A Republican member of Congress is being condemned as a racist for publicly praising a group of white male students caught on camera taunting a Black student during a face-off between pro-Palestinian protesters and counterprotesters at the University of Mississippi.
In a 50-second recording posted on social media, one white student appeared to hoot like a monkey and jump from foot to foot while clutching a plastic cup as a security worker and two police officers stepped between the young white men and the lone young Black woman.
"Ole Miss taking care of business," Georgia U.S. Rep. Mike Collins wrote Friday in a caption to the video on X, formerly Twitter.
Collins credited the video to another X user who said it came from "Ole Miss" and called it "beautiful."
A spokesperson for Collins didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, the Hill reported on Saturday.
Collins' video was viewed more than 15 million times by early Saturday afternoon and drew about 11,000 comments, including one that called him a "racist embarrassment" and demanded that he resign from Congress.
Political consultant Fred Wellman, national chairman of the Forgotten Democrats group, also wrote, "Which part is your favorite, Mike?"
Is it the "white kid acting like a monkey at the black woman or the white security guy acting like she's a threat? I'm trying to figure out which flavor of racism has you all excited the most," Wellman added.
Another commenter asked Collins: "Have you no shame?"
On Thursday, a demonstration at the University of Mississippi by about 60 pro-Palestinian protesters was overwhelmed by 200 counterprotesters, including some from the school's Fraternity Row, according to Mississippi Today.
Some counter-protesters reportedly shouted antisemitic remarks including, "Hit the showers!" in an apparent reference to the Nazi gas chambers used to kill Jews during the Holocaust.
Police broke up the protest, the first of its kind at the Oxford campus, after less than an hour when both sides began throwing water bottles and other objects at each other, Mississippi Today said.
