When it comes to fighting a woman, a man can’t win, even if he actually wins. If she’s black and he’s white, you have even more of a foregone conclusion. Make him a celebrity, and you might as well nail his career-coffin shut. It doesn’t matter why the fight happened, whether she started it, and even less if she was the one screaming racial epithets throughout. This is the climate we’re living in, one that makes no allowances for the circumstances that comprise individual incidents; if you’re below someone on the oppression food chain as defined by the progressive left, you’ve lost the fight before it’s even started. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a fight. You can just stand there and get assaulted, and you’ll still come out the villain.

I could write an entire article on the tweets being directed at Anthony Cumia in the wake of his firing from Sirius XM, particularly those expressing the sentiment of “ha ha! You got beat up by a girl!” and the quandary they present—of whether it’s better to be called a pussy or a woman-beater—but there’s so much ripe hypocrisy on display within the leftist narrative here that I’d be wasting a greater opportunity in doing so. For those who don’t know, Opie & Anthony is (was) a popular radio show broadcasting from New York City, with Anthony Cumia being one-half of the eponymous duo that has worked together since 1995. Cumia is a white man (he’s genuinely white, not media white, AKA “Zimmerman white”) who was allegedly assaulted by a black woman late on Tuesday night for taking her picture during a visit to Times Square, during which time he was also photographing buildings, crowds, and the various eccentrics that consort there.

According to Cumia, she took exception to his photographing her, so she walked up and started punching him. He admitted on Twitter to having called her a nigger during the fracas (the slur was replaced with a grawlix, but it’s safe to assume given the number of characters), though he has noted that he did not strike her back because he didn’t want to hit a woman, and he didn’t involve the police because he didn’t want to waste their time. He followed his original tweet with a series of expletive-laden micro rants directed at his attacker, calling her a “savage” and a “cunt pig animal” before addressing the level of violence in the black community. Predictably, progressive outposts such as Gawker and the New York Post have decided that he is the villain and not the victim here, despite the fact that he was the one who was physically attacked.

I’ve written before about the issue I take with being filmed and photographed without my permission, as well as the role of racial epithets during physical confrontations. I’ve actually used violence to get a camera out of my face in the past, and so it’s hard for me to defend somebody’s right to take pictures in public, but the fact is that I don’t need to. Public photography is totally legal, while assault isn’t—besides which, the guy I hit was being an antagonistic douchenozzle and going out of his way to upset me, whereas the woman who assaulted Anthony Cumia (if he is to be believed) did so in an explosive fashion without any attempts to resolve the situation amicably. The fact that people are taking exception not to the assault itself, but to his use of the word “nigger” while being physically assaulted, is profoundly indicative of where we are as a society today.

It echoes the national lynch mob that formed to seek vengeance for Trayvon Martin after his death, regardless of the killing’s self-defense component that later was proved in court. In today’s world, you need to watch what you say while you’re getting beaten up. Watch whom you get assaulted by, too; the fact that Cumia was accosted by five black people in the aftermath of his being attacked demonstrates the notion that the script is irrelevant, and that it’s what the cast looks like that determines the audience response. For all of the modern leftist caterwauling about “victim blaming”—i.e., telling women on the receiving end of violence how they should react to their abuse—progressives seem all too ready to tell white men how they should behave while getting the shit beaten out of them. Why anybody should have to vet their linguistic impulses while having blows rained down upon them is beyond me. If I saw a Chinese guy getting stomped by seven white dudes on a crowded bus, I would not only forgive him for calling them crackers, I would expect him to do so. You’re being punched, for crying out loud. Blow a little steam off.

Of course, the media backlash stems not only from his self-admitted utterance of a racial slur in the heat of the moment, but from his following tweets comparing his assailant to livestock, along with the fact that he dared to note the statistically disproportionate amount of violence in the black community.

Naturally, various commentators—from professional journalists to angry teenagers on Twitter—have deliberately misquoted and distorted his words to suit their version of events. Not that you’d think they’d need to—he has, after all, confessed to using words such as “nigger” in moments of anger before on national radio, and it is this brazen attitude that makes him not only a prime candidate for public progressive flagellation, but an ideal villain within their narrative, one who will likely never apologize for his transgressions and who can therefore never be redeemed. The fact that his own show had an “apology clock” for such events makes this all so ironic that I’m half-inclined to suspect that the woman who punched him was a government plant. I look forward to his never saying sorry. We’ve lost a great radio show but have gained a blow against political correctness, one that will resonate long after Anthony’s bruises heal.