On May 1, 2026, Florida Republican Rep. Randy Fine appeared on The Jenny Beth Show and said the quiet part out loud. While attacking his Republican primary challenger Dan Bilzerian, Fine ranted about Bilzerian’s Armenian heritage, mocked Armenia as “his foreign country,” and then closed with a line that should disqualify him from public office in any functioning democracy.
“We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress.”
Not Bilzerian specifically. Armenians. The whole people. An entire ethnic group, 1.5 million of whom are American citizens, told by a sitting US congressman that they are unfit for representative government in their own country.
This is not a slip of the tongue. This is who Randy Fine is, and it fits a pattern so consistent that it has become his entire political identity.
A Career Built on Bigotry
Fine has called Rep. Ilhan Omar a “Muslim terrorist.” He has compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to former Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. He has said the only problem with dropping nuclear weapons on Gaza would be that “the fallout would drift into Israel,” meaning the lives of two million Palestinians under siege were not even part of his moral calculation. The only consideration was whether the bomb might inconvenience the country he serves first. He has written publicly that “may the streets of Gaza overflow with blood.” He has suggested dogs are preferable to Muslims.
This is the man who now wants to draw a line through American civic life and announce that Armenian Christians fall on the wrong side of it.
The Armenian National Committee of America, the leading Armenian advocacy group in the country, condemned Fine’s remarks within hours. ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian called the rant “no surprise” because Fine “is backing a bill to arm and abet Azerbaijan, a genocidal dictatorship fresh off its ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Armenian Christians.” ANCA Advocacy Director Gev Iskajyan called the comments “blatant bigotry” and “disqualifying.”
They are right. But the deeper story is what makes Fine’s behavior not just bigoted but functionally genocidal.
