The Washington Post published a report Thursday revealing the shocking-but-not-all-that-surprising news of yet another young Republican political operative posting Nazi and Ku Klux Klan-related content to social media. Preston Parra, 24, according to the Post, interned for Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., for two months in 2024 “before working as a contractor for his leadership PAC the next year.”
Being confronted with former and active staffers’ Nazi connections has become a recurring story for Collins, the GOP nominee for a crucial Senate seat in a purple state. But this isn’t an issue exclusive to Collins. In the era of President Donald Trump, the right has nurtured a culture of online trolling that deliberately blurs the line between identity-based hatred and edgelord “comedy,” using the latter to provide cover for the former.
In May, Slate’s Ben Jacobs reported that Collins’ then-chief of staff, Kip Talley, was part of a group chat that included notorious white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. In that chat, Talley bragged about using “the levers of the legislative branch” and “reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ” to try to get the racist, Holocaust-denying MAGA activist Charles Johnson released from prison. Talley told Slate, “I acted solely in my personal capacity” and “did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins” or “use official resources.”
Having covered the pipeline from alt-right trolls to mainstream professional Republicans for years, I know this as a familiar gaslighting tack: admit to creating deliberately offensive online content, laugh at anyone who took you seriously, then wink at the racists.
Closer to home for Collins, CNN’s KFile reported in July that his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II — a right-wing influencer with almost 1 million TikTok followers — “promoted White nationalist ideology, spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, called for Muslims to be deported and shared an antisemitic infographic targeting Jews that he said his wife (Collins’ daughter) made.” Scheer didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment, and Collins released a statement saying he “has always condemned all forms of antisemitism, including this, and always will regardless of the source.”
Collins’ campaign didn’t respond to the Post’s questions about Parra and others. Instead it released a statement condemning antisemitism, while also accusing Collins’ Jewish opponent, Democratic Sen. Jon Osssoff, of not doing enough to denounce antisemitism on the left. He later released a similar statement and added that he “unequivocally condemns” Parra’s posts, which he called “vile” and “completely unhinged.”
Parra told the Post that his racist posts are “satirical” and that he’s not really a white supremacist, just a provocateur, though he added, “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world.” Among those satirical posts was repeatedly posting the word “twink” — slang for a young, slim gay man — so that it resembled a swastika.
Having covered the pipeline from alt-right trolls to mainstream professional Republicans for years, I know this as a familiar gaslighting tack: admit to creating deliberately offensive online content, laugh at anyone who took you seriously, then wink at the racists.
When I saw Parra’s “twink” post, I was immediately reminded of the “Twinks for Trump” party I attended as a journalist during the 2016 Republican National Convention — a well-covered, virulently racist event co-hosted by gay right-wing pro-Trump activists, headlined by Milo Yiannopoulos. Though Yiannopoulos later lost the support of his MAGA billionaire benefactors after appearing to express sympathy for pedophiles, the blueprint he helped draw during the mid-2010s political rise of Donald Trump remains in regular use today.
BuzzFeed News in 2017 reported in great detail on Yiannopoulos’ ties to the alt-right, neo-Nazis and white nationalists. This included exchanges with the self-described neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin — who counts Vice President JD Vance among his most prominent fans — in which the two discussed how to keep outwardly “clean” of being publicly associated with online Nazis, while not undermining racists’ support for Trump. (The Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday that Yiannopoulos was arrested the day before by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “failing to show up for his immigration hearing” and “will remain in ICE custody pending removal.”)
Now that Trump has been the dominant political force in America over three presidential terms, Republican concern about being perceived as “clean” from Nazi taint seems positively quaint.
In 2023, Nate Hochman lost his job on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign following outrage over an ad he created featuring the Nazi “Sonnenrad” symbol. But Hochman’s career quickly recovered, and by 2025 he was working for Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri.
Then there was the 2025 revelation in Politico of Young Republicans’ outrageously bigoted group chats. Vance urged anyone offended by the racist, antisemitic, misogynist messages to “grow up” and not to “focus on what kids say in group chats,” like “edgy, offensive jokes.” The group chat’s participants were age 24 to 35, including a MAGA lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Just a few months later, the Miami Herald reported on another racist, antisemitic MAGA group chat featuring young conservative activist leaders — including a campus chapter president of the Charlie Kirk co-founded organization Turning Point USA — posting hateful, violent, fascist rhetoric.
Parra told the Post that his racist posts are “satirical” and that he’s not really a white supremacist, just a provocateur, though he added, “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world.”
Some professional Republicans are belatedly coming to the realization that their party — and the conservative movement more broadly — has a young-Nazi problem. But the blame is frequently deflected to people like “Groyper” guru Fuentes, or the wildly popular antisemitic former Daily Wire podcaster Candace Owens, or antisemitic and racist influencers that mainstream MAGA types have ridiculously dubbed “the woke right.”
The main culprit, in fact, is Trump himself. America’s dominant political figure for more than a decade is an unapologetic gutter racist — including for his Hitler-esque claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and his eugenics-based smear of Somalis as “very low IQ people,” to name just a couple examples — who has only grown more brazen as he slides further into decrepitude.
His trollish rhetorical style and vicious bigotry are all a generation of young conservatives has ever known or admired. Remember the craven political maxim that we should “take Trump seriously, not literally”? How’s that working out now?
If anyone’s hoping the Republican Party will ever subject itself to de-MAGA-fication once Trump is constitutionally prohibited from serving in the White House, remember that it is the youth of the movement that will have to demand it. In the meantime, good luck finding any prominent MAGA commentators or Republican lawmakers incisive (or brave) enough to diagnose the right’s young-Nazi crisis as what it is: Trump’s legacy.
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