I think the real lesson of this thread is that Opie wasn't just a board operator on that show, he was the tard wrangler and although we didn't know it then; Anthony was the tard he was wrangling.
He basically saved Ant from himself for like 15 years, which now that we know how Anthony truly is we can appreciate how large of a feat that was. Opie got a pretty large lolcow to clean up his act, get a job and turn that job into a largely successful career.
Definitely and like a lot of Opie's work in hindsight...it was more subtle and difficult than it sounded. Opie could lead him off a racist tangent if it came up in the moment but Anthony was very hard to get a grasp on if he was determined to get into race talk. One of the worst ones was the eugenics rant.
You can just feel Opie throw his hands up and check out until he can sic the callers on him to try to pull him back. Then, Opie flat out questions Anthony about his obsessive focus on black people and Ant dodges the question by bringing up another video he watched. When Jim makes a point that could lead off the eugenics talk, Opie jumps in to agree with it and continuously tries to move it in that direction. When one of the callers flat out confronts Anthony, he starts getting upset and talking as if he's an esteemed scientist presenting evidence as opposed to a high school dropout who was rescued from a life at Apollo Air Conditioning by a longtime radio host. Opie had his work cut out for him. What was one of the first things Anthony did after being fired for tweets his employers deemed racist and violent? He went on a white nationalist radio show and ranted about how diversity wasn't needed at NASA.
The hosts seem shocked that he agreed to be a guest on their show and one even flat out states that being there is likely going to make his problems after getting fired even worse. At the time, people like Norton were making excuses for Ant doing the show like maybe he didn't know what type of show it was or his appearance was some kind of clever statement about how Sirius XM mishandled his firing. But, nope...he wasn't unaware or clever. He knew exactly what kind of show he was going on and told the hosts he'd love to hang out with them over beers since they were so on the same page about race. Opie was completely right to not fight for this idiot's job.