Last night, Anthony Cumia, host of SirusXM's The Opie & Show, went on an angry, bitter, violent, racist rant on Twitter for hours. At one point he literally said about African Americans: "They are not people." But anybody who is at all familiar with Cumia wasn't the least bit surprised by his vitriol.
Cumia claims to have been assaulted by a black woman in Times Square last night. He says he was taking photos and the woman objected to being in the frame. She allegedly punched him, although when pressed by his Twitter followers, he said he "never felt [his] life was in imminent danger" and didn't see a reason to "escalate the situation" by calling the police.
He did, however, call the woman a "fucking cunt" and later took to Twitter to call black people "animals" and "savages" who "prey on white people" and are inherently violent. He also repeatedly discussed how "lucky" she was that he didn't shoot her with the gun he was carrying and added that he hopes she gets killed or that "a home boy beats her to death."
But this isn't anything out of the ordinary for Cumia. He regularly makes jokes at the expense of black people on his SiriusXM show and his personal podcast. It's been going on for years, but the kind of people who would typically be offended by the things Cumia says about race aren't willing to wade through hours of his radio show everyday. He's been in a unique position to speak so egregiously on racial issues without being particularly challenged or taken to task by the opposition or his parent company.
Here's just a small taste of what he's said in recent years:
In an otherwise innocuous—and frankly, boring—discussion about a trip to the dentist, Cumia said:
"Does race matter to you at the doctors? It does to me. When I look for a doctor or a dentist, I look and I try to figure out the name and see if the name is somebody who might be my own race. I just trust my own race more."
In a more direct discussion about race relations he said:
"The press will coddle black people. It's unbelievable the extent the press will go to to try not to offend and try this inclusion."
"The fucked up thing is people were getting upset that so many black people were being portrayed as criminals on the news. That's it. And sorry, there's a large percentage—it's disproportionate to the population of this country of black people committing crimes."
"Do you understand that people have said that black people can't be racist because to be racist you need a power base in order to oppress people? You've got it, black people! You have the power base. You have the ability with that R-word to fucking ruin people's lives. Not mine. Haha."
"Most of the blacks here in the United States have less of an attachment to slavery than I have to fucking Italy."
"They hear slavery and racism and use it as an excuse to take the path of least resistance which is selling drugs and fucking rolling people for money."
There have been several occasions where he's berated black fans of his show when they've called in to disagree with his views. In one instance he screamed at a caller:
"You're not gonna get 100% of whitey to kiss your fucking ass with their guilt. Fuck you and fuck your mother! I'm a text book guy. I've been a text book guy my whole life. I use facts!"
Cumia is not exactly a "text book guy" in the sense that he reads text books. He is a high school dropout. He could be considered a text book racist, though. He often blames the financial issues of the country on black people in the prison system. He's also repeatedly expressed how unfair things are for white men.
"I have a problem with the fact that white people can't address black issues in this country."
It goes on…
and on…
and on.
(The girl in the above video with Cumia is his teenage girlfriend Ileana Kennedy, who goes by the pseudonym Jane Anselmo when she writes stuff like how it's harder to be a man than a woman. A fan of Cumia's radio show, she began dating him when she turned 17. Her father is Jim Kennedy who served in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary to President Clinton. He was also head of communications for the White House Counsel's office, Vice President Al Gore, Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman and the Clinton Foundation. He is currently Chief Communications Officer for News Corp.)
Cumia's latest Twitter rant can be found below. SiriusXM did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
