A MAGA congressman’s attempt to defend himself from accusations of racism has spectacularly backfired.
“The left has one debate tactic: call you a racist and pray you shut up. I never will,” Texas Rep. Brandon Gill posted on Thursday as a pull quote on X over a brooding profile shot of himself. “Calling us racist doesn’t work anymore,” he added in the caption.
None of the irony of Gill’s Thursday post was lost in the comments section.
“No one is calling you racist as an attempt to scare you into shutting up,” Omar’s fellow Minnesota Rep. Shri Thanedar wrote. “We call you racist because you refer to Indian Americans as ‘7-Eleven workers’.”
Thanedar then shared a screenshot of one of Gill’s earlier posts in which he had used the phrase that way. “The fact that you married an Indian American shows that you’re just a grifter pandering to a racist base,” he wrote. “How pathetic it must be to be that cheap.”
Gill told then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” last June over footage of the Muslim Indian-American New Yorker eating rice with his hands. Many pointed out at the time that Gill’s wife, who’s also of Indian descent, would have grown up eating the same way. Mamdani later secured a historic victory and is now the city’s mayor.
The elected Republican official has made his views clear on other occasions, too. He let podcaster Benny Johnson’s claim that Somalis are innately less intelligent go unchallenged during an April appearance on the pundit’s show, then argued migrants from the East African country are a “net drain” on the U.S. economy. “Not all cultures are equal,” he told the host.
Gill also picked a fight online with Mehdi Hasan last October, telling the British journalist to “go back to the U.K.” if he wanted to “live in a Muslim country,” and claimed Muslims are arriving “en masse” to “fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life.” He later told Newsmax that “Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States.”
The congressman’s attacks aren’t always rhetorical. He circulated a petition among supporters last February to deport Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, arguing the U.S. “would be a much better place if she were to be sent back to Somalia.” Omar remains a U.S. citizen, as she has been for the past 26 years, after fleeing her homeland’s civil war as a child.
Journalist Zaid Jilani wrote that the real test of Gill’s rhetoric comes later this year, during what already promises to be an uphill battle for Republicans to retain control of the House and Senate at midterms. “Let’s check back in November 2026 how much people like your brand of white nationalist politics,” Jilani wrote.
The Daily Beast has contacted Gill’s office for comment on this story.
