At their Senate debate in Atlanta on October 13, Democrat Jon Ossoff accused Mike Collins of calling for immigrants to be thrown to their deaths from helicopters. Collins didn't answer. He changed the subject to immigration enforcement and went after Ossoff instead.
Ten days later, CNN's KFile team showed why he might not want to talk about it. The 2024 post Ossoff was talking about wasn't a one-time thing. Going back through Collins' old posts and interviews, CNN found a pattern: jokes and hints about killing political enemies, praise for a politician who called for "more gallows," and years of telling people that January 6 was a peaceful stroll.
Collins wants to represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate. Here is what he has said when he thought it was funny.
"So good thing no one says that"
In August 2021, the U.S. was pulling out of Afghanistan. It was chaotic, and 13 American service members were killed. Online, an image spread that claimed to show the Taliban hanging a person from a helicopter.
Collins reposted it and added his own comment:
"If someone said this is what should happen to some of our military/political leaders for everything that's happened in AFG lately they'd probably get banned. So good thing no one says that."
That is the oldest trick in the book. You say the thing, then you pretend you didn't. CNN read it the plain way: Collins was suggesting that American military and political leaders deserved to be hanged from a helicopter.
"Might push her out"
A few weeks before that, in July 2021, Collins was a guest on the Christian radio show "Sandy Rios in the Morning." Joe Kent, another Republican running for Congress at the time, was talking about his travel plans. The host joked that he could catch a ride with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"She'd be happy to give me a ride, I'm sure," Kent said.
"Might push her out," Collins cut in.
Even the host knew that was too far. "Oh, don't say that. They'll be after you. You know they will," Rios said.
"I was joking," Collins said.
This is the Speaker of the House he was talking about — a woman whose husband, the next year, had his skull fractured with a hammer in their own home by a man asking, "Where's Nancy?"
Then came "Pinochet Air"
The helicopter post Ossoff brought up at the debate came almost three years after the Afghanistan one. In February 2024, Collins wrote that a migrant accused of attacking police should get “a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back.”
That is not a travel joke. Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet had his opponents thrown out of helicopters to their deaths. X took the post down for breaking its rules and temporarily locked his campaign account.
And the man Collins wanted put on that "ride"? Manhattan prosecutors later said he had been misidentified and had nothing to do with the attack.
So that's three times in three years: leaders hanging from a helicopter, the Speaker pushed out of a plane, a migrant thrown from a helicopter. Each time, the same shrug — it was a joke, nobody really said it.
He kept thanking the "more gallows" senator
In February 2022, Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers spoke at a conference run by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. She called Fuentes "the most persecuted man in America," called his followers "the future," and said "we need to build more gallows." Her own Republican-led state Senate voted 24-3 to censure her on March 1, 2022.
That was national news. Collins didn't care.
In June 2022 — almost four months after the speech and the censure — Collins thanked her for backing his campaign for Congress: "Very grateful to Senator Rogers! An early supporter who never backed down! Thank you!" In August 2022, he wished her good luck in her own election.
And on July 28, 2025, the day he launched his Senate campaign, Rogers endorsed him. "Thank you, Wendy!" Collins answered.
He isn't the only Republican in Congress who has gotten cozy with Fuentes' crowd. Paul Gosar spoke at the same conference two years running. But Collins wants a promotion — to the U.S. Senate — and he took the gallows senator's endorsement on day one.
"Who is Ray Epps?"
In August 2022, Collins went on a show called "In the Trenches with Teddy Daniels." It ran on the network of Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has pushed Holocaust denial. Peters spoke at the same Fuentes conference as Rogers — and asked from the stage why Dr. Anthony Fauci wasn't "hanging by the end of a noose somewhere."
On that show, Collins called jailed January 6 defendants "political prisoners." When the host called the attack a "grandma-guided tour" of the Capitol, Collins said, "Amen, brother."
Then he started asking questions:
"Who is Ray Epps? What role did he really play? And another thing, what about these pipe bombs that they supposedly had out there? What is the deal with those? We need full investigations on that."
Both of those questions have answers.
- Ray Epps was the target of a false right-wing story that he was a secret federal agent who started the riot. Prosecutors have said plainly that Epps was never an undercover government agent. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got a year of probation.
- The pipe bombs weren't "supposedly" anything. They were left outside the Republican and Democratic party headquarters near the Capitol, and police had to disable them. In December 2025, the FBI arrested and charged a Virginia man with planting them.
"Peaceful grandmothers"
Getting elected to Congress didn't change him. On January 6, 2025 — the fourth anniversary of the attack — Collins posted that "thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building." He said they had been "hunted down, arrested, held in solitary confinement, and treated unjustly."
He hasn't let go of it since. This summer, when a man convicted of two felonies for January 6 asked Collins if taxpayers should pay people like him, Collins said "That's easy. Yes."
What he said on the debate stage
At the October 13 debate, a moderator asked Collins straight out whether he is a white nationalist.
"No, I condemn any sort of hate speech, antisemitism, hate of any kind. It's abhorrent," he said.
Ossoff pushed him on the "neo-Nazi propaganda" coming out of a home Collins owns — a reference to CNN's July report that Collins' son-in-law is a white nationalist influencer who posts Nazi imagery and lives on Collins' property. Collins said, "I'm a little tired of this, Jon," and accused Ossoff of stirring up threats against his family. Since then, CNN found one more antisemitic comment — a use of the slur "goyslop" — posted from the Instagram account of a skincare business the son-in-law just launched.
When the moderator asked Collins whether he still believes Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020, Collins wouldn't answer. He attacked Biden's record instead. "There was a lot of doubt in that election," he said.
His campaign did not respond to CNN's request for comment on any of this.
What the record shows
Mike Collins, Georgia's Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, joked on the radio in 2021 about pushing the Speaker of the House out of a plane, suggested weeks later that American leaders deserved to be hanged from a helicopter, and in 2024 said a migrant — who turned out to be innocent — should get a "free helicopter ride." He thanked Wendy Rogers for her support months after her own party censured her for calling for "more gallows," and accepted her endorsement the day he launched his Senate run. He called January 6 a tour by "peaceful grandmothers," and on the debate stage this month he still wouldn't say Joe Biden won in 2020.
