A producer for former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) weeknight show on the right-wing One America News Network has reportedly been fired after he shared a vehemently antisemitic social media post depicting Jews as cockroaches.

Vish Burra, who was a booker and script writer for Gaetz, had drawn widespread backlash for posting an AI-generated animated video last week showing him entering a “scheming room” with Stars of David on the door to find a group of cockroaches counting money, who scurry away upon his arrival. The post has since been deleted.

“I will expose the vermin in the venomous coalition and their transgression against MAGA, America First, and Kevin Roberts at The Heritage Foundation,” Burra said in another post to X, which has also been deleted. “It all starts with Susan Lebovitz-Edelman,” he wrote, referring to a Jewish trustee at the Manhattan Institute who is married to the hedge fund manager Joseph Edelman.

Lebovitz-Edelman, he wrote, “is behind the entire campaign to oust Kevin Roberts from The Heritage Foundation by using her leverage as a recent big dollar donor to take control of the organization.”

Burra’s firing was reported by The Wrap and The Independent on Monday.

OAN did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday afternoon.

Gaetz, a former far-right congressman from Florida, had defended Burra in a social media post Saturday and sought to brush aside the controversy, saying that his producer had “posted something dumb this week. He knew it was dumb and quickly deleted it.”

“I too have posted dumb things on social media without thinking — some I’ve deleted, some I haven’t. And I’ve had to pay some consequences along the way. Vish will too,” Gaetz wrote. “I’m not the internet hall monitor of any of my coworkers (thankfully.) I can say on the Matt Gaetz Show we do not believe in applying bigotry to any group of people, no matter where they live or how they worship.”

But Burra’s post faced blowback inside OAN. A Jewish anchor, Stella Escobedo, wrote on social media that she was “very hurt, disappointed and concerned that someone I work with — chose to post this.”

“Posts like these create violence toward Jews,” she said. “Dehumanizing a group is the first step on a road we’ve seen before. And that road leads to the mass murder of Jews.”

Burra has also faced scrutiny for other antisemitic posts recently highlighted by Escobedo, including comments in which he called a Jewish woman a “stinky yenta,” defended a Nazi Halloween costume and wrote that “America First means not being held hostage by a nearly century-old postwar consensus fairytale about what happened in World War 2.”

Burra, who has long been known as a provocateur within the MAGA movement, previously worked as a top aide to disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY).

Prominent Palestinian-American DJ and producer Farid Karam Nassar, who goes by the stage name Fredwreck, targeted Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) earlier this week with a series of explicit racial slurs, citing Torres’ support for Israel.

Nassar, who has worked with artists including Eminem, Britney Spears, Ice Cube, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, won a Grammy in 2020 for an album with R&B artist Anderson .Paak and he assisted with the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show.

In response to a video of a recent public confrontation between Torres and a pro-Palestinian activist, Nassar described Torres as a “s@mbo koon,” using misspellings of two racial slurs for Black people.

Nassar also commented, “He’s lucky I didn’t run into him on the streets.”

The DJ followed up with a direct message to Torres’ Instagram account, shared with Jewish Insider by the congressman’s office, in which he called Torres a “sell out as House Slave” and made a remark referencing AIPAC and gay sex. Torres is openly gay.

“Violence is not a bug but a feature of the Free Palestine movement,” Torres said in a statement. “No amount of harassment and intimidation will deter me from standing up and speaking out against AntiZionism and antisemitism.”

Nassar did not respond to a message requesting comment.
Nassar accused Israel of genocide on Oct. 18, 2023, and posted on Instagram “From the River to the Sea… We will be free… #endapartheidisrael.”