GERMAPHOBE HOWARD STERN LEAVES HIS ‘APOCALYPSE BUNKER’ FOR FIRST TIME IN TWO YEARS FOR A-LIST DINNER WITH JENNIFER ANISTON, JIMMY KIMMEL AND JON HAMM; admits he’s ‘been afraid of catching COVID:’

Stern left his house for the first time in two years to dine with other A-listers, including Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, despite admitting it was ‘too much’ for the germaphobe.

Stern, 68, finally left his $20million ‘apocalypse bunker’ in Southampton to enjoy an Israeli meal at Laser Wolf in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Friday night after he and his wife Beth were invited out by late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, 54.

‘I really had an exhausting weekend, emotionally, physically,’ Stern said on his radio show on Monday. ‘For the first time in two years I ventured out of the house. It was too much for me. It was too much. I haven’t been out in two years.’

Despite being in great company – rubbing elbows with the likes of Justin Theroux and Jon Hamm – the radio host said he was ‘in a panic’ the whole time.

‘I said to my wife: “I don’t want to go, I’m in a panic, I don’t want to get COVID.”

‘I know our president has told us the pandemic is over and everyone is walking around without masks…I still just don’t want to get COVID.’

Flashback: What Happened to Howard Stern?

Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.

It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”

The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.

As Stephen Kruiser wrote at the start of year: Howard Stern Is Now Your Grandmother. “I wasn’t a radio guy but there was a time in the early ’90s when I set my alarm to listen to Howard Stern. He was that good. He was crass. He was insightful. Most importantly — for me — he was funny. He was also beyond edgy. Now he’s a bitchy, housecoat-wearing granny.”