Antisemitic and racist shock jock is back on the radio, 11 years after being fired for tirade
Anthony Cumia, the former longtime host of Opie & Anthony, has joked about lynching and the Holocaust and made offensive comments about Jews on X
Anthony Cumia hosting The Opie & Anthony Show at SiriusXM Studios in 2012 in New York City. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld March 12, 2025
A conservative radio host who was fired a decade ago for calling a Black woman an “animal” and has since shared a host of racist and antisemitic content on social media has a new show on New York’s WABC that is available for other stations to run.
The host, Anthony Cumia, has posted Holocaust jokes online and cozied up to white supremacists including Nick Fuentes in the years since SiriusXM fired him as longtime co-host of Opie and Anthony, a shock-jock show that ran into problems over sexual content and hate speech. The Anthony Cumia Show debuted Sunday from 8 to 10 p.m. and, according to a news release from the WABC’s parent company, Red Apple Audio Networks, “sparked a flurry of inquiries about syndication.”
Neither Cumia nor the company responded to inquiries about the new show on Wednesday.
Chad Lopez, president of Red Apple, said in a statement earlier this week that “radio clearly wants Anthony Cumia” and that other stations could pick up the show as soon as this coming Sunday.
Cumia, who has been hosting an eponymous podcast since 2014 said in the same news release: “I missed radio, and I am thrilled at the interest from radio stations nationwide. Radio is a great way to engage with the audience.”
Cumia, 63, got his start after entering a song parody contest at a Long Island radio station 31 years ago, and made problematic remarks about Jews as recently as a few months ago.
In October, he endorsed a post on X that said “the Jewish elite” were “facilitating, propagandizing, and financing mass immigration into all the white European countries.”
Around the same time, he also shared a series of antisemitic quotes from President Richard Nixon, including that “most Jews are disloyal,” and said: “Wow, it’s interesting when someone is able to point them out without experiencing any consequence.”
And he re-shared a caricature of a Jewish man holding a leash attached to the neck of a Black man depicted as a dog. “Their violent pets do their bidding,” it read.
Cumia called to ‘stop placating the Jews and the n—–s’
During his break from the airwaves Cumia posted photos of himself with Jared Taylor, the white supremacist editor of an online magazine, and Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and one of the nation’s most prominent white nationalists.
But two years ago, he posted a clip of a livestream on Youtube where he complained about an online gaming platform that Fuentes was trying to create. In that video, Cumia repeatedly called Fuentes the n-word and then said, “Nick, stop placating the Jews and the n— and fix your shit,” using an abbreviated form of the n-word.
In June 2024, Cumia wrote to Fuentes on X: “Hey! Leave the blacks to me, Nick. You have your hands full with the jews.”
After the White House Hanukkah celebration in December, Cumia sardonically asked online whether the wooden menorah used was built from the doors of a gas chamber. Six months earlier, responding to a photo of then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — the nation’s most prominent Jewish elected official — at a barbecue grill, replied: “Rumor has it 6,000,000 burgers were cooked that day,” Cumia said.
And when an X user asked followers to share a movie where they wanted the villain to win, Cumia suggested Downfall, a film about the final days of Adolf Hitler.
Twitter suspended Cumia’s account in 2017, and permanently banned him from the platform in 2021. But was allowed to return after the website was purchased by Elon Musk the following year.
After Musk was accused of antisemitism in 2023 for endorsing a social media post stating that Jews were promoting “hatred against whites,” Cumia replied: “Why is absolutely ANY criticism of Jews deemed ‘antisemitic’?”
He has also posted a number of offensive posts about Black people, including one celebrating lynching. Posing under a large tree in South Carolina, Cumia wrote: “I look at every old tree branch and wonder if any of them ‘helped out’ with the cause back in the old days.”
History of controversies
Cumia met Gregg Hughes, a radio host known as Opie, in 1994, when he entered a song parody contest about O.J. Simpson. They launched Opie and Anthony together the next year. That show was based in Boston but distributed on 17 stations across the country, and had its share of controversies. It was canceled briefly in 2004 after a segment purporting to feature a couple having sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
But XM Satellite Radio resurrected the show later that year and it ran for another decade before Cumia was fired after claiming that he was punched by a Black woman in Times Square, and going on a racist tirade on Twitter referring to another Black person as a “savage” and writing that “they aren’t people.”
Hughes, Cumia’s former co-host, said during a livestream after Red Apple announced The Anthony Cumia Show that Cumia was a “terrible person” who would squelch his hate speech for WABC.
“‘Oh you need me to tamp down my race stuff? No problem I’ll do that,’” Hughes said, imitating Cumia. “He’s a guy who always played to the room.”
He added: “Bad people win all the time.”
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