Rehab For Radicals

A Montreal group seeks to defuse the rage that fuels extremism

- Seila Rizvic

MAXIME FISET first shaved his head not long after graduating high school in Quebec City. He collected a copy of Mein Kampf, a Nazi flag, and several books on how to build bombs, and he began referring to himself as a neo-Nazi. He once attempted to engineer a detonator to be used in an attack but stopped short of going through with his plan. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Fiset slowly began to abandon neo-Nazi ideology, a change precipitated mainly during a stint as a bouncer at a gay bar. When the bar found out Fiset was a neo-Nazi, they chose not to fire him, while his acquaintances at Storm front, then the internet’s most prominent white-supremacist community, urged him to quit. “That was a lesson in tolerance that I really remember today very fondly,” he says.