White nationalist State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert is regularly producing white supremacist propaganda with a man named Michael McKevitt, formerly of the U.S. Army, Hatewatch has determined. Hatewatch reported that Gebert, while being investigated by the State Department for his ties to a hate movement, has produced a series of podcasts steeped in the white genocide conspiracy theory and promoting white nationalist fatherhood. Gebert’s show typically features a co-host who employs the stage name “Potato Smasher.” “Potato Smasher” talked about wearing a “swastika shirt” on one episode of Gebert’s show and made a comment about suffocating Indian people to death with plastic bags on another. Hatewatch reviewed the social media posts of a man named Michael McKevitt, who has employed the pseudonym “Potato Smasher” online and is linked to members of The Right Stuff and Identity Dixie, a neo-Confederate group that spun out of that organization. His wife, Allyson McKevitt, is also connected to the white nationalist movement, Hatewatch determined. She sometimes uses the pseudonym “Evelyn.” Public records confirmed that Allyson and Michael McKevitt are married.
Before collaborating on a podcast with white nationalist State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert, Michael McKevitt used a number of different aliases in a Facebook group for the neo-Confederate outfit Identity Dixie. McKevitt posted this picture of himself under one of those aliases in December 2018. The sticker on McKevitt’s phone case is the “Celtic cross,” often used in white-power communities with the slogan “white pride worldwide.” Hatewatch attempted to reach the McKevitts by phone and email for a comment on Gebert’s podcast but were unsuccessful. Here’s how Hatewatch identified the McKevitts as key associates of Gebert:
‘Day of the Rope Soap’ Allyson McKevitt works with a soap company that Gebert and Potato Smasher periodically promote on his show. The soap company uses white nationalist in-jokes as part of their marketing. They once sold a product called “Day of the Rope Soap,” for example. “Day of the Rope” is often understood as a reference to the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, in which racist, antigovernment revolutionaries hang people they deem to be race traitors from lampposts, trees and utility poles. McKevitt, using his own name, posted “buy my wife’s soap” to the extremist-friendly Russian Facebook clone VK.com on Nov. 6, 2019, and included a link to the soap company’s website. In the same post, McKevitt clarified, “My wife makes the candles, she isn’t [the soap company].” McKevitt has since deleted his account on that site, but Hatewatch archived it.
via splcenter: White Nationalist Podcaster Identified as U.S. Army Veteran