Rep. Mike Collins official photo, 118th Congress.jpg
In the Senate race against Jon Ossoff, far-left operatives and some Republicans are attacking the leading Republican, a conservative who faces a runoff against a close ally of Brian Kemp.
Reportedly, when Laken Riley was murdered, Derek Dooley said nothing, and Mike Collins fought for the Laken Riley Act. About border security and illegal immigration, Dooley said he is “sensitive to both sides of the issue.” He also stated that illegal aliens shouldn’t have to “look over their shoulders every 5 minutes and worry about us taking them out of the country.”
Since then, Erick Erickson, The Slatest, Steven Guest, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution have said Georgians must not vote for Mike Collins. Donald Trump has not endorsed anyone in this race, and the candidates have said that President Trump supports them both.
This is what the Sentinel knows so far.
The Reasons for the Attacks via Erick Erickson
In answer to someone on X who complained about Erickson digging up dirt on Republicans for Democrats, Erickson replied, “You’re damn right. I will make sure Republicans understand that one of their candidates for office, in this case, Mike Collins in Georgia, who we still have the opportunity to stop from getting the party’s nomination, knowingly hired a sociopath with a criminal record who is alleged to have used yours and my tax dollars to subsidize his girlfriend and then referred to a rape victim’s husband as the “sloppy seconds” of the alleged rapist.”
He did send out the disgusting post. The “Mike Collins War Room” account on X replied to a post by Luke Thompson, who was sharing a new poll on the runoff election, showing a drop in Collins’s popularity. The reply, which has since been deleted, read “Matt Lauer’s sloppy seconds chiming in to take an L” and, in a follow-up, called him “a Yankee with poor judgment on women and GA politics.”
The leftist Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the poster was Brandon Phillips, a major yet controversial political operative in the Collins camp, who was fired.
The now-deleted tweets of Mike Collins’s campaign war room mocking the wife of Luke Thompson, a consultant for Derek Dooley’s PAC.
They refer to Thompson’s wife, who attempted suicide after allegedly being raped by Matt Lauer, as Lauer’s “sloppy seconds.”
They then doubled… pic.twitter.com/ML9cXZVwwE
— Amber Duke (@ambermarieduke) May 22, 2026
In a statement posted on X shortly after 6 p.m. Friday, Collins called the message “despicable and unauthorized,” saying it was published without his knowledge or approval.
“Earlier today, a campaign advisor sent out a despicable and unauthorized Twitter comment using a Team Collins campaign account,” Collins wrote. “The statement was made without my knowledge or approval and in no way represents or reflects my values or the values of this campaign. I want to apologize for this offensive tweet. I have made staffing changes to ensure this type of behavior never happens again.”
RINO Erick Erickson continues (Being a RINO doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but he is one): AND THEN, after firing the guy, the candidate hired Matt Gaetz’s chief of staff, who was in a white nationalist group chat trying to get a Holocaust denier out of prison.
The far-left Slatest writes:
The chief of staff for Rep. Mike Collins, the front-runner to be Republicans’ Senate nominee in Georgia, said he used his congressional position to attempt to free a Holocaust denier from prison.
Kip Talley, Collins’ current chief of staff, detailed his efforts in a group chat that included prominent white nationalists, among them Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Slate has reviewed the chats.
Talley actively intervened on behalf of Charles Johnson—a notorious internet troll, Holocaust denier, and racist—while Johnson was incarcerated from November 2025 to February 2026, according to messages Talley sent to the group chat in December 2025. (Talley was, at that point, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, before being promoted to chief of staff in January.)
In a statement, Collins’ office denied the allegations.
“This bogus complaint is a sad attempt to derail one of Georgia’s most effective conservative legislators in Congress. Rep. Collins looks forward to providing the House Ethics Committee all factual information and putting these meritless allegations to rest,” the office said.
In a letter to the House Committee on Ethics, attorney Russell Duncan, who represents Collins and Phillips, said that the allegations came from “two disgruntled, former members of Congressman Collins’ staff” and called on the committee to dismiss the matter.
Duncan said the decision to temporarily hire Craze was within Phillips’ discretion and that she “provided valuable assistance to the Office throughout both years regarding communications and other work of the Office.”
I think Nick Fuentes is a Nazi; I don’t know enough about Richard Spencer. Charles Johnson is a Holocaust denier, but I don’t have a clue if he deserves to be in prison.