U.S. State Department Official Involved in White Nationalist Movement

The official, Matthew Q. Gebert, works as a foreign affairs officer assigned to the Bureau of Energy Resources, a State Department spokesperson told Hatewatch. Online, and in private correspondences with other white nationalists, Gebert uses “Coach Finstock” as a pseudonym. Through that alias, he expressed a desire to build a country for whites only.

“[Whites] need a country of our own with nukes, and we will retake this thing lickety split,” “Coach Finstock” said on a May 2018 episode of “The Fatherland,” a white nationalist podcast. “That’s all that we need. We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles.”

Gebert joined the State Department in 2013 as a presidential management fellow, according to an alumni update published about him in George Washington University’s GW Magazine that summer. Presidential management fellowships are considered prestigious. The program has a "narrow focus – developing a cadre of potential government leaders," according to a website devoted to the program.

A post Gebert made as “Finstock” on a white nationalism-focused forum called The Right Stuff suggests his radicalization started in 2015, two years after he started his job with the State Department. “I got into this [movement] and off the conservative reservation in 2015,” he wrote in a January 2018 thread called “Ricky Vaughn is a N*****faggot who has no place in [The Right Stuff],” which referred to the pseudonymous identity used by an internet personality in the white nationalist “alt-right” movement.



https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/08/07/us-state-department-official-involved-white-nationalist-movement-hatewatch-determines