RANDY FINE MIGHT BE THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

People who should know better believe that the Republican Party might moderate after Donald Trump leaves office, but here's a story about a Republican who's been in Congress for less than a year and is already an emerging superstar hatemonger:

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., prompted calls for his resignation from Democrats and a major Islamic civil rights group after suggesting in a social media post that he'd choose dogs over Muslims.

"If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one," Fine posted to the social media platform X on Sunday.

Shortly afterward, he added a photo of a post from Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of the pro-Palestinian group "Within Our Lifetime," in which she called dogs "unclean" and said that "NYC is coming to Islam." Kiswani later told NBC News in an email she made the comment satirically.

Fine wrote in the follow-up post, "For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani," referring to Zohran Mamdani, New York City's new mayor.

Here's a little background: On January 25, New York City had its biggest snowstorm in five years. Parts of the city received nearly 15 inches of snow. Temperatures were well below freezing for a week after the storm, and only briefly cracked 32F for another week. So the snow has lingered, which is unusual here. It's finally begun to melt in the past few days.

There's an unpleasant amount of scattered trash and dog poop on top of the snow piles. This isn't pleasant, but I've lived here nearly fifty years -- it always happens here when snow lingers for a while. The New York Post -- which hates our new mayor and wants to blame him for this -- has fixated on this problem. Here's a story the Post ran on February 11 (cover your eyes if you're sensitive to the sight of dog waste):

The next day, Kiswani posted these tweets:

Congressman Fine knows how to ring the Pavlovian bell that makes right-wing rageoholics drool: He not only attacked Kiswani, he linked her to Mayor Mamdani:

For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani. pic.twitter.com/zcIs4tVyly

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

(Kiswani, in fact, has been critical of Mamdani since he was inaugurated.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in:

This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official.

It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured & stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it. https://t.co/OPHd5jtM2b

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2026

Fine took her on as well:

Rep. Randy Fine: "People should know Democrats like AOC are saying 'we are going to get rid of your dogs.' Americans need to keep that in mind when they go and vote in November."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 17, 2026 at 8:09 AM

Fine hits every pleasure center in GOP rageoholics' brains:

Look, here's my view: It's not enough for Democrats to think anyone who wants to come here illegally should be able to do that. They also think they should be able to get whatever free stuff they want. Now they're demanding that we change our values and how we live as Americans.

My post was in response to a major Muslim leader saying dogs should be forbidden from New York City because to some Muslims it bothers them. Well, if they're going to make us choose between our dogs and them going home, the choice is easy, and people should know Democrats like AOC are saying, "We are going to get rid of your dogs."

You mean this AOC?

(That's Deco, AOC's French bulldog.)

Apart from the bigotry and the Democrat-bashing, this plays on GOP voters' misunderstanding of how diverse communities work. Kiswani wasn't really saying dogs should be banned in the city, but even if that had been her point, and even if she were a top Mamdani adviser, it wouldn't matter. New York is a very dog-friendly city. We wouldn't tolerate a ban on dogs -- some of were angry in 1978 when a law went into effect requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. But we can tolerate unpopular opinions -- we don't expect everyone to think the same way, just as we don't expect everyone to have the same set of religious beliefs or the same dietary habits or the same dress code. We know some of our neighbors eat halal (or kosher), but we know they don't expect us to. Do some Muslims or some Jews (or the Amish men who come up from Pennsylvania to sell produce) dress according to their customs? Fine, but there's no pressure on us to do the same.

I think many Republican voters can't understand this. The places they live are monocultures. They'd like to impose their monocultural values on the rest of America. They assume that our Muslim mayor wants to impose what they consider a bad monoculture on us, but he doesn't, and we wouldn't allow him to (and wouldn't have elected him if we thought that's what he wanted).

Fine, meanwhile, seems like a rising GOP star. He's Jewish and wears a yarmulke, which might limit his stardom, but he's a hardcore hater:

... he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.

In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.”

... In November 2024, Fine warned Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that they should “consider leaving before [he] gets there,” followed by “#BombsAway,” an open threat against two Muslim members of Congress....

In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”

I could see him winning the Senate seat of the aging Rick Scott in 2030. I could see him running for president and being a credible candidate in the GOP primaries. And if he doesn't have a successful career in electoral politics, I expect to see him topping the podcast charts someday. He's a star on the rise.