Dan Bilzerian’s challenge to Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th Congressional District has turned into something more poisonous than an ordinary primary fight. After Bilzerian ramped up antisemitic ads and verbal attacks aimed at Fine, politicians and elected officials from both parties denounced the campaign rhetoric on Sunday evening.
The backlash mattered because Fine is not an obscure target. He is a Jewish Republican congressman who won a special election last year to replace Mike Waltz, and the attacks landed in the middle of an active Florida Republican primary. Speaker Mike Johnson called the ads against Congressman Randy Fine in Florida's 6th District disgusting and said antisemitism has no place in politics. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went further, calling Bilzerian’s campaign blatantly antisemitic and saying it shocks the conscience. Republican Rep. Don Bacon, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also condemned the posts, with Huckabee calling the rhetoric possibly the most disgusting political thread he has seen.
Bilzerian’s content has included references to Adolf Hitler and explicit antisemitic tropes, making the condemnation swift and broad rather than partisan and local. That is the part that has given the race its immediate edge: this is not just a hard-fought House primary, but a public test of how far elected leaders are willing to go in calling out hate when it comes from inside their own political lane.
Fine, though, is not entering that fight with clean hands. In February, he posted on X, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” later saying it was in response to a post by Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani. Fine also posted, “For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani,” and last July he called Somali American Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar a Muslim terrorist after she called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. That history does not soften the antisemitic attacks aimed at him, but it explains why the exchange has become so combustible and why neither side can claim moral high ground without qualification.
Bilzerian’s campaign website says he supports ending all foreign aid, including to Israel, and pushes an antisemitic claim that Jewish special interest groups are running the country into the ground. He is also among other far-right conservative voices in Florida who have been critical of Israel. The unanswered question is whether the backlash changes anything inside the Republican primary, where the only clear result so far is that Bilzerian’s attack campaign has drawn public disgust from leaders who rarely agree on much else.
