Mike Collins is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia. On Thursday, August 27, 2026, The Washington Post published what it found on the X account of a man who used to work for him.
A swastika. An image of himself in what look like Ku Klux Klan robes. A racial slur for Black people, posted several times. The words "White Power." All of it in June and July of this year.
The man is Preston Parra, 24. Until August 24, when he changed his biography and made his posts private, his own X account described him as a "twink fascist."
What Collins actually paid him
Collins' campaign has a habit of describing the people around him as strangers. So it is worth being exact about this one, because the paperwork is public.
Parra interned in Collins' congressional office for two months in 2024, according to LegiStorm, the tracker of federal staff employment.
Then he got paid. Overhaul PAC — Collins' own leadership PAC — sent Parra two checks in May 2025: $2,700 on May 7 and $5,000 on May 23, both filed with the Federal Election Commission as "fundraising consulting." That is $7,700, in the FEC's own records. It was about two months before Collins launched his Senate campaign in July 2025.
Parra's consulting website goes further. It quotes Collins praising the quality of his "product": "You can grade it by the amount of people that are watching it and pushing it back out." The site does not say when Collins said it or what he was talking about, and Parra told the Post it was about the video clipping and digital work he did, not the personal account. Collins' campaign was asked whether he stands by that endorsement. It did not answer.
"Satire," he says
Parra told the Post the Klan image was made with Grok's AI tool and that the account is "satirical." He said he is a provocateur. He said Collins didn't know about the personal account because it was private at the time. "What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?" he said.
He also told the Post he is not a white supremacist — because it goes against his religion, and because his father is Colombian.
And then, in the same interview, he said this:
"I do think that the white race contributes more to the world."
That is not a joke that landed badly. That is a man explaining his actual position to a national newspaper, on the record, while defending himself.
Parra also said he liked working for Collins because of the tone. "I like the edginess," he told the Post. "I didn't think it was edgy enough."
The fourth one
If Parra were the only one, Collins could plausibly say he got unlucky in a hire. He is not the only one. He is the fourth person connected to Collins caught with this material, and each one was documented by a different newsroom.
His son-in-law. In July, CNN reported that David Alan Scheer II — married to Collins' daughter — is a "pro-White nationalist" influencer with more than 1.5 million followers who shares antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery. We wrote that story up here. Scheer asked his followers to vote on whether he should make a video titled "why Gen-Z doesn't hate Hitler." He is registered to vote at a house Collins owns.
His chief of staff. In May, Slate reported that Kip Talley — Collins' chief of staff — was in a roughly 30-person group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two of the best-known white nationalists in the country. In the chat, Talley described working to help Charles Johnson, who has promoted Holocaust denial, while Johnson was locked up. "I'm going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention," Talley wrote in December 2025. Collins replaced him in July. Talley said he acted "solely in my personal capacity."
His digital director. In May, William Paul — who worked as Collins' digital director in 2025 — walked up to Rep. Mike Lawler in a Washington bar and started in on him. A NOTUS reporter was standing right there and heard the whole thing — including Paul telling Lawler that Jews were anti-American, and that Lawler's Jewish supporters served Israel more than America. Paul later apologized on X and said he was getting help for a drinking problem.
And now Parra. Four people. Four different outlets. One congressman in the middle of all of it.
His answer was to change the subject
Here is what Collins said about his son-in-law earlier this month:
"He has had no role in my campaign whatsoever, and I don't believe or support those views and I have always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source."
Here is what his campaign said about Parra this week: it did not answer the Post's detailed list of questions. A spokesperson put out a statement saying Collins condemns antisemitism and finds it "abhorrent" — and then accused Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, of not condemning antisemitism on the left hard enough.
That is the pattern, and it is the whole pattern. A general condemnation of a category. No mention of the specific person. And a pivot to his opponent.
He did the same thing when more than 50 Black Georgia lawmakers signed a statement demanding he explain his ties. "No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else," he said. Nobody had said anyone spoke for him. They asked him to account for the people he hires, pays and marries into. He has still never done it.
Georgia Republicans stopped waiting
The people saying this out loud are not Democrats.
Debbie Dooley, an original tea party organizer in Georgia who backed Collins' rival in the primary, put it to the Post this way: "In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him." She added: "We do not need a senator that thinks he's a media influencer on X and has no integrity. Ethics matter. I cannot support him."
Shelley Wynter, a conservative radio host in Georgia, endorsed Ossoff. So did former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton — three crossovers in three days.
And a former Collins staffer told the Post what the office's social media strategy actually was, under longtime chief of staff Brandon Phillips: "casual trolling" and a "comms philosophy of shock factor." Another Georgia Republican operative summed up the confusion inside the party: "There was always a question of where does Mike end and Brandon begin."
Phillips is the same aide at the center of the open House Ethics investigation into Collins' office, where a nonpartisan watchdog found "substantial reason to believe" that Collins himself "retained an employee who did not perform duties commensurate with the compensation the employee received" and "discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges by retaining an employee with whom his Chief of Staff had a personal relationship." The complaints that started it said she was paid $5,000 as a district intern for no work. Investigators recommended subpoenas. Collins called it a "nothingburger."
Collins' own feed
None of this is happening to a man with a spotless account of his own.
In March 2024, Collins replied "Never was a second thought" to a post attacking a Washington Post reporter that flagged her Jewish identity, and refused to apologize when people objected: "Y'all just see stuff that ain't there."
In May 2025, he said replacing a Steak 'n Shake in the congressional food court with a halal restaurant was "equivalent to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century."
In 2024, he reposted a video of mostly white college students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester, with one of them making apelike sounds at her. He said afterward that he disavows racism and that the sounds were not the video's "focal point."
Parra said he took the job because he liked the edginess of that feed, and wished it were edgier.
What the record shows
Four people connected to Mike Collins — his son-in-law, his chief of staff, his digital director, and a paid contractor for his leadership PAC — have been caught posting or defending Nazi imagery, white nationalist company, or antisemitic abuse, in reporting by four separate news organizations. Collins' PAC paid the contractor $7,700. Collins has never explained a single one of them by name. His answer, every time, has been a general condemnation of racism and a complaint about Jon Ossoff.
Source
Liz Goodwin and Olivia George, "Mike Collins's former staffer posted KKK, Nazi imagery," The Washington Post, August 27, 2026. Photo of Mike Collins via The Advocate.
