How Many Fascist Cronies Can One Republican Have?

Not for the first time, Republican Georgia congressman and Senate nominee Mike Collins is having to fend off questions about a former staffer’s florid public embrace of racism. On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that “a former staffer for Representative Mike Collins (R-Georgia) shared images in June and July on his X account of a swastika and one that depicts himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.” 

The former staffer in question is 24-year-old Mike Parra, who worked as an intern for Collins as well as a contractor for a pro-Collins leadership PAC. Parra says he was merely being “satirical,” and that he is not really a white supremacist. But he has also described himself as a “twink fascist,” used anti-Black slurs, and said he thinks “the white race contributes more to the world,” which most people would recognize as the core belief of white supremacists.

Since Parra no longer works for Collins, his racist posts might seem a minor matter. But this is not the first such scandal involving Collins and his staff—not by a long shot.

As The Washington Post sums up:

A number of people in Collins’s orbit have been accused of having ties to white nationalists or of making racist or antisemitic comments, and the congressman’s own social media presence has also drawn scrutiny….

Collins, a trucking executive, has faced scrutiny over his own social media feed, where he has shared posts that were called racist and antisemitic, allegations he has denied….

In July, Collins replaced his…chief of staff Kip Talley after Slate reported on his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, both of whom are white supremacists and antisemites….

CNN reported in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared Nazi imagery online.…

In May, another Collins ex-staffer, William Paul, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) at a bar, hurling antisemitic insults at him…

Having one racist crony may be regarded as a misfortune. Having several should make even the most naïve investigator suspicious.

Aside from these incidents of racism and antisemitism from various confederates, Collins also fired another staffer, Brandon Phillips, for a vile post mocking the attempted suicide of the wife of a rival political consultant. The viciousness of that post shares an affinity with the racist trolling that Collins and his associates have often indulged in.

It’s a mistake to see this nastiness and bigotry as having no wider importance beyond the individuals concerned. Rather, they reflect a political fact that extends beyond Collins: Over the past 10 years, racist invective has become one of the main ways that the GOP activates its base and courts younger voters. It was not by chance that figures like Parra and Phillips worked for Collins. Rather, their passion for outré violations of common decency were what made them desirable employees—until they went too far and had to be disavowed.

In 2017, in the wake of the infamous Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the journalist Alex Pareene wrote a remarkably prophetic essay for Splinter arguing that the alt-right racist provocateurs who attended the rally were the future of the GOP. Pareene noted:

Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer. In the age of President Donald Trump, what inspires a young person not merely to be conservative or vote Republican, but to get active in organized Republican politics? Do you think it’s a fervent belief that Paul Ryan knows the optimal tax policy to spur economic growth? Or do you think it’s more likely to be something else?

Pareene ended his essay by naming one rally attendee:

These future Republican elected officials could easily look very much like rally attendee Nicholas Fuentes, a Boston University student until his decision this week to leave the school. He didn’t appear to be a formal member of any young Republican organizations, but he was a self-described Republican. In interviews, he denies being a white supremacist. On Facebook, after the rally, he wrote: “The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming.”

In 2017, Fuentes was, to borrow a Bob Dylan phrase, a complete unknown, a college dropout with some local notoriety for his racist provocations. But he would shortly become one of the most popular streamers on the far right, infamous for his repeated Holocaust denial and praise of Nazism. Both Trump and his vice president JD Vance have been diligent about cultivating the hard-core racists in their coalition, including Fuentes, who infamously dined with Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

We’re now a decade into Trump’s takeover of the GOP. It ill-behoves us at this late date to be shocked by the fact that a Trump acolyte like Mike Collins has said bigoted things, has bigoted family members, and has repeatedly hired bigots for his staff. Collins does all this because this is how you succeed in GOP politics.