Several people involved with Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins’ Senate campaign have ties to a group founded by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, the Daily Beast has learned.
At least two of Collins’ campaign-appointed leaders, Joshua Mote and Michael Boggus, have ties to American Patriots USA, a far-right group founded by Chester Doles, a former Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi National Alliance leader.
Doles has touted being a fifth-generation member of the Ku Klux Klan, and was jailed after he was convicted of beating a Black man in Maryland in 1993. And despite recent claims that he has left white surpremacy behind, the hate group leader has still been front and center at events featuring white supremacists, including the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Boggus, a convoy captain who represented Banks County, served as “state director” of APUSA, which is classified as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He campaigned with Doles in a 2020 bid for Congress, and has defended the former KKK leader’s racist past.
“He’s proven to me that he’s walked away from that lifestyle. Because I cannot stand the Klan,” Boggus said at the time, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Boggus did not respond to questions from the Daily Beast.
Mote, a Collins’ convoy captain in Hall County, has served under Doles as a vice president of APUSA.
“I’m super excited to announce that my friend, Mike Collins, has made his announcement that he is running to be our next United States senator,” Mote said in a video he shared on Facebook in July 2025, on which Collins commented: “Thank you! We’re gonna put the hammer down!!!”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, Mote said the Collins’ campaign asked him to serve as a convoy captain in February, but he stepped away from the role in April following the death of his 2-year-old son.
Mote denied being a racist and asserted APUSA was “never a hate group” during his time there, which he claimed was eight months.
“When we learned who [Doles] was, and that he was not the reformed Christian he claimed to be, we left immediately,” Mote said.
Before he was a convoy captain, Mote was listed as the manager of Cody Cantrell’s campaign for sheriff in White County, Georgia, on the “White Information Network.” Photographs later circulated of Cantrell allegedly giving a Klan salute, and no official paperwork for his candidacy was ever filed.
Before he enlisted APUSA affiliates to aid his campaign, Collins himself had denounced the group as a “hate organization,” after Doles listed him as an “invited speaker” for a pro-Trump demonstration in 2019, the AJC reported.
“White supremacy and white nationalism have no place in our country, and I will continue to denounce any and all forms of hate,” Collins said at the time.
Since the start of his Senate campaign, Collins has touted his “convoy captains” initiative—appointing campaign organizers in each county across the state to coordinate grassroots efforts in his bid to defeat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
“Y’all...we’ve got so many convoy captains across the state,” Collins said at a campaign event in Morrow last month, where he lavished praise on his organizers. “It is amazing because we do run a huge grassroots organization; it’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful.” Collins did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
The ties are the latest in a series of controversies surrounding Collins and his campaign, several of which have involved white nationalist figures or groups—even within his own family.
In July, CNN reported that Collins’ son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has a track record of sharing antisemitic material and Nazi imagery in comments across the internet.
Scheer, who was featured prominently on Collins’ campaign website, has blamed Jews for “porn” and “killing JFK,” as well as orchestrating both the 9/11 attacks and the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, a Trump-aligned conservative activist, last September.
“There’s nothing wrong with White Nationalism,” he told a user in the comments section under one of his videos.
Collins has an incendiary record on social media himself, where he has been likened to a mini-Trump. He backtracked in May 2024 after praising Ole Miss University students who racially harassed a Black protester on campus, and his X account was suspended in 2024 over hateful comments he made about a Venezuelan immigrant—though X owner Elon Musk eventually overturned it.
In August, racist online posts from Preston Parra, 24, who interned for Rep. Collins in 2024 before working for the lawmaker’s PAC until late May 2025, were unearthed, including images depicting himself as a KKK member and sharing swastikas. Parra defended his posts to The Washington Post as “satirical” and intentionally provocative.
As scandals have plagued the Collins campaign, the GOP has reportedly weighed whether to pull funds entirely from his Senate bid, with one Republican poll showing Ossoff led Collins by 7 points.
“If you went to a laboratory and tried to create the worst general election candidate for this state and environment possible, you couldn’t do better than Mike Collins,” a GOP strategist told MS Now in June.
