescendingly lectured Prejean Boller, telling her she is “not a victim of religious persecution,” and pointing out that there are “Christians dying for their faith at the hands of Islamists as we speak in Nigeria.” Rose also suggested that Prejean Boller disagrees with the Vatican regarding Israel. All as if Prejean Boller had not just lent her voice to one of the causes most dear to Pope Leo’s heart by joining him in advocating for persecuted Christians in Gaza and the West Bank – something Lila Rose and many other prominent American Catholics have been conspicuously unwilling to do.

The list goes on. Catholic author Leah Libresco Sargeant. Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project. Matthew Schmitz of Compact Mag. American Enterprise Institute’s Marc Thiessen, a frequent Fox News commentator.

READ: ‘Christ is King’: Catholic kicked off Religious Liberty Commission responds to LifeSite petition

Catholics must stop encouraging anti-Catholicism

If you’re a conservative Catholic, you’ve probably said the same thing I’ve said numerous times in response to woke mobs’ efforts to “cancel” dissenters: that it’s a betrayal when Catholics cooperate, and that they’re like the proverbial villager who feeds his neighbors to the crocodile, hoping the beast will eat him last.

You would think Catholics would come to their sister’s defense, especially given the contempt and even overt expressions of anti-Catholicism being thrown at her by influential people and institutions – which does the added damage of normalizing public expressions of bigotry against our Church.

In fact, it says quite a bit about her Catholic attackers that they treat Seth Dillon as an unobjectionable player in the whole drama. One of her main interlocutors in the hearing, Dillon oversees the increasingly humorless “humor” site The Babylon Bee. Again, from CatholicVote’s Zeale News:

Dillon’s publication has faced scrutiny for pitting Israeli interests against Catholic leaders in Gaza and the Holy Land. As Zeale News reported in July 2025, “Babylon Bee Managing Editor Joel Berry accused Gaza’s Christian community of aiding Hamas — just days after three Catholics were killed in a July 17 Israeli strike on Holy Family Church, the only Catholic parish in Gaza.” Berry said at the time that Catholics in Gaza “all support Hamas” and “aid … the terror regime.”

And the blatant anti-Catholicism of Dillon’s crew doesn’t stop there. After the hearing, Bee writer Mikale Olson publicly wrote in reply to Prejean Boller: “Is this a good time to remind everyone that Roman Catholicism is, in fact, not Christian?”

And that was mild in comparison to some other insults she received for her Catholic faith.

Pro-Israel activist Laura Loomer wrote that Prejean Boller would be ousted from the Commission, then “shamed as you deserve to be,” adding: “Then you can go to church and cry in a box about your sins….” Elsewhere, Loomer dredged up painful ordeals from her past in an effort to embarrass and discredit her, then sacrilegiously invoked the Mother of God, mocking Prejean Boller as a “wannabe Virgin Mary” (an example of explicitly anti-Catholic cruelty too hideous to link to).

When pro-Israel conservative author James Lindsay wrote that he is “tired of radical Integralists (Right and Left), occultists (mostly Right), and Communists (Left) hiding behind Catholicism,” I saw none of Prejean Boller’s prominent Catholic critics call out the anti-Catholicism of his statement.

Nor did they speak up when pro-Israel conservative talk show host Jenna Ellis said in response to Prajean Boller’s remarks: “It’s always the Catholics…”

Or when Republican “Walkaway” Campaign celebrity Natalie Jean Beisner wrote that there is a “Catholic to Jew hater pipeline.”

READ: Catholic silence on the dangers of ‘Christian Zionism’ is inexcusable

Time for Catholics to choose: wokeness or freedom?

Against any claim that the attacks on Prejean Boller were merely organic, harmless expressions of disagreement, I would point first of all to the fact that they culminated in her being exiled from her position of influence – a major political feat.

But consider also the fact that within hours of her advocating for Palestinians and asserting her right to reject political Zionism at the hearing, the entire editorial board of the Wall Street Journal published an all-hands-on-deck condemnation of her membership on the Religious Liberty Commission.

As to the substance of the actual editorial, there really wasn’t any. Instead, it only further demonstrated that DC Zionists have no serious arguments to back up their habitual bullying of dissenters – and that instead they rely on the woke method of “canceling” their opponents. The editorial was flippant and phoned in, lacking even a fraction of the cogency of Prejean Boller’s careful reasoning at the hearin, and none of the moral guts. She’s a “dingbat,” the editorial board wrote in their insultingly lazy 425-word essay.

And of course numerous Catholics approvingly shared this attack on their correligionist. After all, it came from a “respectable” publication.

It is stunning to see such a thoughtless feeding frenzy among some of our foremost lay leaders with ties to political and cultural power. All Catholics. All engaging in an online feeding frenzy against a fellow Catholic in the name of “Christian Zionism,” which the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem recently denounced by name as a “damaging ideology.”

If only any of these American Catholics were ever half this zealous about condemning – as their Pope and Catholic leaders in Gaza and Jerusalem do – Israel’s crimes against the Body of Christ.

And all this scurrying cowardice for what? To enforce the approved script Prejean Boller refused to read from – the preferred talking points of woke Zionism, which amounts to nothing more than a rapidly shrinking fringe cult, however favored it may be by a few elderly rich people.

Well, these Catholics are free to seek the approval of those few powerbrokers. But I’m afraid such Catholics have already received their reward.

But as for the rest of us, I say we seek first the Kingdom of God. I say we stand with Carrie Prejean Boller. To the bitter end.

Reprinted with permission from The Jason Jones Show.