Dan Bilzerian’s antisemitic attacks on Randy Fine drew rare bipartisan condemnation on Sunday evening, with House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries both blasting the rhetoric as beyond the bounds of political speech.
The backlash landed because Fine, a Jewish Republican running in Florida's 6th Congressional District, is already in the middle of a Florida Republican primary that has turned ugly fast. Bilzerian has challenged him there with ads and online attacks that officials said crossed into antisemitism, turning the race into more than a local contest.
Johnson called Bilzerian’s attack ads disgusting and said antisemitism and open hatred of Jewish communities have no place in American politics. Jeffries used even sharper language, calling the campaign hateful and blatantly antisemitic and saying it shocks the conscience. Don Bacon and Ted Cruz also expressed revulsion, and Mike Huckabee said it was possibly the most disgusting political thread he had seen.
Bilzerian has long trafficked in provocative language, but the recent round of attacks went further, with content that included references to Adolf Hitler and explicit antisemitic tropes. His campaign website also says he supports ending all foreign aid, including to Israel, and pushes the claim that Jewish special interest groups are running the country into the ground. That has made him one of several far-right voices in Florida criticizing Israel while running in the state.
The friction in this race is hard to miss. Fine is the target of antisemitic attacks, but he has also drawn criticism for his own remarks about Muslims and Palestinians. In February, he posted on X, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” and later said he was responding to a post by Nerdeen Kiswani. He did not apologize. Last July, he called Ilhan Omar a “Muslim terrorist” after she called Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal.”
What happens next is less clear than what happened Sunday night. Bilzerian has already shown he is willing to keep escalating, and the question for voters in Florida's 6th Congressional District is whether the flood of antisemitic attacks changes anything on the ground or simply hardens a race that is already defined by insult, grievance and identity politics.
