At Foggy Bottom, at Greenway Farms, he was just Matthew Q. Gebert. “Boring dad government dude,” one of his colleagues said. People described him as friendly, straitlaced, professional. He wasn’t one to socialize outside of normal work hours, according to colleagues. He usually left early—he had an hour-and-a-half commute home. But that was only half of Gebert. The other half was a secret, and for several years it stayed that way.

Two years into his job at the State Department, Gebert started dabbling in the alt-right—the loosely knit constellation of white nationalists and white supremacists who comprise some of the president’s fringiest supporters. Eventually, he became a fixture in the alt-right scene, reportedly running a local chapter called the “D.C. Helicopter Pilots,” in an apparent allusion to the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose supporters were known to throw political opponents out of helicopters. In those circles, Gebert was known mostly as Coach Finstock. Among his acolytes, he was just Coach. (It was an odd pseudonym. Coach Finstock was a character on the MTV series Teen Wolf, and he was played by Orny Adams, a Jewish comedian.)

He mostly played the role of den father for 20-something latchkey haters. The former alt-right provocateur Katie McHugh, who last year publicly denounced the movement, is said to have crashed at the Geberts’ house for several weeks. (McHugh did not respond to a request for comment.) Anna Gebert served on the board of a local tourism association, Visit Loudoun, while reportedly complaining privately that Loudoun County was becoming too diverse. The couple was also reportedly known for serving swastika cookies to like-minded guests.

Gebert’s evolution had happened slowly, and then all at once. He grew up in the Democratic stronghold of Stratford, in southern New Jersey. He went to Sterling High School, with white kids and black kids. Race didn’t appear to be a big deal—at least not openly. There was some gang violence, but heroin was a bigger problem, according to a source. Gebert was a standout. As Southern Poverty Law Center blog Hatewatch has noted, his classmates voted him most likely to succeed. He read, traveled to Ukraine and Russia, and studied in Moscow through a program at American University. He acquired an affection for all things Slavic; he met his wife, who was then a student at Northwestern University and also studying abroad, according to Hatewatch.

In 2015, something metabolic happened. That was the year he escaped the “conservative reservation.” In a 2018 appearance on a podcast hosted by alt-right figure Ricky Vaughn, speaking as Coach Finstock, he traced his shift to the immigration bill cosponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy. “That was sort of what got my wheels turning was McCain, Kennedy in 2006, when they were trying to do that amnesty, as I saw MS-13 proliferating throughout Virginia.” In 2015, 2016, everything started to coalesce, both online and off. Donald Trump, Mexicans, rapists, the wall, the obvious passions and furies that the Republican nominee was tapping into, the fecklessness and hypocrisy of the GOP “leadership.”

In alt-right parlance, Gebert was red-pilled. Many alt-righters, including Gebert, present better than run-of-the-mill bigots, but their beliefs are hardly sophisticated; they subscribe to the same anti-Semitic mythologies that have been coursing through the ether for centuries. But because they read newspapers and have a glancing familiarity with big ideas, they sound credible to those on the precipice—those in search of an identity. Gebert is believed to have socialized with leading alt-right figures like Richard Spencer and Michael Peinovich. Spencer, in 2016 and 2017, was best known as the face of the movement. Peinovich, who goes by the name Michael Enoch, founded the alt-right blog and podcast network the Right Stuff, including alt-right touchstone the Daily Shoah. (Peinovich, in a rambling and disjointed telephone conversation, denied having ever heard of Gebert, despite reports of Gebert hosting Peinovich at his home.) Gebert, like Spencer and Peinovich, was in Charlottesville in August 2017, for the Unite the Right Rally that left one protester dead, his brother Michael Gebert told Hatewatch. In 2018, he reportedly donated $225 to the Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, who was perhaps best known for his blatant anti-Semitism.