HOWARD STERN DISAPPEARED YEARS AGO:

Howard didn’t stop being great because he went to satellite. He stopped being universal.

The second shift came with the money. And, look, good for him. A $500 million contract? That’s the American dream. But once you’re that rich, the money changes you. And more importantly, it changes the show.

Howard built his empire by fighting – Station managers, executives, politicians, rival hosts. He was the underdog, the guy being censored, fined, harassed, and punished for daring to speak his mind.

But once he became the highest-paid broadcaster in history, there was no more fight. He had won. He didn’t have a boss anymore. He was the boss. And with no one to battle, there was no more friction, and no more fire.

Suddenly, the guy who once ranted about bureaucracy, bad management and corporate nonsense was no longer punching up. He was the system. And his show, once anarchic and unpredictable, became safe. Soft. Comfortable.

Worse, it became celebrity-driven. Where once Howard roasted celebrities and cut through their fake personas, now he courted them. The guy who once ridiculed Hollywood phoniness was now sipping wine with Jimmy Kimmel and kissing up to Ellen DeGeneres.

Then Trump broke his brain. If the move to Sirius dulled Stern’s edge, Trump annihilated it.

The guy who made his name being the most politically incorrect man in media suddenly became a scold. A hall monitor. A voice of sanitized, elite-approved opinion. The man who used to mock everyone and everything was now in lockstep with the Manhattan elite he used to detest.

And it wasn’t just Trump he turned on, it was us. The listeners. The regular, blue-collar, lunch-pail Americans who rode with him for decades. He didn’t merely oppose Trump politically – fine, that’s his right – he condescended to and insulted the millions of people who supported him.

This 2022 Daily Mail headline neatly sums up the late stage career path of the Sirius-XM version of Stern: 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 — and admits he’s ‘been afraid of catching COVID.’

Related: Julie Burchill asks: Is Hollywood’s woke era ending? “When that wily old fox the tax-avoiding Mick Jagger allegedly said ‘My heart is Labour but my money is Conservative’ he was being honest in a way most pop stars (see the financial behaviour of U2) would never dare to, lest their fans turn on them. Entertainers follow the path they do because they want attention and they want to be rich. If they really cared about making things better for people, they’d have trained to become nurses or firefighters. Still, celebrity Democrats could learn a lesson from Republicans like [Dean] Cain and [Sydney] Sweeney, who don’t see the non-famous as Deplorables put on earth to be preached at.”