If you watch Obama-era video clips of Opie and Anthony, you will notice Patrice O'Neal kept dancing around naming the Jews on air more and more before his death from diabetes. We could've had a timeline where Patrice O'Neal and Anthony Cumia start a podcast together after both ended up getting fired. Patrice O'Neal is way smarter than Kanye West. Maybe he would've called out Israel and APIAC instead of the Jews outright?
Does he still have those black friends? Patrice died a long time ago and it's hard to imagine that even the most craven and desperate "based black man" right wing grifter wouldn't drift away after Ant records himself creeping on teenagers or screaming "NIGGER!!!" repeatedly for 20 minutes because of some technical problem. He will party with black entertainers and fuck black hookers, but he tells the world every day that he looks down on them and thinks they're animals.
As I have said before, Patrice always had weird views on race. He was pretty openly a black nationalist, but at the same time he didn't really seem to mind other race nationalists existing. I often viewed him as just believing that racism was natural and that it was better to be open about it. It is why he got along with Anthony so well.
It is hard to judge him by todays standards because so much has changed since he died. I wouldn't be shocked if he went along with a lot of the BLM stuff, but I don't know if he would have stood firm on other issues as they crept up. As
@Tanner Glass mentioned, he didn't really care about having a huge career so he may have not been as concerned with towing certain lines or avoiding getting cancelled the way other guys in the associated sphere did when trying to pursue bigger portions of celebrity spotlight.
I’m going to use this opportunity once again to say how overrated Patrice is. Despite him talking about how much he understands women, he still ended up with an unattractive single mom. The bits were funny at times but he ended up in the same situation as every other low value guy. If he was a 400+ pound black man with a nonstop stream of Brazilian thots outside his door, I’d take his views a little more seriously. Banging prostitutes and shacking up with a single mom is something any schlub can do.
I also get that since he died early that people can claim he was about to blow up but that wasn’t necessarily true. The New York magazine write up was spot on that his big breakthrough moments didn’t really result in much and even Patrice admits he burned too many bridges. I get why people want to assume he was /)(\ close to making it big but that wasn’t reality.
I like Patrice but he would not be the next Chappelle if he was still around. He was a smart guy and was funny but those don’t mean much in the world of comedy.
It is funny because they used to occasionally make fun of him for this on the radio. I remember
after Opie's wedding they said how he came off like a lunatic because he was spouting off his usually views that he gave out on the radio, but without the radio environment he came off less laughable and more like a psycho. They also said how he talks a tough game in regards to women and relationships but that they all thought that the girl he was currently with was only using him for her own purposes and that he won't be able to get another one if she dumped him.
With Patrice and the rest of the ONA crew who have to remember to look at them as people to laugh at and nothing more. People often lose sight of the barrier between real life and entertainment. These guys aren't people you should be taking life advice from, they are people just trying to perform a funny radio show. They aren't high quality people in todays society and they certainly wouldn't have been ones decades ago when society was much healthier than it is now. Most of them were fuck ups in their lives and there is a reason for it.
Sure, you could gather some wisdom or insights from things that they talked about. But at the end of the day most of them should be viewed as the very lolcows we laugh at on this site: just people to gawk at and laugh for their antics.