On Friday night’s “Red Eye” on the Fox News Channel, Anthony Cumia, formerly of SiriusXM’s “Opie & Anthony” radio show reflected on dismissal from SiriusXM after a series of tweets deemed to be offensive of the star reacting to his allegations of being assaulted in Time Square in New York City earlier this month.
Co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Andy Levy challenged Cumia on the claim the tweets weren’t racist and that perhaps the situation could have been handled better.
Partial transcript as follows:
CUMIA: If you read those, honestly people picked it apart. It wasn’t racist.
LEVY: How is it not racist? How can you say that?
CUMIA: I was talking about people that instantly go to violence. I walked down the street. She called me “a white mother f-er” and started punching me in the face. I addressed her and other people that act like that.
LEVY: But that’s not how your tweets read. You kept saying “they.”
CUMIA: Animals, “they” — the people that would assault you.
LEVY: That’s not how it read. It read like —
CUMIA: Sorry, I’m no hemming way.
LEVY: But, I think that gets to Greg’s point.
GUTFELD: Mariel Hemmingway? A tremendous actress. No, but basically, OK — let me ask you this. Who was the word savages and animals directed at because the general consensus is you were saying all blacks.
CUMIA: No, that’s the misconception. I was saying people that act like this, and I address that there is a huge violence problem in the black community.
GUTFELD: Often by the way you address that almost obsessively.
CUMIA: Look, let me tell you something. It has been addressed by pastors, reverends, church groups There’s marches, rallies, all kinds of things. We must silence the violence and save the children, tell them not to act with violence. You could go through the news clip U.S. and can come up with tons of these. But the second I addressed it and said there is indeed a violence problem I am the bad guy that just said all blacks are violent. I didn’t say that. I said there was a problem.
LEVY: The problem is you said that right around the same tweet where you said they are savages.
CUMIA: Should I have taken a breath?
Later in the segment, Cumia was asked if he would apologize if offered his job back, to which Cumia decline.
“I will never apologize for this,” he replied. “I will never apologize. Even if they came back and said will you? I didn’t do anything wrong. This is completely — this is exactly who I am. I am not seen going to deny it. I go off on tears like this. I curse and I say horrific things about people who piss me off and that’s exactly what i did. Why am I going to apologize and say I am different or I changed? I haven’t. It would be a phony bogus apology. If it happened again I would do the same thing.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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