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Howard Stern interviews Kamala Harris on Tuesday, October 8. YouTube screenshot

It’s always sad to see someone become everything they once hated, especially if they hated all the right things.

As hard as it might be to believe, there was a fertile patch of time about thirty to forty years ago when the mere mention of radio “shock jock” Howard Stern’s name sent waves of revulsion among the celebrity class. Stern was rated a little better than Hitler; at best, he was on par with cockroaches. The hatred he used to inspire was so unhinged, one might call it Stern Derangement Syndrome.

It’s almost identical to how the celebrity class has been acting toward Donald Trump since he first declared he was running for president back in 2015.

The first time I heard of Stern, I was driving my girlfriend northward on the chemical-laden New Jersey Turnpike from Philadelphia to Newark Airport sometime in 1984. It was late in the afternoon, and as Stern’s distinctively deep wisenheimer voice floated out of the car radio as we began to pick up New York station WNBC, my girlfriend said something along the lines of, “Oh, not this guy—he’s a disgusting pig.” Stern was casting aspersions about people living in the Bronx projects as a female cohost whom I later determined to be Stern’s lifelong chuckle-monkey Robin Quivers tittered at his every utterance.

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As a naive and vastly uninformed college liberal who didn’t know any better, I also thought Stern was disgusting—far more objectionable than those benighted and oppressed saints in the Bronx projects I’d learned about in sociology class.

About a year later, after I’d moved to the New York metro area and Stern was universally loathed by everyone except his fans, I read an essay in the Village Voice by Richard Goldstein titled “Let the Ass Bray: One Cheer for Howard Stern.” Goldstein was giving Stern, an acknowledged ethnic cohort, a pass for his “sexual candor” and his “free speech” persecution for “obscenity.” This was back when the left didn’t completely control speech. But this was the same Richard Goldstein who’d written in 1973:

I can never encounter a white Southerner without feeling a murderousness pass between us. As though, whatever his personal instincts, his ethnic history predisposes him to regard castration and rape as his prerogatives.

I’m not sure if others are like this, but whenever I’ve heard unrelentingly bad hype about something (or someone), but then a lone voice or two in the wilderness whisper that there’s something redeeming about it (or them), I get intrigued and will give that thing (or person) a fair hearing.

Usually, I become a convert.

It happened with to me with punk rock at some point in the late 1970s. At first, mainstream media treated it like a pestilence and the heavy-metal kids at school would beat you up if you dared suggest that this music of freaks and outcasts had merit. But then when I read in CREEM magazine that some punk band from England called The Clash had a power reminiscent of the early Who, I gave ’em a listen and was hooked…for a couple years. But then political sanctimony and an ever-expanding rulebook crept into punk rock and ruined it forever.

Sometime in the summer of 1987, when Stern was courting increasingly negative controversy, I read columnist Pablo Guzman in the New York Post write something along the lines of, “Well, I gotta admit—despite everything that people say about him, Howard can be funny from time to time.”

One morning in 1987 before catching the Q Train from Brighton Beach for the tedious and crowded hourlong ride to my typesetting job in Midtown Manhattan, I tuned my Sony Walkman in to Stern’s morning show on WXRK. I became a fan immediately, and it had nothing to do with him being “vulgar” or “offensive.” Almost without exception, his scripted comedy bits were dumb and amateurish.

What impressed me were his predatory instincts as an interviewer, his disdain for shallow and hypocritical celebrities, and his ruthless competitive instincts toward other radio hosts. He could find someone’s psychological weakness and drill inside their skull like a killer worm boring its way inside an apple. His targets were helpless before his powers of interrogation, and they either wound up laughing along with Stern and his crew, or they’d stomp off in anger and look even worse. It was his greatest talent.

I moved to Los Angeles late in 1987 and sorely missed his show until Stern finally went on FM morning radio in 1991. As he’d done previously with other rivals, he set his sights on LA’s reigning morning-radio shock-jock champs, a pair of insipid, mullet-headed goobers named Mark and Brian.

Late in 1991, Earvin “Magic” Johnson—who led the Los Angeles Lakers to five NBA Championships in the 1980s and was the closest thing that city had to a sacred cow—shocked the world when he revealed he’d tested positive for HIV.

At some point shortly thereafter—it might have been when he finally knocked Mark and Brian off their #1 perch in LA, then flew out to conduct a sadistically celebratory “funeral” for the vanquished duo, Stern said something at a press conference about how he didn’t feel bad for Magic Johnson, because by that point everyone knew how AIDS was acquired and Magic’s problem was that he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

It was vintage Stern. It was his version of “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” He articulated what a lot of people thought but were too timid to say out loud.

The same process that happened to me with punk rock and Howard Stern—bad hype, then a hint that the bad hype is misguided—happened to me with “racism” much later. You’re all aware of how bad the hype is, and has been, about racism. But then you hear one or two statistics undermine the narrative, or you experience some real-life adversity that runs counter to everything they preach about “racism,” and you become an avid convert—a fanatic, even.

Ironically, one of the people who helped me take a second look at all the bad hype about “racism” was Howard Stern. When he and Robin were going over the news about David Duke’s presidential run in 1992, Robin read a few of Duke’s policy positions, and Howard said with a laugh and no discernible irony that some of it…he had to admit…sort of made sense.

But over the years, Howard Stern seemed to curdle under fame’s withering heat lamp. When he finally became embraced by the same celebs he used to lampoon, maybe he realized that all along that his “bite” was merely spite.

Stern started going to a therapist in 2001 while divorcing his wife Alison. Although therapy somehow made him “evolve” and “become a man,” he lost everything that was once compelling about him.

One by one, whatever teeth he once had began falling out, leaving only moist gums. He finally left FM radio in 2004 and signed a massive deal with Sirius XM Radio, which ostensibly gave him the freedom to utter profanities without FCC fines, but what was the point? By then, he had all the “edge” of a matzoh ball.

The man who made his bones attacking the vanity and superciliousness of the rich and famous eventually turned his show into a safe hugbox where those same vapid and insufferable notables could receive a non-intrusive tongue bath.

Howard Stern and Donald Trump used to be such good friends that they attended one another’s weddings. Stern was at the Manhattan gala when Trump wed Marla Maples in 1993. Fifteen years later, Trump was there <a target="_blank" href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-