FOX 24 US
There’s a particular genre of Georgia political reporting with which Americans nationwide might soon become much better acquainted. These stories often begin with some variation of a common refrain: “Mike Collins is once again under fire for…”
For hiring a chief of staff accused of various violent acts.
For replacing said staffer with someone caught in a white nationalist group chat.
For making light of the January 6th insurrection attempt, calling it a “self-guided, albeit unauthorized,” tour of the Capitol.
For tapping out any number of Islamophobic, antisemitic or racist social media posts.
For being one of the first elected officials to promote the sick conspiracy theory that former President Joe Biden ordered an attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, Georgia voters in the GOP Senate runoff will choose between Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) and Derek Dooley, a candidate branded as a more traditional conservative and endorsed by governor Brian Kemp (R). Trump endorsed Collins via a Saturday night Truth Social post.
“Mike is strongly supported by the most Highly Respected MAGA Patriots in Georgia and beyond,” the president wrote. Trump made clear in the post that Dooley’s refusal to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election was a disqualifier, complaining that Dooley “said that I lost Georgia in 2020 when, in actuality, the facts have now proven that I won by a lot!”.
The winner will face Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA).
Dooley, a former NFL football coach, has never run for political office and even admitted he didn’t vote in the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections. A businessman who was elected to the U.S. House in 2022, Collins courts controversy and often wears it like a badge of honor. He rarely eschews outrage. But his brand of aggressive and vulgar social posting often draws on conspiracy theories and the dangerous and violent rhetoric that lives in the darkest parts of the MAGA-sphere and deeper, in corners of the extreme far right.
“Social media amplifies falsehoods, which is bad enough when they’re spread by the village idiot,” the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in 2024 about Collins. “When the village idiot is in Congress, it gives conspiracies a credibility that more people might believe.”
That rebuke came after several posts from Collins blaming Biden for the July 2024 shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania that left Trump and two others injured and one man killed.
“Joe Biden sent the orders,” Collins wrote the night of the incident, later urging the Butler County district attorney to “file charges” against the former president for “inciting assassination.”
That was neither the first nor the last moment people were alarmed by Collins’ attention-grabbing assertions of his purported beliefs.
Collins is the frontrunner in the Senate election. And even as he flirts with the far-right online, sometimes waving away the resulting controversy as an enthusiasm for memes, more than one of his staff picks has, in real life, drawn widespread criticism just weeks before the Tuesday runoff.
Shooting Guns and Sharing Murder Fantasies
The son of a Republican state rep., Collins spent his life before politics as a small business owner, running a trucking company with his wife. He ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for an open U.S. House seat in 2014, but lost to Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). He reentered the political fray in 2021, when he launched his bid for Congress, branding himself as a full-throttle supporter of Trump.
Almost immediately, he got down to business online, posting a video to Twitter beneath the caption “Newsflash: Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election.”
“Mike Collins here, your pro-Trump, America First trucker,” he begins. Holding a rifle, Collins goes on about his baseless belief that Georgia’s elections are full of fraud before firing his weapon and reducing what appears to be a plastic trash can labeled “Voting Machine” to shreds.
In that 2022 race, Collins wound up in a runoff against Vernon Jones, another election denier who is now a contender for Georgia Secretary of State and a long-time politician who’s faced a litany of his own political problems. Jones had been accused of rape in the mid 2000s, a fact Collins seized on, tweeting a photo of a rape whistle with Jones’ name on it and a pink handgun. “Although some use a rape whistle for protection against sexual assault, a 9mm is the more preferred form of protection,” the post read. Jones filed a police report about the post’s implied threat of “violence against Jones,” but officials declined to press charges.
After reaching Congress, Collins latched onto the right’s anti-DEI movement and linked a Norfolk Southern train derailment to corporate diversity efforts. The Biden administration’s focus on diversity and inclusion, he said on the House floor, “is forcing private companies to rethink their goals and one has to wonder, was Norfolk Southern’s DEI policies directing resources away from the important things like greasing wheel bearings?”
He’s leaned into an identity as the “Memer of Congress,” even though his content has consistently crossed the line from garden variety conservative trolling into violence, thinly veiled threats and explicit conspiracy theorizing. In February 2024, he referenced an extremist meme to imply that an immigrant who was accused of assaulting a police officer, and later exonerated, should be killed.
Collins quote tweeted another representative’s post about the incident and suggested they buy the accused “a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back.” The post referenced right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose supporters were said to have thrown his political enemies from helicopters. Allusions to this practice and “free helicopter rides” are popular among white nationalists and other far-right, hyper-online extremists. Collins’ post was flagged by X as violating the platform’s rules but can still be viewed.
Collins reiterated the white nationalist fantasy weeks later when an undocumented immigrant was accused of killing nursing student Laken Riley. “Jose Antonio Ibarra would make a great first passenger for the new Pinochet Air,” he said of the man who would later be convicted of Riley’s death.
Republicans in Congress, joined by 46 Democrats, would in early 2025 pass the Laken Riley Act, which was sponsored in the House by Collins. It requires federal authorities to immediately detain undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes, and lets states sue the federal government if it fails to do so.
In April 2024, Collins drew bipartisan ire when he interacted with a tweet from a highly anti-Semitic X account criticizing a Jewish Washington Post journalist. The account, which has the display name “Garbage Human,” reposted a New York Post article about the journalist with the phrase “In case you were wondering, yes she is,” which is often used online as a covert way to hatefully link a person’s actions with their (usually) Jewish heritage. “Never a second thought,” Collins replied. Collins claimed he was calling the journalist a “garbage human,” but his post remains live, even after the original account clarified it was definitely referring to the journalist being Jewish. Collins’ campaign told Jewish Insider he’s an “ardent supporter of Israel in Congress.”
The NAACP reprimanded Collins in May 2024 after the congressman celebratorily reposted a video of a group of counterprotesters opposed to a pro-Palestine gathering at the University of Mississippi that clearly shows at least one white male counterprotester making monkey-like sounds and gestures at a Black woman who was demonstrating in support of Palestine. “Ole Miss taking care of business,” Collins wrote.
In a rare moment of acknowledgement, Collins released a statement following that post asserting that he didn’t tolerate racism. “Frankly, I did not believe that to be the focal point of the video shared at the time, but I recognize that there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify,” Collins said.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the student seen making the sounds in the video was removed from his fraternity. Collins’ X post, however, is still up and public.
Before he set out to dismantle and remake U.S. public health policy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a 2024 presidential candidate running as an independent; many Trump allies resented his campaign, fearing it would take votes away from Trump. When news emerged of Kennedy losing part of his brain to a parasitic worm, Collins compared the incident to the killing of some of Kennedy’s family members.
“You either die a Kennedy with a hole in the brain or live long enough to become a Kennedy with a hole in the brain,” Collins wrote.
A spokeswoman for Collins told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the post was a reference to a famous line from a Batman movie but “did not explain why Collins replaced the words in the quote with what appeared to be direct references to the deaths of the elder Kennedys,” the AJC reported.
The congressman’s deeply xenophobic social posts about Islam and Muslims are especially prolific. Most recently, he was mocked for complaining about the replacement of a Steak n’ Shake with a halal restaurant.
“This is equivalent to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century,” he wrote.
Two Chiefs of Staff, a Series of Accusations and a White Nationalist Group Chat
Collins’ campaign X account made a post so disturbing in late May that the congressman had to come out and issue a rare, straightforward apology. The post was reportedly published by Collins’ campaign advisor Brandon Phillips. It mocked a woman who accused former television anchor Matt Lauer of rape and whose husband is now working for a PAC supporting Collins’ Republican opponent Dooley. The post replied to one by the operative that commented on polling in the Collins-Dooley runoff. “Matt Lauer’s sloppy seconds chiming in to take an L…” it said.
The stunning moment led the Senate hopeful to put out a statement describing the post as “a despicable and unauthorized twitter comment,” and to fire Phillips, who was already a controversial hire in the Collins camp.
Collins employed Phillips as his chief of staff before transitioning him to a senior campaign aid earlier this year. Phillips, a longtime Republican political operative, had been forced to resign from his role on the Trump campaign staff in 2016 after it emerged that he had years earlier plead guilty to criminal trespassing charges. In 2008, Phillips was arrested on felony charges of battery and criminal damage related to an incident with two other people wherein he inflicted “visible bodily harm” and property damage, according to local news reports; he ultimately pleaded guilty to lesser charges, according to the reports. Police also responded after he pointed a gun at a woman in a separate incident that year. In 2022, Phillips was charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty for kicking a dog. He also allegedly spit in the face of a Republican activist at a Trump event in 2024. Currently, Phillips is the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether Collins’ office improperly paid Phillips’ girlfriend for a sham internship.
Collins replaced Phillips in his role as chief of staff with Kip Talley earlier this year. That gave rise to a fresh scandal.
On May 28, Slate reported that Talley in December 2025 — while holding another role in Collins’ office — participated in a group chat with prominent white nationalists including Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Talley on the chat said he was attempting to intervene to help Charles Johnson, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier who had been held in contempt of court as part of a racketeering case.
“I’m reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ. Trying to get him out,” Talley reportedly wrote in the chat, which, Slate reported, had been organized by Johnson. “I’m going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention,” he also said.
Talley denied he acted in an official capacity at the request of Collins in a statement to Slate. Collins, Slate reported, declined to comment to them, and his campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPM.
