Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia) is challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff. The former staffer posted a swastika and shared an image of himself in what appear to be KKK robes.
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A former staffer for Rep. 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 images — found in a search by The Washington Post — follow other controversial actions and rhetoric from former Collins staffers and other Collins associates that have dogged his Senate campaign.
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 is challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) in November in a purple state that Donald Trump carried two years ago. The race is critical to control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage.
Several Republicans in Georgia told The Post that they have grown increasingly worried about what some call a pattern of troubling associations and behavior.
“In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” said Debbie Dooley, an original tea party organizer and conservative advocate in Georgia who backed Collins’s rival in the primary. “Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”
Collins’s campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the former staffer and others. Instead, a spokesperson released a statement saying that Collins condemns antisemitism and believes it is “abhorrent” and alleging that Ossoff, who is Jewish, has not sufficiently condemned antisemitism on the left. The Ossoff campaign declined to comment.
The ex-staffer who posted the Nazi and KKK images, Preston Parra, 24, interned for Collins for two months in 2024 before working as a contractor for his leadership PAC the next year. Overhaul PAC paid Parra $7,700 for fundraising consulting in May 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and in an interview, Parra said he worked for the group for several months. That was shortly before Collins announced his Senate bid.
In December of that year, Parra celebrated seeing Collins signs in Georgia, in one post saying: “let’s get that man elected.” A few hours earlier, he posted “DEUTCHLAND UBER ALLES,” a song lyric that became associated with Nazi Germany.
Parra, who recently described himself as a “twink fascist” on his X account until changing his biography and making his posts private on Aug. 24, is a conservative political operative whose consulting site touts his ability to marshal a network of influencers to boost Republicans. The Daily Mail reported this year that Parra posted frequent crotch shots and a photo of himself that he captioned “racist.”
In an interview with The Post, Parra said that the KKK post — which he said he made using Grok’s AI feature — and much of the other content on his X account are “satirical” and that he considers himself a provocateur. Collins was not aware of Parra’s personal X account when he worked for the lawmaker because he had made it private, Parra said. “What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” he said.
Parra said he is not a white supremacist because it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father. “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said.
The image of the swastika, which he posted in July, was made out of the word “twink,” a slang term referring to a young and slim gay man.
The images of the Klan robe and the swastika had not been previously reported.
Parra also posted a racial slur to refer to Black people several times and the phrase “White Power” in X posts in June and July.
Parra’s consulting website says that Collins praised the quality of his “product,” although it does not say when Collins made the remark or what specifically he was referring to. “You can grade it by the amount of people that are watching it and pushing it back out,” the site quotes Collins as saying.
Parra said Collins’s remark was about the digital work he did for him, which included clipping video of events the congressman was part of, not his personal X account.
Collins’s campaign did not respond to a question about whether he stood by his comment endorsing Parra’s work.
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 2024, he added approving comments as he reposted a video of mostly White college students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester, with one student making apelike sounds at her. Collins later said he disavowed any racism and did not see that as the “focal point” of the video.
In another post, he shared an account’s mocking of a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish identity. Collins said he was criticizing the reporter’s views, not her background.
Controversies around other past staffers have also followed Collins. His campaign told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it dismissed Brandon Phillips, his former chief of staff and adviser at the time, after Collins’s campaign account on X mocked an operative for his Republican opponent during the May primary. Collins called the post unauthorized and “despicable.” Phillips also drew a House ethics review over whether he improperly hired a person he had a personal relationship with to work for Collins as an intern. Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.
In July, Collins replaced his subsequent 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. In the chat, Talley detailed his efforts to help Charles Johnson — who ran far-right websites and has promoted conspiracy theories including Holocaust denial — in jail. (Johnson was jailed for civil contempt after defying discovery orders related to a suit that found him liable for defamation and racketeering.) Johnson told The Post that “a lot of people were concerned about my well being” while he was in jail.
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In a statement to Slate, Talley said that Collins did not direct his participation and that he “acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.” Reached by phone Wednesday, Talley declined to comment further.
CNN reported in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared Nazi imagery online. Scheer, who is registered to vote at a home Collins owns in Georgia, asked his online followers to vote on whether he should make a video titled “why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.” He also shared a Nazi propaganda image from the 1930s in a comment criticizing Israel, CNN reported. Scheer did not provide a comment to the outlet and did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.
“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,” Collins said of Scheer in a statement this month.
In May, another Collins ex-staffer, William Paul, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) at a bar, hurling antisemitic insults at him in an exchange that was witnessed by a NOTUS reporter. He served as Collins’s digital director in 2025, according to the federal employee tracker LegiStorm. Paul, who is also the son of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and did not respond to a request for comment, previously apologized on X for his conduct and said he was seeking help for his drinking problem.
Collins’s social media posts and staff problems have alienated some conservatives in the state, who believe he may be endangering the GOP’s chances of winning back the Senate seat.
“We do not need a senator that thinks he’s a media influencer on X and has no integrity,” said Dooley, the tea party organizer. “Ethics matter. I cannot support him.”
Shelley Wynter, a conservative radio host in Georgia, said he decided to endorse Ossoff after Collins won the GOP primary because it worried him that Collins did not distance himself from Phillips after a nonpartisan government watchdog group accused Phillips of hiring a person he had a personal relationship with for a job she did not actually perform. (Phillips denied any impropriety.) The ugliness of the Republican primary also played a part in his decision, he said.
“It’s the meanness and mean-spiritedness that turns off many voters,” he said of the tone of Collins’s campaign.
It has long been unclear to Georgia Republicans whether the aggressive, trolling style of Collins and his campaign’s social media feed was a result of the congressman’s taste or that of Phillips, his longtime former chief of staff.
“There was always a question of where does Mike end and Brandon begin,” said one Georgia Republican operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the congressman.
In his work for Collins, Phillips was known for spearheading a social media strategy of “casual trolling” and a “comms philosophy of shock factor,” according to a former staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.
“Brandon had the final word. He controlled the social media,” the person said.
Parra said he was attracted to the tone of the office’s social media when he started working for Collins. “I like the edginess,” he said. “I didn’t think it was edgy enough.”
The Post contacted 10 former staffers to ask about the culture of Collins’s office. Two declined to comment on the advice of their attorneys, while others did not respond to requests for comment.
Collins remains the focus of a House Ethics Committee review over whether he misused government funds. In January, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog released a report saying there was “substantial reason to believe” that Phillips hired someone he had a personal relationship with as an office intern, placing her on the taxpayers’ payroll even though she “did not perform duties commensurate with her compensation.”
The watchdog spent months reviewing claims against Collins and Phillips after receiving two separate allegations in September 2024 that Phillips’s girlfriend was paid $5,000 as a district intern despite not doing any work, according to the report. An attorney for Collins and Phillips said the intern was properly hired and provided “valuable assistance” to the office on communications and other matters.
The report recommended that the House Ethics Committee subpoena Collins, Phillips and others.
Months later, it remains unclear whether the subpoenas have been served or whether the investigation will wrap up before Collins’s term ends in January. The committee is likely to lose jurisdiction over the matter once Collins leaves the House.
Collins and Phillips have denied wrongdoing, with Collins calling the probe a “nothingburger” and his attorney describing the allegations as the product of “disgruntled” former staffers.
A longtime GOP operative in Georgia, Phillips served as Trump’s state director for his 2016 presidential campaign until he resigned weeks before the election when a local news outlet unearthed Phillips’s guilty plea to criminal trespassing charges in 2008. He admitted to destroying a laptop and slashing someone’s tires, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
According to LegiStorm, Phillips worked with Collins as a transition aide after he won a House seat in 2022 and then as his chief of staff for three years. He became a senior policy adviser in January 2026 until May, when Collins announced “staffing changes.”
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Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
