Howard Stern to America: We Don’t Deserve Freedom?

One of America’s great iconoclasts over these last decades has been Howard Stern. He made his mark on talk radio like none other, courageously beholden to no force able to rein him in. No boss, no station, no media conglomerate, no government watchdog was ever able to curb his free-wheeling opinions, given unrestrainedly by the self-styled “King of All Media,” even though many powerful entities certainly tried. Fired by WNBC in New York, he went on to even bigger and better things, all the while fending off millions of dollars in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indecency fines levied against his broadcast licensees such as Infinity Broadcasting and Clear Channel. Stern never backed down though and wound up doing things his way in the end. His venue is now on Sirius XM and still ranked the 9^th most popular radio program in the USA.

When I went on his show three times at its height in the late 1990’s it was ranked #1, with perhaps twenty million listeners in sixty markets from coast to coast. In those days Mr. Stern was a one-man howling hurricane, a temblor on the air. He expressed any opinion, took on all comers, aired and explored a hundred hot-button topics that none other would touch, and deservedly etched his name into Americana. I, for example, on his air on January 20, 1998, advised his listeners that owing to a particular tectonic quirk making the Golden State more susceptible to conjoined lunar and solar tidal forces, it wouldn’t be too surprising should a large earthquake (magnitude 5.0 or greater) strike somewhere along the California coastline, between 4:45 and 7:55 PM on January 27. On that day and only 65 minutes outside the parameter, a 5.0 temblor did rupture a few miles off the coast of the California/Oregon border, accompanied by an extremely rare undersea volcanic eruption, all newsworthy enough to be written up on page three of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition, February 1, 1998.

Today though the Howard Stern Show has taken on a different air—and it’s one shockingly antithetical to the completely open exchange of ideas the venue was. Howard Stern, once the irrepressible maverick of US airwaves, has morphed into a parallel universe version show host, the transformed radio jockey now hardly the nonconformist. To the contrary, a sycophantic, servile, fawning lockstep has descended on the show, one of the truly great media fonts completely subverted by the mainstream it used to abhor. Now however, the mainstream is a faux-“progressive” hatred of America, the family, tradition, religion, culture, normalcy, law, order and patriotism. Above everything an insanely pervasive loathing of President Trump must underlie it all, even unto sabotaging one’s own radio show. And Stern’s obliging obsession with Donald Trump is best summed up in what he told Variety magazine in 2024: “I don’t hate Trump; I hate the people who vote for him. They’re stupid and I have no respect for them.” Of course, rabid comments like that—aimed at insulting half the country—don’t help in boosting listenership.

Howard Stern does though cling to one last vestige of individuality at least: he’s a Jewish-American who doesn’t overtly yearn for the destruction of Israel. But Democrat party commissars must surely be working to rectify that as well, and we shouldn’t be too surprised to see Mr. Stern sporting a keffiyeh in due course.

The collectivist, anti-West, Jew-hating one-worlders have nonetheless made such inroads with the Stern show that a few years ago during the Covid hysteria when schools were shut down, businesses destroyed, families forced apart, workers reluctant to submit to an untested new serum fired, entire industries shuttered, and nations sent lurching backward, Howard Stern came down on the side of the jackbooted forced vaccinators. “When are we going to stop putting up with idiots in this country,” he asked, “and say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated?  [Expletive] them. [Expletive] their freedom.”

Calling for his own American countrymen’s liberties to be trampled, only a few years later, is punctuated now with the horrifying details of Anthony Fauci’s journal on a US government server being made public. Quite a bit of what was said and done during that bizarre episode in dysfunctional history is seen now to be not just lies, exaggerations and patent falsehoods, but some of the biggest ever perpetrated upon massive populations. The Howard Stern Show owes its listeners, the audience it said didn’t deserve “freedom,” an apology. And it owes them some enlightenment too.

Indeed, just how are rugged individualists, free thinkers, and lone wolves like Howard Stern converted into hiveminded echo chambers for the mass-insanity that promotes 102 genders, defunded police, abolished prisons, blocked puberty, erased borders, an Israel that is wiped out from the river to the sea—and forced vaccinations? WNBC couldn’t accomplish it, nor could even the FCC. War lords’ secret police and death squads across the world should doubtlessly be very interested as well in all the tactics and strategies.

But Americans told plainly to their faces that they don’t merit their freedoms deserve an explanation as well.