Twitter ‘historian’ Mike Stuchbery, a minor e-celebrity in the small world of online social justice warriors, is celebrating Breitbart London editor-in-chief Raheem Kassam’s suspension from the microblogging site.
Stuchbery, who has tweeted at the No Go Zones author over fifty times beginning in June 2017, hailed the suspension following a campaign of sustained harassment and flagging by left-liberal trolls, who purported to be acting in defence of blogger Snigdha Nag.
Stuchbery had served as something of a cheerleader for the group, whose most prominent actor was lawyer Sarah Wait, who referred to Kassam as “shit“, “filth“, and “inferior” — without sanction, apparently — but complained to Twitter Support and company boss Jack Dorsey when he responded in kind and dismissed her threats of legal action as “vexatious”.
“Today, is a good day” Stuchbery tweeted. “[Raheem Kassam] has been suspended for seven days.”
He added: “I wonder if I could take the prick to the cleaners for all the lies he’s told about me? Mmm, hate-money…”
Stuchbery did not elaborate on what “lies” had been told about him while alluding to possibly attempting to profit from vexatious legal claims. He is known to routinely beg his Twitter followers for cash.
Despite his jubilation, however, all the suspension has achieved so far is a surge in followers for Kassam’s account.
Stuchbery, a former supply teacher, achieved two minutes of e-fame with a blog post titled ‘I’m Banning Banter!’ in 2014.
The Australian said “banter” was “one of the things I’ve had a real time adjusting to in Britain,” asserting that it “seems to be a catch-all term for any sort of off-colour or inappropriate behaviour.”
He was subsequently derided in several national media outlets as embodying the particularly thin-skinned and humourless attitude which has come to typify much of the modern left. He was told his services were “no longer required” shortly afterwards, and complained of having been “forced out”.
It was not the first time Stuchbery had struggled to hold on to employment, having found himself among just 18 per cent of Australian teachers on fixed-term contracts in the state of Victoria who were not retained in 2010/11.
In 2016 he left the teaching profession altogether, suffering from anxiety and panic attacks which he later described as “headaches made of sad”.
Fast approaching 40, the ex-teacher suddenly achieved something of a career resurgence, posting “epic” takedowns of popular right-leaning figures in lengthy Twitter threads. These proved to be a gift to lazy journalists, who found they could turn them into low-effort online “articles” by simply copying them out and adding a little explanatory text.
The first of these “epic” takedowns was aimed at YouTube polemicist Paul Joseph Watson, who had taken issue with the BBC portraying a black centurion and his mixed race household as a “typical family” in Roman Britain, asserting that the country had not been “ethnically diverse” in ancient times.
Stuchbery launched a foul-mouthed rant which was supposed to demonstrate that Roman Britain was, in fact, ethnically diverse, referencing foreign legions posted there and a handful of skeletons which likely belonged to Romans of North African descent and slaves.
The mainstream media lapped it up, although Stuchbery’s thesis was somewhat questionable; akin to claiming that Japan — close to 99 per cent ethnically Japanese — is “ethnically diverse” based on the relatively small number of American soldiers based there.
Subsequent Twitter postings suggested Stuchbery’s knowledge of Roman Britain was indeed fairly superficial.
For example, he shared an Independent article claiming it provided “evidence of sub-saharan [sic] African women living at part [sic] of York’s rich Roman elite”, when it referred only to mixed race North African women — who may well have been light-haired and light-skinned, given historical descriptions of native Berbers before North Africa was conquered by the Arabs.
(Stuchbery did not take the time to defend the BBC’s more obviously ahistorical portrayals of Iron Age Britons as black, or of black emirs in Middle Eastern armour being among the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede.)
Stuchbery’s next “epic” takedown was aimed at Ian Miles Cheong, after the journalist pointed out that the Nazi Party, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was socialist.
“OK, dickhead, I did this politely to someone else earlier, but now I’m going to rinse you. Prepare,” he boasted — before claiming at length that fascism and socialism could not possibly be related, despite byzantine regulation of agriculture, industry, and labour, nationalisations, and the confiscation of profits, private arms, and private property being common to both.
This thread attracted the same gaggle of opportunist scribblers as the Watson thread, recycling it under headlines such as ‘A White Supremacist Writer Just Said Nazis Were Socialists And Got Owned By A Historian’.
(Cheong is a Malaysia-based journalist of East Asian extraction.)
Stuchbery’s star may be fading, however, with his last success as a free content creator for the mainstream media appearing to be this spirited defence of the masked black bloc thugs of Antifa, after Watson — a favourite foil — said British writer George Orwell would “roll in his grave” at their antics.
Stuchbery argued Orwell was “as ‘Antifa’ as it gets”, referencing the former Indian Imperial Police officer’s experience fighting for the POUM during the Spanish Civil War, and citing his famous account of his experiences in it, Homage to Catalonia.
Stuchbery may not have read the book in full, however, having failed to mention how Orwell was forced to flee Spain after Leftist ideologues — the equivalent of today’s Antifa — decided that Orwell was himself a fascist, as his political beliefs were not sufficiently in line with theirs.
Orwell later famously observed that, “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless”, and criticised “the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction” — like Antifa.
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