The Many Extremists in Mike Collins’ Orbit Have Come to Define His Campaign

The most prominent throughline that has emerged in the 2026 Georgia Senate race is that one candidate, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), seems to be virtually surrounded by fringe figures.

Collins himself has — at times slowly — responded to each new revelation by denouncing things he should, including antisemitism and racism. But his ties to out-right antisemites and racists have continued to emerge. Those ties, the most recent of which was exposed by a Washington Post article on Thursday morning, shine a new light on Collins’ own controversial social media presence, where he’s interacted with openly anti-Jewish accounts and at least twice invoked a violent historical reference popular with white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys.

Collins will face incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. A slate of polls have Ossoff with a healthy lead over Collins in the general election.

On Thursday, the Post reported that a person who served as a former Collins intern and contractor for Collins’ leadership PAC posted images to social media of himself in Ku Klux Klan regalia and of a swastika in June and July of this year. Preston Parra, 24, interned for Collins in 2024 and worked for Collins’ PAC throughout 2025, the Post reported. He’s posted online about being “racist” and “fascist,” repeatedly used slurs to refer to Black people, and used the phrase “White Power” in a social posting over the last two months, according to the Post.

Parra told the post he is not a white supremacist, and noted that his father is Colombian. “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he told the Post. 

Parra is at least the fourth person in Collins’ orbit to be exposed as espousing extremist views and behaviors. 

A former chief of staff–turned–campaign advisor, Brandon Phillips, called a woman who had accused former television anchor Matt Lauer of rape “Matt Lauer’s sloppy seconds.” (The woman’s husband worked for a PAC supporting Collins’ Republican primary opponent.) Before engaging in that  offense, for which he was fired, Phillips had accumulated a series of bizarre allegations about his behavior, which ranged from pointing a gun at a woman to kicking a dog to spitting in the face of a Republican activist. 

Collins’ next chief of staff Kip Talley worked to try and help a known white supremacist and Holocaust denier, Charles Johnson, while Johnson was in jail for contempt of court as part of a racketeering case, Slate reported in May. Talley did this while employed at Collins’ office and through a group chat full of prominent white supremacists including Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.

And the saga of Collins’ neo-Nazi influencer son-in-law David Alan Scheer II continues to unfold. Scheer is married to Collins’ daughter Summer and has produced advertisements for the congressman’s trucking company. Scheer also wrote, “There’s nothing wrong with White Nationalism,” in a YouTube comment, according to a July report by CNN’s K-File. He’s advocated for restoring America’s white population by removing other races, and attacked “Israel and Zionist Jews” as responsible for policies that he said “undermine the White Christian nature of America.” Scheer also claimed Summer was the creator of an antisemitic infographic that Scheer called “a consolidated version of all the proof jews control our government through finance.”

Neither the Georgia Republican Party, members of its leadership, or the National Republican Senatorial Committee responded to TPM requests for comment when the K-File report broke earlier this summer. 

On Friday, Aug. 21, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Scheer was still at it. He suggested in at least two social media comments that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Scheer also made disparaging comments about Muslims and evoked Hitler while rationalizing prejudices based on appearance in a recent YouTube video. Scheer’s continued inflammatory remarks came after Collins met with a small group of Jewish voters in Georgia. 

Parra, the most recent white supremacist Collins affiliate, called his dangerous antics “satire,” in an interview with the Post. Collins has framed his own offensive social media presence similarly.

Collins positioned himself as someone who uses social media to bring levity to the seriousness of Washington politics, he told the AJC in 2024. But even by then, Collins’ posts had veered into outright racist and antisemitic territory. He agreed with an account which called a Jewish reporter a garbage human. He celebrated a video in which white, male college students yelled at and made monkey noises toward a Black woman protester. He had his X account suspended after advocating for the killing of an immigrant who’d been accused of a crime using a white supremacist dog whistle. Weeks later, he parrotted the same meme about “Pinochet Air,” referencing right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose supporters threw their political enemies from helicopters. Collins’ posts are still up.

He told the AJC that he’s just being himself, and that people who are offended by his online presence aren’t his target audience. So who is?

Collins’ campaign did not immediately respond to TPM’s requests for comment for this story. His campaign has condemned antisemitism and pointed to the congressman’s legislative support for Israel.

In response to a TPM request for comment, Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) campaign spokesperson Valeria Rivadeneira-Crandell sent TPM a link to a tweet from an AJC reporter which included Ossoff’s response to the Post’s new report.

“Swastikas and the Klan. Another week, another scandal for the bigot Congressman Mike Collins and his collapsing Senate campaign,” Ossoff said.