patrick.net

From the shock jock who stood up for free speech, law and order, and great looking babes. From Breast Feed The World to Saving Latin Asses.

Really great story about how Stern used to be the Loudmouthed Hero of the New York Working Man-Commuter, railing against stuck up assholes, bad roads, and Dinkins style Liberal Criminal Coddling. Used. Before he married a hot model and got a slot on America's Got Talent.

By the 2010s, he dumps long time pals Trump, Gottfried, and Dee Snider. His third biography, mostly centered around his more tame era of the past decade, makes the outrageous claim that the guy who ran for Libertarian Governor of NY in 1994, who mocked Dinkins daily and lauded Koch and Guiliani, “As my listeners know, I don’t like talking about my political beliefs on the air.”

He's even gone so far as to sanitize his old classic Broadcasts.

He disowns his former “hard-ass pose,” which he diagnoses as having “provided an almost impenetrable shell that protected me from feeling need.” He even asks readers to do him a favor and throw out their copies of his first two books. In promotional interviews for Howard Stern Comes Again—the incredible number of which seemed to belie his claim that he’d found humility—he repeated this spiel. He once squeezed laughs out of his narcissism; his narcissism now takes the form of tiresome bragging about having purportedly surmounted it.

In any event, this latest round of interviews made for a sad spectacle. A great entertainer was disowning the best part of his oeuvre; a former rebel leader was bowing to the king to win favor at court; a master at skewering high-level hypocrisy had gone over to the other side. “You’ve gone from filth merchant to talk of the town,” Jimmy Kimmel told him in October. Stern’s opening commentaries on the interviews in his new book seem designed to make old fans wince: he considers Madonna “a kindred spirit,” calls Stephen Colbert “very evolved and emotionally connected,” praises Rosie O’Donnell for her “wisdom and graciousness,” applauds Lena Dunham for her “wisdom” and “understanding,” and touts Gwyneth Paltrow’s “humanity.” When Amy Schumer recalls the time her boyfriend touched her without explicit permission and hesitates to call it rape, Stern insists that it was, and concludes by saying, “I want to apologize for all men.” He even manages to work in a sympathetic word for Christine Blasey Ford. And the references to his own “personal growth” keep on coming. After a while, he sounds like someone who’s joined a cult.

We can remember him at his peak, at least.

https://www.city-journal.org/howard-stern#.XhTDd6je_Ks.twitter