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If you’re tapped into conversations around Israel online, you may have noticed a certain blond woman who, seemingly out of nowhere, has started popping up all over social media. Carrie Prejean Boller, a former beauty queen and faithful Trump supporter, has found herself at the center of an explosive conservative fight.

She appeared as a figure in the national conversation suddenly last month, when clips began circulating online of her comments during a meeting of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission—a group, tasked with creating a report on the importance of and threats to religious liberty, that has focused largely on airing claims of discrimination from conservative Christians. In that meeting, Prejean Boller noted her opposition to the definitions of antisemitism used, asserting that Christians could be labeled antisemites for quoting the Bible—an argument that treads dangerously close to saying that Scripture condones anti-Jew hate. Worse, she insisted, repeatedly, that Candace Owens has never said anything antisemitic. This was an absurd statement: Owens often rants about powerful Jews ruining American society. A couple of days later, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the commission’s chair, announced that Prejean Boller had been kicked out of the group.

Afterward, Sen. Ted Cruz called her an “Israel-hating crazed antisemite,” while Laura Loomer deemed her a “stupid bitch.” Meanwhile, figures as unusual as Sarah Palin and Michael Flynn came to her defense, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations praised her for speaking the truth. On Friday, Tucker Carlson released an interview with her on his massively popular podcast.

Somehow, this once relatively obscure conservative character had quickly become one of the most interesting and inflammatory personalities in the intra-MAGA feuds playing out over Israel. Prejean Boller, a conservative Christian claiming a religious basis for opposing Israel, represents an odd brand of anti-Israel politics that is on the rise on the right. This brand mixes sincere compassion for victims of U.S.–Israeli military force and astute observations about Israel’s destructive actions with conspiracy theory–driven hostility toward Jewish groups. The trend isn’t unique to the right—antisemitism has at times crept into pro-Palestinian activism on the left as well—but coming from a place of conservative defiance against MAGA leadership, it can seem thrillingly bold. Without knowing the full context of Prejean Boller’s politics and past, she and her supporters look to progressives like allies in the fight, a splinter group that understands just how hollow Trumpism really is.

As Prejean Boller wrote to Donald Trump Thursday, in a blistering, six-page response on X: “To say your Presidency is a disappoint to your supporters is an understatement.”

It’s fascinating to see how Prejean Boller came to this position. For more than a decade, she was one of Trump’s biggest supporters. She served on his campaign advisory board in 2020 and dutifully claimed that the election had been stolen from him. She ranted about mask mandates, complained about transgender athletes, equated drag queens with sexual predators, and made appearances on Fox News to argue for Christian family values.

She has long had a specific interest in religious freedom, based on her own personal experience. Prejean Boller gained her original conservative following after saying she opposed gay marriage during the 2009 Miss Universe pageant; she has said she believes that her answer, which was rooted in her religious beliefs, cost her the crown. After a backlash and a tabloid scandal that involved nude photos, she became a minor celebrity, and Trump, who owned the Miss Universe franchise, publicly defended her. (He later approved her firing as Miss California over breach of contract.)

Back then, her political beliefs arose from conventional conservative evangelical culture. But Prejean Boller converted to Catholicism last April. She concluded, after some soul-searching, that Christian Zionism was the product of deeply misguided Protestant thinkers. And she started to say a lot of things that seemed, to pro-Palestine progressives, deeply reasonable.

In the contentious meeting that caused her eventual ouster, for example, she argued that the panelists were acting in bad faith, conflating critiques of Israel with critiques of Jews. That was true. The Religious Liberty Commission, which is composed almost entirely of conservative Christians, repeatedly made this assertion, as if it were an uncontroversial and established truth, and gave no voice to Jewish Americans critical of Israel. Prejean Boller later told the magazine the American Conservative that she believes that many Jewish Americans face real antisemitism in the U.S. but that “they’re not the ‘right’ Jews for this commission, because they aren’t Zionist Jews.” The fact that the commission considered only Zionist Jews legitimate Jews was antisemitic in itself, she argued. Also true.

Even more unusual, in this particular political milieu, was her expressed compassion for Palestinian Muslims. She asked the panelists to stop making Islamophobic comments and wore a Palestinian flag pin at the event. On social media, she has repeatedly advocated for a “free Palestine,” describing her advocacy for Palestinian civilians as her “calling.” She has described what is happening in Gaza as a “genocide.” In the American Conservative interview, she articulated her criticism of Israel’s mass killing of civilians as part of her faith: “As a pro-life Christian, I couldn’t deny the horrific suffering that the Palestinians were enduring,” she said.

Because of these arguments, CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization, commended Prejean Boller’s performance on the panel, characterizing it as her “encourag[ing] solidarity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.” And after she was kicked off the council, Sameerah Munshi, the sole Muslim on the commission, resigned in protest.

At a moment when so many Republicans are being aggressively and proudly Islamophobic, it’s easy to see how Prejean Boller would come off as a kind of beacon against anti-Muslim bigotry. But to rally around Prejean Boller would be a mistake. She often veers into more-troubling territory in her opposition to Israel. On the panel, she vehemently disagreed with the other members’ comments about growing antisemitism in the conservative movement—a problem obvious to anyone who has spent any time on X. She shared a hard-right Catholic influencer’s post about “Zionist Israel” being “the enemy of the entire Christian world.” She has suggested that the Epstein files reveal the Zionist power over America. She has amplified gleeful posts celebrating Nick Fuentes, a noted white nationalist and Holocaust apologist.

It’s also clarifying to look at those who have rallied behind Prejean Boller. It wasn’t just CAIR; it was also the extreme right-wing group Catholics for Catholics. It was a Jan. 6 insurrectionist. It was Steve Bannon.

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This may seem like a confounding mess, but it’s helpful to understand how the split in the conservative movement over Israel maps onto different factions. On the pro-Israel side, for example, there are secular hawks with specific geopolitical ambitions and vile white nationalists who see civilizational stakes in the fight to control the Middle East. But there are also religious motivations: Jews who fear persecution and support a Jewish state; mainstream Christians raised with a general fondness for the Holy Land and sense of kinship with Jews; fundamentalists who believe that the Scripture literally commands the support of Israel; Pentecostal-style Christians who feel a kind of radical rootedness to Israel; and evangelicals who believe that the world’s Jews must return to Israel to trigger Jesus’ second coming and the end of days.

Prejean Boller stands out in this crowd for having a Christian opposition to modern Israel. She has described her censoring as a matter of anti-Catholic prejudice. She has claimed, emphatically, that her anti-Zionism is the position of the Catholic Church. She is wrong about that: Although the pope has been critical of Israel’s violence, the Vatican does recognize Israel as a state, even if it doesn’t connect it to ancient Israel, as so many evangelicals do. In reality, American Catholics have theological room to be either Zionist or anti-Zionist.

For some secular or non-Christian supporters of Palestine, it’s thrilling to see a Christian take a theological swipe at Israel-supporting Christians. “Lindsey Graham says that if you don’t bless Israel, then God’s going to curse you. I mean, this is crazy,” Prejean Boller told the American Conservative. “This is heretical teaching, and I, as a Catholic, reject that.”

But there’s something deeper going on here: Catholics have always sat slightly uneasily in the MAGA coalition. Evangelicals have long fueled Trumpism, and its power players occasionally betray scorn for the Catholic Church. The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan, for example, recently called the pope’s prayer for peace “girly nonsense.” Doug Wilson, who leads the church movement that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth belongs to, has said that in his ideal society, Catholic parades would be banned as a “public display of idolatry.” So, for many Catholics, the religious factionalism of this fight has its own kind of appeal, a kind of lashing out against evangelicals in power. Prejean Boller likes to argue that “to be a true Christian you must be Catholic.” This whole conversation is filled with land mines.

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So what should a reasonable person actually make of Prejean Boller? She will likely continue to collect praise from Muslim civil rights activists, Catholic progressives, and pro-Palestinian protesters who are careless enough not to notice—or perhaps care about—the antisemitic personalities that have also flocked to her cause. She is both more interesting and more potentially dangerous than Owens and Carlson, two incredibly popular anti-Israel conservatives who have gone deep into fantastical conspiracies. By defying traditional rules of operation for conservative influencers, fusing conspiracy theories with genuine moral insight and scrambling what we think of left vs. right politics, she has perhaps unwittingly laid a trap. If pro-Palestine progressives fail to see the warning signs, she may compress the conversation around Israel into a false dichotomy. It will become a fight not just between pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist interests but between two painfully simplistic ways of explaining the world: of Islamophobia from her enemies, and antisemitism from her friends.

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