Rep. Mike Collins is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. His opponent, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, got right to the point in a recent debate: “Imagine running for the U.S. Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to millions from your home,” Ossoff said. “That’s Mike Collins.”
Ossoff was referring to Collins’ son-in-law David Alan Scheer II, who promotes racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, Nazi imagery, and ethnic cleansing on social media and on podcasts, and has declared, “We’re going to retake America for Christian White men!”
Another much-quoted Ossoff line from the debate was that Collins had “hired half the third Reich,” a reference to Collins staffers, including his former chief of staff Kip Talley, who Slate revealed was in a chat group with white supremacists like Nick Fuentes talking about trying to help a Holocaust denier in prison on contempt of court charges.
Ossoff may also have had in mind a self-described “twink fascist” who interned for Collins and then worked at his leadership PAC, and who posted a photo of himself in a KKK robe. Yet another former staffer hurled antisemitic insults at Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in May. USA Today had enough material to compile a timeline of Collins’ ties to white supremacy.
But the problem with Collins is not just about his family or lousy hiring record—it’s his own extremism, expressed through offensive and aggressive social media posts.
Collins shared video showing students at the University of Mississippi making ape-like sounds and gestures at a Black woman protestor. Collins added, “Ole Miss taking care of business.”
In one post about a Venezuelan immigrant accused of being involved in assaulting a police officer, Collins wrote, “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back.” The reference to Augusto Pinochet echoes far-right adoption of slogans like “Pinochet did nothing wrong”—an endorsement of the notorious Chilean dictator’s murderous tactics, which included throwing political opponents out of helicopters into the ocean.
In another post highlighted by CNN, Collins responded to a video of migrants near the southern border by writing, “This is when you switch from 40mm to the 105”—a reference to an artillery weapon.
Collins’ record reveals how far-right racism, antisemitism, and glorification of fascist violence have spread throughout the GOP during the Trump era, especially among young men—and how little the Republican Party is doing to resist it.
Here’s more evidence: Marshall Rawson is likely to win election to the Florida state legislature despite documented attendance at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and his ties to the neo-Confederate League of the South, leading Talking Points Memo’s Christopher Mathias to decry “the prospect that an unrepentant white supremacist will attain elected office in one of the country’s most populous states with no pushback from the Republican Party.”
Right Wing Watch has reported on Nick Fuentes’ strategy to infiltrate the GOP by getting “groypers” —fans of his bigotry—elected to local office and hired as congressional and administration staff. When Fuentes bragged after racist young Republican chats were leaked last year that “everyone’s a groyper now.” he was exaggerating. But every racist and would-be fascist in authority is one too many. Vote blue.
