How Could You Not Connect the Dots?: Inside the Red-Pilling of State Department Official Matthew Gebert – Vanity Fair
Several months before Gebert tweeted the swastika photograph, he appeared on Vaughns podcast to, in his words, defend the movement, to defend my friends. (It should be noted that Vaughn, whose given name is Douglass Mackey, has come under attack from fellow alt-righters for not being adequately alt-right and that, not long after the podcast aired, Nehlen, the Republican congressional candidate, doxxed him, sending Mackeys life into a tailspin.) Gebert was angry with Vaughn for sowing discord among the alt-right. He was against infighting. He said, more than once, that it was important that alt-righters name the Jew, alt-right speak for using openly anti-Semitic terms. Vaughn said Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson were susceptible to Zionist propaganda, which Gebert appeared to agree with, but then Gebert said, The service that Tucker is doing on Fox News is unquestionably of value to the boomers sitting in their Lazy Boys and watching it every night and dropping those bombs.
At one point in the conversation, Gebert turned somber. He was discussing his double life. He sounded like a quarterback addressing his teambloodied, exhausted. I take these risks because I have a grave sense of foreboding that this country and all of the white countries on earth are on a collision course with perdition, with disaster, he said. The only reason Im taking this risk is so that my kids can grow up in a whiter country, if not an actual, explicit, white-exclusionary country at some point in their lives or their grandkids.
In 2018, Geberts security clearancea Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, which gave him access to an array of highly sensitive intelligence across the U.S. governmentwas re-upped. None of these interviewers ever, I would say, was an impressive human being, but this was truly unbelievable, one of Geberts former colleagues said. Another former colleague added, How could you not connect the dots?
I attempted many times to reach out to Gebert for comment for this story, first through email, then through a phone number I believed to be his, then through his family members, none of whom replied to my messages. I tried knocking on his door, and leaving my contact information with a neighbor, all to no avail.
For years, Gebert took a combination of trains and buses into D.C., went to work, came home, logged on. He and his wife were model neighbors. They didnt play loud music. They could be relied on, in a pinch, for sugar or milk. (Ive had Nazi milk, one neighbor said. Jesus, to think of that.) They adhered to the homeowners association bylaws and painted their house one of the colors in the Duron Curb Appeal Exterior approved accent palettein this case, wheat, or maybe amber white, with forest green trim. His neighbors either liked or had never met him. But none of the neighbors I spoke to disliked him.
Then, on the morning of August 7, 2019, Hatewatch reported that Gebert was the leader of an alt-right cell in Northern Virginia, and that he had posted anti-Semitic comments on white-nationalist forums and been a guest on a now defunct podcast called the Fatherland, which addressed issues like white demographic decline and the subversiveness of girl power.
Within minutes of publication, the story was being read on most of the screens in the building, a State Department employee said. It didnt take long for the story to start ping-ponging around the globe, from one U.S. embassy to another. As far as the higher-ups at State were concerned, there were two very big problems with Gebert being a civil-service officer. The first was that no one wanted to work with him. His unmasking had made him repugnant and toxic. The second was Russia. Multiple State Department sources suggested that Geberts apparent affinity for Slavic culture, particularly as related to his white-nationalist leanings, would be considered problematic.