The hate growing in Mike Collins’ own backyard
You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your neighbors — especially if your neighbor lives on your property and posts white nationalist and antisemitic social media content to 1.5 million followers.
But what if that neighbor is also your son-in-law? And what if the extremist content runs the gamut from run-of-the-mill misogyny to deeply offensive racism so profound it relies on quoting and praising Adolph Hitler’s theory of leadership?
That’s the reality facing U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, whose son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, ignited a controversy in July when CNN revealed the connection between the two just weeks after Collins wrapped up the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.
Collins took more than a week to respond publicly to CNN’s revelations about Scheer’s white supremacist messages, eventually telling my colleague, Tia Mitchell, “I don’t speak for anybody and nobody speaks for me.” Asked at a news conference later in the month whether he would denounce Scheer’s statements, Collins said he had “fully addressed that” and quickly walked away.
Still hounded by reporters’ questions earlier this month, Collins responded more directly in an effort to put the controversy behind him. “I condemn all forms of antisemitism, I don’t care what the source is,” he told reporters. “Any type of hate, I condemn it, period.”
But the problem for Collins is that the hate he says he condemns is coming from his own backyard, where Scheer lives with his wife, who is Collins’ daughter. And it hasn’t stopped.
Although Scheer originally began posting online about four years ago as a sort of fitness influencer selling supplements and calling his followers “my beautiful shredded scholars,” his posts became radicalized and conspiratorial as the war between Israel and Gaza erupted and, later, as war between the United States and Iran dragged on.
In videos on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Scheer has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “Satanic warmongering, Zionist piece of garbage,” denied the existence of “Judeo-Christian values,” and said that white Christians, not the people of Israel, are “God’s chosen people.”
In other posts, Scheer has accused Jewish people of being responsible for pornography, 9/11, inflation and the murder of Charlie Kirk. In a podcast last month, he praised a quote from someone he described as “a particularly spicy individual, a very controversial individual to say the least.” The “spicy individual” was Hitler.
Other videos and writings focus on immigrants, women, and minorities.
In a YouTube video two weeks ago, Scheer said prejudice is essential, “because looks don’t lie.” Last month, he declared that if he were the devil, “I would convince women that the greatest contribution they can have in society is economic input.”
More concerning than all of that, though, are Scheer’s repeated statements that he and others like him are “starting a movement” that requires young, white Christian men to be prepared to mobilize and fight.
“There’s no voting our way out of this, at least not at this point in time,” he wrote on Telegram last October. “We must get organized. Rally your brothers and spread critical information. Train for physical confrontation ... Things are gonna get a whole lot uglier before we can make them better.”
During an episode of the “Wright Wing” podcast with Jerrod Wright, Scheer urged young men to reject college, learn a trade and train to be physically “hard to kill.”
“We’ve got the platform, we’ve got the connections,” Scheer said of himself, Wright and other online influencers. “What we need from you is to get your life in order.”
Incredibly, Scheer has only increased his presence online, even as his father-in-law launched a U.S. Senate campaign and has recently been forced to bat down one controversy after another.
Along with Scheer’s online postings, Collins also had to fire his first chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, who had been accused of violent behavior before being targeted by a congressional ethics investigation for allegedly paying his girlfriend for a no-show internship.
Collins then had to fire his replacement chief of staff after revelations that the staffer had promised to use the weight of Collins’ congressional office to help free a Holocaust denier from jail. The pattern is impossible to miss.
In response to Scheer’s posts, Collins has insisted that he is the real supporter of Israel, not Ossoff, who is Jewish, but who has angered some in the Jewish community with votes to block specific arms shipments to Israel.
“If you want to look at who I am, look at my voting record and how I supported Israel,” Collins said.
It’s possible that Collins really does support Israel and rejects antisemitism. But it’s also true that there is not a single vote he could take in Congress that would offset the damage being done by Scheer and other extremist influencers posting white supremacist, anti-Jewish content and finding an audience so large it goes from a being a fringe ideology to a lucrative business model.
The best thing Collins could do for his campaign, for Israel, and for the state he says he wants to serve is to get Scheer to take down his social media posts and root out the hate closest to his own home.