Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) lashed out at conservative firebrand and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Saturday, calling him “the most dangerous antisemite in America.”
Fine didn’t mince words on the third day of the four-day Republican Jewish Coalition annual legislative conference, taking place this weekend in Las Vegas.
“Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous antisemite in America,” Fine told the 1,000 participants, making this year’s conference one of the more well-attended. “He has chosen to take on the mantle of leader of modern-day Hitler Youth.”
Fine was one of several speakers at the RJC event who attacked Carlson for his anti-Israeli rhetoric and his fawning interview with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“I just want to make it really clear I’m in the ‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the party,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told attendees. “You can sit in a basement with weird people and say weird things. It’s a free country, right? But if you ever run for office as a Republican and say this weird [stuff], we’re going to beat your brains out.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) was more subdued.
“I think it’s important that we don’t promote antisemitism and we don’t promote people that want to destroy our relationship with Israel,” he told reporters after his speech.
No other speaker went after Carlson as hard as Fine, who has called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) a “Muslim terrorist” and said of New York state representative Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in Tuesday’s election for New York City mayor, that it was “a disgrace” he was ever granted citizenship and called for his deportation.
As Fine spoke at RJC, dozens of students carrying signs reading “Tucker is not MAGA” lined up in front of the stage. (MAGA refers to the U.S. president’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.)
“To call him out, especially with Randy Fine, the ‘Hebrew Hammer,’ really calling him out, really sets a precedent that the Jewish community will not tolerate any sort of antisemitism, not just on the left but on the right as well,” said one of the students, Michael Kaminsky, 22, a senior at DePaul University in Chicago. (Kaminsky sued DePaul after being attacked.)
Carlson, who was given a coveted prime-time speaking role and loud applause at last year’s Republican National Convention, has interviewed professors who claim that Adolf Hitler was not the genocidal murderer who began World War II, as well as Fuentes, a white supremacist who has dined with U.S. President Donald Trump in 2022, between his presidencies.
Trump denied knowing who Fuentes was at the time and said he wasn’t supposed to be at the meal.
“Tucker’s fall from grace has been one of the most extraordinary implosions in political history, and the rapidity of it has created real challenges for us all,” Fine said.
“Our friends don’t have our shared experience. I have to deal with this with my colleagues in the House. They remember the Tucker of five years ago,” the Jewish congressman said. “They don’t live with antisemitism every day. They don’t think about it the way we do, and it’s jarring for them to try to understand how did this person become who he is today.”
“The challenge is he’s inspired a movement of hate in our midst,” Fine said.
Fine also announced that he would cancel an appearance at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank whose president rushed to Carlson’s defense.
“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,” Kevin Roberts, the Heritage president, said in a video, naming both Carlson and Fuentes.
Roberts later denounced Fuentes in a second social-media post. He didn’t comment on Carlson in that post.
That didn’t mollify Fine, who said on Saturday that Heritage “will have no future in my office, and I will be calling on all of my colleagues on the Republican side to do the same.”
“If those who support Tucker Carlson want to see a venomous coalition, all they need to do is go look in the mirror,” he said.
He also turned his attention to two of his House colleagues, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
Massie seemed to indicate in a post on social media nearly two months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack that Congress was putting “Zionism” over “American patriotism.” Greene spoke at a white supremacist conference hosted by Fuentes and suggested that the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish banking family, funded space lasers responsible for California wildfires.
“Some days I marvel at their stupidity, other days at their evil,” Fine said at the event in Las Vegas. “It makes my stomach crawl that I have to sit in the same room as them.”
