Last year, Rep. Mike Collins, a second-term Georgia Republican who is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall, posted a meme that appears to have gone largely unnoticed.

On the left was a photo of Donald Trump in the Oval Office, pointing to someone just out of the frame. The photo was accompanied by a quote from the president: “Can you turn the lights down? I want to show you something.” Next to it Collins had attached an image and a snippet of dialogue from the 2006 film Blood Diamond. It comes just after Leonardo DiCaprio’s grizzled mercenary tells an American journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, he’s from “Rhodesia.”

“We say Zimbabwe now, don’t we?” Connelly says.

“Do we?” DiCaprio responds.

The reference—a one-off post with no accompanying context or follow-up—might have gone over the heads of most of Collins’ constituents. But the implications were obvious to plenty on the online right. A poster with the handle “X Wigger” responded: “We are all Rhodesia now.” Another user replied to Collins with a faded photo of three shirtless Rhodesian soldiers, and the words, “PATRIOTS IN CONTROL.”

“[W]e’ve got a sitting congressman rhodesia-posting now boys,” wrote a staffer at the right-wing outlet The Blaze. “[I]ncredible things are happening.”

Collins, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been dogged by his close associations with white nationalists, including a Nazi-posting son-in-law who lives next door. But he is far from alone in expressing his affinity for Rhodesia. The now-defunct white supremacist state in southern Africa is having a moment on the right. Bo French, the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, wrote last year that “We need to be Rhodesia.” The Washington Post reported in September that a now-former campaign staffer for Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted created a Spotify playlist devoted to songs about the country. Donald Trump Jr. is peddling Rhodesian lifestyle apparel. Some of Silicon Valley’s leading lights are Rhodesia-posting, too.

There was a time not so long ago when public support for Rhodesia was “morally untenable,” as the New York Times put it in a 2018 story about a resurgence in interest among “white supremacists.” Although their governments differed in their particulars, Rhodesia was, then and now, closely linked in the popular imagination with apartheid South Africa—two white-minority nations that violently resisted Black self-determination on the continent. But the former British colony had found “new life” on the far right, the Times reported. Before murdering nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Dylann Roof posted his manifesto at a website called “The Last Rhodesian.” In a photo he posted on the site, he wore a jacket with the apartheid-era South African flag over his right breast; the Rhodesian flag—green and white, with two antelopes in the middle—was right below it. (Roof was himself following in the footsteps of an earlier white supremacist gunman. James Earl Ray attempted to flee to Rhodesia after assassinating Martin Luther Luther King Jr.)

“[W]e’ve got a sitting congressman rhodesia-posting now boys,” wrote a staffer at the right-wing outlet The Blaze. “[I]ncredible things are happening.”

You don’t have to spelunk in the darker recesses of the web to find Rhodesia-posting today. Collins isn’t even the only battleground candidate who’s dabbled in it. Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee in a competitive House district in West Texas, filmed himself doing........

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