ANALYSIS: TRUE. Howard’s end: Shock jock Stern has lost his sting — and his mojo.

“The Howard Stern Show,” long in decline, is dead.

In March 2020, when New York City officially went into lockdown, Stern fled to his basement in the Hamptons. Over one year later and now vaccinated, as he first admitted on-air Monday — back from yet another vacation — Stern still has no intention of ever returning to his Midtown studio, his luxury Upper West Side apartment, or any semblance of pre-pandemic life.

The Howard Stern who stayed on air as planes flew into the World Trade Center is unrecognizable.

“Things will never get back to normal,” he declared just two weeks ago. “I do not believe the pandemic will ever be over.”

For a once-constant listener like me, this is heretical, especially here in New York City, where every single neighborhood is struggling to survive. Also, Howard: This pandemic will end, even though you, a germophobic recluse, clearly wish it would not.

But such sentiments have defined Stern’s show and attitude this past year: pessimism, anger, and a worldview that shrinks ever inward, limited in size and scope to The Basement — the literal and metaphorical dwelling place of this once-great show. . . .

Stern long ago abandoned his best attribute, going after famous hypocrites. Hilaria Baldwin, for example, pretending for years to be from Spain — when really she’s from Boston — and bagging a movie star would once have been Stern show fodder for days.

But Hilaria barely rates a mention. Why? Can’t piss off Howard’s good pal Alec in the Hamptons. Howard’s in with the cool kids — all he ever really wanted, despite claims to the contrary.

Almost every institution in America, even the Howard Stern Show, has been undermined by its owners’ desire for chumminess with the elites. Who aren’t even elite.