Mike Collins and the GOP’s ‘Ironic Nazi’ Problem

By Seth Mandel

Friday, August 28, 2026

 

Mike Collins has a growing list of ex-staffers with anti-Semitism scandals, which is itself a scandal for the Republican Senate nominee from Georgia. And while Collins must answer for his own lapses in judgment, the problem is much wider than one Trump-backed candidate’s vetting process.

 

The Republican Party has an absurd number of young staffers and potential staffers indulging in the right-wing “ironic Nazi” social trend. And toxic feeder streams pollute the whole river.

 

All of which means the GOP has a Mike Collins problem of its own creation, and containing it is only going to get more difficult.

 

The Washington Post reports that 24-year-old Preston Parra spent two months as a Collins intern in 2024 and then worked for several months in 2025 as a contractor for Collins’s political-action committee.

 

In the past, Parra has described himself as a “twink fascist” and posted a picture of a swastika made out of repetitions of the word “twink.” He also used AI to make a picture of himself in KKK-style robes.

 

Parra seems to have made his social-media account private around the time he went to work for Collins, so both men are likely telling the truth when they say Collins hadn’t seen the posts. But it also appears that Parra is par for the course.

 

In May, an ex-staffer named William Paul (the son of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul) reportedly launched a 10-minute anti-Semitic tirade at Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who isn’t Jewish. Two months later, Collins fired chief of staff Kip Talley when it came to light that Talley was in a chat group with prominent white supremacists.

 

Collins had to fire one of Talley’s predecessors, Brandon Phillips, over social-media misbehavior and an ethics investigation into a possible Phillips conflict of interest. “In his work for Collins,” the Washington Post notes, “Phillips was known for spearheading a social media strategy of ‘casual trolling’ and a ‘comms philosophy of shock factor,’” as described to the Post by another former staffer.

 

It was that “shock factor” that attracted Parra, who told the Post that he likes “the edginess” but “didn’t think it was edgy enough.”

 

That, in a nutshell, is the GOP’s juvenility problem.

 

And virtually every leak of young GOP group chats adds more evidence to the pile. One such chat log was revealed by the Miami Herald a few months ago. Someone had the bright idea of starting a Miami-Dade County Republican Party student chat. The results were predictable:

 

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as ‘whores,’ used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

 

The key part of that story comes in response to one chat member who “posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people.”

 

An official with the College Republicans responded: “How edgy.”

 

Being edgy, I suppose, is like acting: You can’t make it look like you’re trying to be something you’re not. You’ve just got to embody the character.

 

But what happens when the character is a twentysomething Nazi poseur? In the future, perhaps he’ll go to work for a Senate Republican candidate.

 

The 2025 version of this chat leak came via Politico. It wasn’t much different: a ton of racism, a heaping of misogyny, and a few servings of anti-Semitism/Nazi posing.

 

Some lost their jobs, and all were roundly condemned by Republicans. But something was missing in the framing of these stories. Politico’s lede: “Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.”

 

Did they worry, or did they “worry”? I’d say it’s clearly the latter. Of course these folks didn’t want to lose their jobs, but how many of them secretly wanted the texts to get out? More than a few, I would wager. Later in the story, Politico reports that the chat logs provided “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.” Yet my concern is that this is how they talk when they know others are listening. And that includes future employers in the world of Republican electoral politics. Right, Mike Collins?