>Was he just tired of maintaining the charade of not being a shitheel >racist and anti-semite? And were people back in the day giving him a pass
>if he dropped little racist or anti-semitic comments? Hard to
>think that nobody saw this coming.

Without doing a deep dive on google, I think that he got a lot of passes on kind of screwy old-school sexism for a lot of his career. The antisemitism, I think, comes out a bit more due to the way the internet can shine a light on weird pockets of society in the 21st century. Catholics have been familiar with his brand (not that he practiced it, necessarily) of bonkers sedevacantism and somehow-related-strong-antisemitism for awhile now, but until recently you actually had to know somebody who believed it to realize it existed.

>Mel is one of the more intriguing stories in Hollywood and I
>feel like we never really hear anyone get into it.
>
>As for his legacy, his final act will determine that. He could
>easily spin himself back into Hollywood's graces and apologize
>for his past and people will dismiss the past decade or so as
>momentary madness. Or he could double down on his idiocy and
>people will see him as a kind of Hemingway figure, an outright
>horrible person who could tell spin a hell of a yarn.

Pretty much. I think the thing that offers some possibility here is the rather extravagant stories of him being decent on an personal level for some people. I think the story was that he put up the insurance money so Robert Downey Jr. could take the role in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And he's still like good pals with Jodie Foster? It's all quite weird.