“Whether a student says, ‘I believe there are only two genders,’ or ‘I believe Palestinians are undergoing a genocide,’ they should not be silenced or punished for expressing their beliefs.”

This snack-size bite of Burkean wisdom comes from Sameerah Munshi, who appears to have worked with former Miss California Carrie Prejean Boller to hijack the president’s commission on religious liberty, leading to a bizarre hearing yesterday and Boller’s dismissal from the commission today.

Boller seems to have accepted a position on the esteemed committee because of her heartfelt belief in her own need for more social media followers. Enter Munshi, an anti-Israel activist who serves as an adviser to the same religious liberty commission. Munshi, a booster of the rabid anti-Semite Candace Owens, has been—no doubt out of the goodness of her heart—helping to elevate Boller’s own personal Owens-esque cry for attention. On Munshi’s Instagram, for example, one of the few posts is a shared posting of Boller’s claim that “Gaza was a precursor to the release of the Epstein files.”

According to Boller, the goal of the you-know-whos involved in Gaza and Epstein is to “normalize and justify the torture and killing of innocent children.” The post ends with a call to solve the problem with this one neat trick: “Defund Israel.”

Today the religious liberty commission’s director, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, announced that Boller is being removed from the committee. “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 hearing on antisemitism in America.” No doubt she will start one heck of a podcast now, though.

Boller was booted for turning yesterday’s committee hearing into a circus by raving like a lunatic about Zionism. The recent Catholic convert attempted to do so in the name of Catholicism, but Catholics on the commission patiently explained church doctrine to Boller and corrected her Jew-baiting claims.

It’s worth noting that the Munshi-Boller duo’s first choice to hijack the hearing wasn’t to have Boller be the one to deliver the rant. Via Boller, they tried to feed the commission names of witnesses who would deliver the anti-Zionist lines themselves: Norman Finkelstein topped their list of prospective guests. “All of our suggested witnesses for the hearing on Anti-Semitism were denied,” she complained. “All of our suggested witnesses were also critical of the Israeli government.”

“Critical of the Israeli government” is one way to put it. Finkelstein puts it differently: “Sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of hell, a satanic state.”

So Boller and Munshi portray Israel as a nation of fanatical child-killers and invite a witness who uses the term “Satanic.”

This is entirely typical of the anti-Israel discourse. The anti-Zionists span the ideological spectrum, but the closest they can come to “disagreeing with Israeli policy” is to cast the Jewish state as a Satanic cult of child-murderers. The days of pretending the conflict is about “settlements” seem so far behind us, and so innocent.

This is the rule, not the exception. When Munshi and Boller insinuate Israel is a country of Jeffrey Epsteins, they are speaking the language of anti-Zionism, not advocating for a two-state solution.

This matters for two reasons. One, we’ve spent two years listening to Hamasniks claim their cause is one of free speech, even when that speech is accompanied by outright assault. A lot of people got taken in by this, and some well-meaning free speech activists are still walking around with egg on their face. Now the anti-Zionists are trying to colonize the religious-liberty movement on the same fraudulent grounds.

Thankfully, Christians on the commission and elsewhere are pushing back against the Instagram As-a-Christians. I hope they succeed: Catholics and Jews have forged a bond over the need to protect religious liberty of late, and Boller’s attempt to undo that deserves to fail.

Second, it is oddly encouraging that Boller’s stunt was so transparently a choreographed play for social-media clout. Her own Instagram page reads like a public-relations clearinghouse for Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. She doesn’t represent Christian political theory; she’s a birthday party clown for adults.

The pattern is easy to recognize. Boller had her moment in the spotlight, it faded, and she wants it back so she trolls Jews on the Internet. Carlson had mainstream institutional prominence for years, it went away, so he trolls Jews on the Internet. Candace Owens—well, you get the point. It is extremely dispiriting that there exists such a path to financial success or social and political clout—Carlson isn’t irrelevant, after all. But it is somewhat comforting that this path requires its travelers to discard their political ideologies and their religious theologies along the way.

Anti-Semitism is unworthy of all but the emptiest minds. That doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.