Ed Danko and U.S. Rep. Randy Fine have parted ways a week after the former Palm Coast City Council member was named Fine’s district director in Flagler, Volusia and St. Johns Counties. Danko resigned well before Fine’s call on Thursday to “nuke” Gaza.
Stephen Shylkofski, named district director for Marion, Lake and Putnam counties–the other counties that form the 6th Congressional District–now appears to be the local district director as well.
“We reached a mutual agreement that the position was not a good fit for me, nor was I a good fit for them,” Danko said today. “It involved administrative duties in the district. And in the end it’s their candy store and they get to run it any way they wish. It was not the way I would run it. No hard feelings between me and the congressman. If anything, more misunderstanding–my role and their expectations.”
Danko served on the Palm Coast City Council between 2020 and 2024. “We’re doubling down on the commitment to constituent service by appointing dedicated leaders for both the inland and coastal regions,” Fine was quoted as saying in a May 12 release on Danko’s and Shylkofski appointments. By week’s end, Danko was no longer the local director.
Esteban Elizondo, Fine’s communications director on Capitol Hill, did not respond to an email sent last Monday about Danko’s departure. (A receptionist said all inquiries had to be sent by email.)
Fine is scheduled to attend Palm Coast’s Memorial Day commemoration at Heroes Park at 8 a.m. Monday and county government’s commemoration at the Government Services Building in Bunnell at 10 a.m. that day, a few days after he called for the extermination of 2 million Palestinians in Gaza by nuclear arms.
Speaking on Fox News Thursday morning, Fine said the Palestinian cause–seeking statehood and the right to exist–“is an evil one.” He was speaking following the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., Wednesday. One of the shooters yelled “free Palestine” as he was being detained by police. Some 52,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a war against the enclave after the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, and the taking of hostages by Hamas.
When a Fox host asked Fine if the shooting changes anything “when it comes to the course of the war or the negotiations to end it,” Fine responded: “I think it speaks to the importance of the only end of the conflict is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror. In World War II we did not negotiate a, 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. There is sompling [he meant to say “something”] deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.”
Asked about the propriety of Fine appearing at the local Memorial Day event following that statement, the chief spokesperson for Palm Coast government said she had not been aware of Fine’s remarks, which have still not been widely reported.
Other Republicans have used almost identical language, among them U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina last May, and Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina around the same time, and Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan 14 months ago.
Fine on April 1 won a special election to replace Mike Waltz in the District 6 seat, after Waltz became national security adviser–a job that lasted only a few weeks before Waltz’s ousster, following Waltz’s invitation of a journalist to a national security group chat that discussed military maneuvers in the Middle East.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy organization, said in a statement that Fine’s call “constitutes an explicit incitement to violence, endangering American Muslims and Palestinians, by calling for nuclear genocide against more than two million Palestinians, half of whom are children. It represents one of the most dangerous and dehumanizing remarks ever made by a sitting member of Congress and marks an escalation of Fine’s long-standing pattern of inciting violence and bigotry.”
Robert McCaw, CAIR’s government affairs director, said “Randy Fine is not just a dangerous bigot. He is a sitting member of Congress openly fantasizing about the nuclear genocidal extermination of Palestinians.”
As of late this afternoon, none of the nation’s national newspapers or major networks, including Fox, had reported Fine’s remarks. Among national magazines, only The New Republic reported on Fine. “At a minimum,” the magazine editorialized, “Fine should be censured for his remarks, as [U.S. Rep. Rashida] Tlaib was censured for much less by House Republicans. But Fine’s GOP colleagues have engaged in similar bigotry against Palestinians, and several others have also called for nuking Gaza. Fine is unlikely to get even the slightest rebuke from any Republican leader, let alone President Trump, who endorsed him last year.”
