House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a rare joint condemnation late Sunday of a Florida Republican congressional candidate’s antisemitic attack ad against an incumbent Jewish lawmaker.
Johnson, 52, released a statement shortly before Jeffries, 54, followed with his own, both targeting Daniel Bilzerian’s campaign against Rep. Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District. The bipartisan rebuke came after Bilzerian, 45, unleashed a disturbing ad last week that deployed slurs and Nazi imagery against his primary opponent.
“The vile attack ads against Congressman Randy Fine in Florida’s 6th District are disgusting and should be condemned by all political leaders on the Right and Left,” Johnson said in his statement. “Antisemitism and outward hatred of Jewish communities have no place in our politics or in America, and we will continue to call them out.”
Jeffries echoed the speaker about an hour later, calling Bilzerian out by name in his own statement.
“The hateful campaign being run by Daniel Bilzerian in Florida is blatantly antisemitic and shocks the conscience,” Jeffries said.
“People of goodwill regardless of political affiliation must reject his vile attacks on the Jewish community. This cannot and will not stand.”
The coordinated denunciations from the top leaders of both parties marked an unusual moment of bipartisan unity in a polarized Congress. Bilzerian’s ad had drawn attention from Jewish Insider on Sunday, seemingly prompting the leadership response.
Bilzerian’s attack ad labeled Fine, 48, a “fat Jew,” “Shylock” and “satanic whore,” and used artificial intelligence to add physical bulk to images of the incumbent. The spot showed Fine hugging a bag full of cash, called him a “Jewish supremacist” and “Satan’s creepy little minion,” and featured footage of Adolf Hitler while a singer asked, “Should we revisit that Austrian painter’s opinions?”
The ad also boasted that Bilzerian does not take money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On social media, Bilzerian has railed against what he terms “the Jewish problem.”
In the viral moment that sparked the national firestorm, Bilzerian’s ad represented an escalation of a scorched-earth primary contest. Fine has himself deployed incendiary rhetoric, including Islamophobic comments and apparent suggestions that Gaza should be nuked. In a Fox News interview last year, Fine said, “In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.” He has also posted on X that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” and called New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “Jihadi” who should be “denaturalized and sent back home to Uganda.”
Bilzerian cited some of Fine’s past rhetoric in his disturbing attack ad, creating a dynamic where both candidates have traded in bigotry even as party leaders moved to isolate the challenger.
Fine responded to the ad by calling Bilzerian a “Nazi” and vowing to “defeat this evil on Tuesday,” when the two face off in the Republican primary. The incumbent succeeded former Rep. Mike Waltz, who left to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and has positioned himself as one of Congress’s most hardline pro-Israel voices, going so far as to declare, “There is no such thing as Palestinian.”
Bilzerian’s entry into the race earlier this year transformed a routine primary into a national spectacle. The social media personality, who has amassed tens of millions of followers across Instagram and X, has built his campaign around antisemitic conspiracy theories. A recent analysis by the Combat Antisemitism Movement found that 33 percent of posts on his campaign’s X account contained antisemitic hate speech, with content reaching an estimated 23.6 million people over a 90-day period.
In a TMZ interview after launching his campaign, Bilzerian denied being antisemitic and questioned the term itself. “No, I’m not antisemitic. I think that that’s kind of a made-up term, I think the Palestinians are the real Semites,” he said. When asked directly whether Hitler was antisemitic, Bilzerian declined to answer, responding instead that “actual Semites are the Arabs.”
The primary election between Bilzerian and Fine is scheduled for Tuesday in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, which covers portions of the state’s northeast coast including parts of The Villages retirement community.