Mike Collins does not seem to notice or care about the company he keeps
In September, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins bragged to a campaign crowd about his “convoy captains,” the county organizers who run his grassroots operation across Georgia. He called them one of the reasons his campaign has been so successful.
On Wednesday, the Daily Beast reported that two of those captains had held leadership roles in American Patriots USA, a group founded by Chester Doles. Doles is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has called himself a fifth-generation Klansman and who went to prison for beating up a Black man in Maryland.
Joshua Mote, Collins’ captain in Hall County, served as the group’s vice president. Michael Boggus, his captain in Banks County, served as its state director.
In 2019, after Doles listed Collins as an invited speaker at a pro-Trump rally, Collins called American Patriots USA a “hate organization” and said white supremacy and white nationalism have no place in our country. He was right then. Seven years later, men who helped lead that organization have been running counties for Collins’ Senate campaign.
In fairness to Mote, who told The Daily Beast that he stepped away from the campaign in April after the death of his 2-year-old son, Mote said he spent only eight months with the group and he only learned who Doles really was after leaving the group.
I have no interest in kicking a grieving father. But the trouble for Mike Collins is not a single man. This is becoming a pattern.
Agitators pull right wing toward white nationalism
In July, CNN reported that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who lives on Collins’ property and was featured on the campaign website, has shared Nazi imagery, promoted the Patriot Front, blamed Jews for 9/11 and for the murder of Charlie Kirk and told one commenter there is nothing wrong with white nationalism.
In August, The Washington Post found that Preston Parra, a former Collins intern who later worked for his leadership PAC, posted a photo of himself in Klan robes along with swastikas and racial slurs. Collins condemned the posts and distanced himself from both men, but a candidate who keeps having to explain the people around him has a problem that press releases cannot solve.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what conservative commentator Rod Dreher calls the “Midwestern Führerbunker,” the network of money, institutions and online agitators working to pull the right toward nationalism, antisemitism and admiration for strongmen.
Wealthy donors shape various right-wing think tanks and publications while white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his followers work their way into Republican organizations. None of it can be successful if conservatives stand against it.
The other day, I noted the right’s protection of Andrew and Tristan Tate, men facing rape and trafficking charges in two countries who nevertheless found friends inside the Trump administration and sympathetic microphones from Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Benny Johnson.
The lesson there was the same. A movement that keeps making room for bad men eventually gets defined by them.
Argument about the other side being worse is wearing out
Collins is what that lesson looks like on a Georgia ballot. I do not believe Collins is a Klansman, and I do not believe he shares his son-in-law’s views. I do believe he has shown repeatedly that he either does not notice or does not care who is standing next to him.
His own record does not help.
In 2024, he praised Ole Miss students who racially taunted a Black protester before backing away from it. If Collins could not keep alumni of a group he personally labeled a hate organization off his county roster, voters are entitled to wonder who would end up in his Senate office.
In his House office, already, he has had a chief of staff on a group chat trying to get a Holocaust denier out of jail. That guy replaced the prior chief of staff, who has his own well-documented history of serious problems.
For a decade, Republican voters have been asked to hold their noses and vote for bad candidates because the other side is worse. But the argument has a shelf life.
It works when the flaws are a candidate’s own temper or vanity. It wears out when the flaw is a habit of elevating people who want to sort their neighbors by race and blame the Jews for everything wrong with the world. People will not necessarily suddenly vote for the opposition, but there is a growing likelihood some just do not vote in the race.
Scripture warns that bad company ruins good morals. Voters understand that instinctively. They judge a man by the friends he keeps, the family he puts on his website and the organizers he lets speak for him. Conservatives are getting tired of dealing with flawed candidates’ moral baggage.
The polling reflects that. One Republican poll showed Ossoff leading by 7 points, and Republicans have reportedly weighed pulling money from the race. Unfortunately, the people now quietly looking for the exits had years of Collins’ public record to consider.
Collins was right that his convoy captains reveal something important about his campaign. It just was not what he hoped voters would see.
Erick Erickson is host of the nationally syndicated “Erick Erickson Show,” heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on WSB radio. He is also a contributor to the AJC.
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