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Warning: readers may find the language and ideas quoted in this story disturbing.

He recruited them from the dark corners of the web, on message boards littered with phrases like “race war now” and “gas the k***s.”

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They were unremarkable young men: lonely, bored and nursing a grudge about their place in the world. Some couldn’t hold down a job and others just drifted from one paycheque to the next.

Nothing was ever their fault.

If they couldn’t get meaningful work, it was because the “Jewish economic agenda” had kept it from them. When women refused to date them, it was part of some feminist conspiracy against white men.

Zeiger, a major neo-Nazi figure in North America, fed off this sense of self-pity when he began organizing a white supremacist group in Montreal. An investigation by the Montreal Gazette has linked Zeiger to Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a local IT contractor who lives in Rosemont—La-Petite Patrie.