The youngest House Republican appeared to confuse fact with fiction, sharing what seems to be a comedy skit as supposed evidence of crime in New York City subways.
“We can clean up our streets tomorrow if we’re willing to lock up criminals and thugs who terrorize innocent people,” Rep. Brandon Gill posted on X on Tuesday, alongside a video showing a man slapping another passenger on the subway before walking away.
The post now includes a “Community Note,” which allows users on X to add context to potentially misleading posts.
The note clarifies that the video shared by the 31-year-old congressman is a “social media stunt” from an Instagram account where “guys pretend to slap each other in public for attention and entertainment.”
The account is labeled as “comedian,” and many of the posts include a note stating, “For Entertainment Purposes Only, This is acting.”
The video shared by Gill, which has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and received 27,000 likes, did not include the “For Entertainment” note.
The Daily Beast has contacted the account owner for comment on the video.
Gill’s call to “lock up criminals” comes at a time when President Donald Trump has argued for deploying the National Guard to nearly a dozen cities run by Democratic mayors to “combat crime.”
Despite claims by Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago that there is an overall decline in violent crime, which data has supported, Trump has said that the city is “like a war zone” and “probably worse than almost any city in the world.”
In Portland, Oregon, where a federal judge blocked Trump’s federal deployment, Oregon Republicans posted a now-deleted social media image intended to show Portland burning to justify sending the National Guard troops into the city. It was later found that the image was actually a composite of two photos from South America.
Comments on Gill’s post show other users sharing photos and videos of crime, with some calling to “deport” the comedian in the video and others saying, “We can clean up our streets tonight if we all commit to carrying per our 2nd Amendment right!”
In September, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that subway crime had fallen to record lows in the summer, down nearly 10 percent from 2023.
It is unclear whether Congressman Gill knew that the video he shared came from a prank Instagram account. The Daily Beast reached out for comment but did not receive an immediate response.
