For weeks, the question about Mike Collins was whether he would say anything at all.

Now he has. And what he said is worth reading closely, because it is a careful non-answer to a question nobody actually asked him.

On August 11, 2026, the Georgia Recorder reported that more than 50 Black Georgia state lawmakers had signed a statement condemning Collins — the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — over what the statement calls his "extensive ties to white nationalists." The signers are not activists or opposing campaign staff. They are sitting members of the Georgia General Assembly.

Their central complaint was not the ties themselves. It was that Collins had never explained them.

"We condemn the Georgia congressman and urge our Republican state legislators to join us in demanding answers for his extensive ties to white nationalists."

State Sen. Nikki Merritt, a Grayson Democrat who leads the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, put it plainly: "I signed this letter because these are some really concerning allegations. We're talking about ties to people who promote white nationalism, just hate and racist propaganda, and these are targeted specifically at Black people and minorities."

Collins' campaign did not respond to the Recorder's requests for comment.

What he actually said

Collins was asked about it at an event in Athens the week before. Here is his full answer:

"No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else. I condemn all forms of antisemitism. I don't care what the source is. Any type of hate, I condemn, period. That's not who I am."

He then pointed to his voting record supporting Israel's military, and said his son-in-law has never been part of his campaign.

Count what is missing. He does not name David Alan Scheer. He does not say whether he has spoken to him. He does not address the fired chief of staff. He does not address the video he himself reposted. He condemns "all forms of antisemitism" in the abstract — a statement no one would dispute — and moves on.

"No one speaks for me" answers a charge nobody made. Nobody claimed Scheer speaks for Collins. The charge is that Collins has spent years surrounded by this and has never once drawn a line.

The three things he did not address

His son-in-law. In July, CNN's KFile documented that Scheer, married to Collins' daughter, promotes white nationalist ideology to a following of more than a million people. We went through that reporting in detail — the Patriot Front posts, the Nazi propaganda imagery, the "Jewish Bolsheviks" video. The Recorder reviewed his accounts too, and found posts claiming Jews control the media and are responsible for the death of Jesus. In one November video, Scheer said: "All we're told is Germany bad, Hitler evil. Don't ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust."

His chief of staff. A May 28 Slate report found that Kip Talley, then Collins' chief of staff, took part in a group chat with white supremacists, where he documented efforts to help an associate who had been jailed for contempt. The man Talley was trying to help had minimized the Holocaust and argued that non-white people were genetically predisposed to violence. Talley said he acted on his own: "I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat."

Collins replaced Talley last month. That was the second chief of staff he lost — the previous one was under congressional investigation over campaign funds and had used a Collins campaign account to mock a woman who said she was raped.

The video he posted himself. This is the one that cannot be blamed on anybody else. In 2024, Collins reposted footage of a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Ole Miss in which white counterprotesters mocked a Black demonstrator — one of them imitating a monkey. Collins captioned it: "Ole Miss taking care of business."

After the blowback, he wrote that he had meant to elevate the reaction to the protests, not the racist behavior, and that he now recognized "there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify."

That is not a staffer's post. That is not an in-law's post. That is Mike Collins' own account, his own caption, and a walk-back that still would not use the word racist.

Why Georgia Republicans are being asked to sign too

The most pointed line in the legislators' statement is the one aimed at their own colleagues: they urged "our Republican state legislators to join us."

That is a test, and so far it is going unanswered. Collins is not a fringe candidate — he is the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, with Donald Trump's endorsement, running against Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.

It is also not only Democrats who have noticed. Former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton have all crossed party lines to endorse Ossoff. Gov. Brian Kemp backed Collins' primary opponent, warning that Collins' history of controversial statements would hurt the party in a general election.

The Center for Politics' Sabato's Crystal Ball recently moved Georgia's Senate rating from "leans Democratic" to "likely Democratic."

The pattern is the point

Any one of these could be a coincidence. A relative with ugly views. A staffer in a bad group chat. A repost that landed wrong.

The reason 50 lawmakers signed a statement is that it keeps happening, and the response is always the same shape: a general condemnation of hate, a pivot to his record on Israel, and no engagement with the specific thing he is being asked about.

Georgians asking Mike Collins what he believes have gotten one sentence: "That's not who I am." They are still waiting to hear who he is.

Source

Four dozen Black Georgia lawmakers press Collins on alleged 'white nationalist' ties by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, August 11, 2026. Photo: Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder.