One of the perks of having attended a top university is you get to bask in the unearned reflected glory of more talented and ambitious classmates. McGill has produced more Nobel Laureates, Rhodes scholars and astronauts — including Captain Kirk! — than any other post-secondary school in Canada, and some of the luminaries who wandered its hallways during my undergrad years include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matthew Rosenberg, national treasure Samantha Bee, renowned turntablist Kid Koala and current prime minister Justin Trudeau.
People have high expectations for graduates of the so-called Harvard of the North and it’s nice to see fellow alumni do well on the world stage, so it came as an unpleasant surprise to learn one is now a leading figure of the alt-right movement.
Not only that but I once passed up an opportunity to accidentally punch him in the face.
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether it’s socially acceptable to punch neo-Nazis ever since Richard Spencer was assaulted on Dear Leader Donald J. Trump’s inauguration day. And to be fair to Stefan Molyneux, the prominent right-wing commentator doesn’t identify himself as a white supremacist but rather an “empiricist” who simply believes different ethnicities can be ranked by IQ and that it would be for the best if brown folks stopped relocating to Western countries. He’s also an open Trump cheerleader and alleged cult leader who aligns himself professionally with Pizzagaters, Proud Boys, Rebel Media personalities and other embarrassing white people. So let’s call a spade a spade, as a bigot might say if unaware the expression actually far predates the racial slur.
I was a freshman martial arts geek and aspiring actor in the early 90s when I took a stagefighting workshop he was teaching as part of a student production of Macbeth, in which he played the titular character. Molyneux was several years older and an imposing and charismatic presence even then. While “low testosterone” is now a favourite diss among MAGA types, the guy was already balding by his mid-twenties but nonetheless wore his remaining hair long, which made him look a bit like Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The class was actually a lot of fun. We learned some basic swordplay and how to fake kicking people in the crotch, slamming heads against floors and walls, and — of course — punching people in the face. Things can easily go wrong when choreographing fight scenes. Just ask Ryan Gosling, who got unexpectedly decked by noted Nazi-puncher Indiana Jones while shooting Bladerunner 2049.
But in my case the chance to make a painful mistake was literally a swing and a miss.
It has to be said that Molyneux, who previously studied at the National Theatre School of Canada, also made for a fine Macbeth. The blood-soaked Shakespearean tragedy tells the tale of a decent man whose ego and ambition leads to becoming a villain. It was perhaps a role he was born to play. (The production also featured Eureka star and current Maytag Repairman Colin Ferguson in the thankless role of Fleance, but I digress.) Hopefully the guy will come to see the error of his ways before Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and he meets his own Macduff.
Because promoting the inherent superiority of one race over another is, to steal a line from Macbeth himself, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Andrew Fleming 