Howard Stern’s remaining audience largely consists of boomers who mistakenly remember a time in which Howard Stern was cool, and Gen Xers who started listening because the boomers did.

While it’s obvious that Stern’s best days are behind him, he’ll sometimes fire off his mouth in an attempt to stay relevant. I’d have no idea what he had to say if it weren’t passed along by new media, which is pretty sad considering his history of proclaiming himself as “King of All Media”. That’s a ballsy thing to proclaim one’s self, but he didn’t use any of that to make the following statement about those who refused the COVID vaccine by reason of their personal freedom:

“Fuck them. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live. I want to get out of the house. I want to go next door and play chess. I want to go take some pictures.”

Howard Stern

If Howard wants so badly to do those things, he can just do them. That’s what those who appreciate their freedoms have been doing with those very freedoms. If Howard himself has been vaccinated, he’d face no risk of getting COVID, if the vaccine were as effective as other vaccines. And if he weren’t (by reason of medical exemption), he’d be taking a risk intrinsic to living life, comparable to catching the flu.

That’s how it goes, sometimes, you don’t have the same kind of health that someone else has, and that makes your choice of activities more narrow than theirs. Fact of life.

Howard, who once upon a time was marketed under the pretense of being shocking and anti-establishment, is now taking a pro-establishment position with no risk of retaliation on the part of advertisers. And over what? He wants everyone else in the world around him to get a vaccine they might not even want, just so he’ll feel safer going outside and doing stuff.

And we’re supposed for feel bad for him after he spent the better part of his life as a multi-millionaire who made bank by contributing nothing to society except firing off his mouth on the radio, and making a movie that no one cares about.

Not everyone can understand why anyone would watch videos on YouTube about people playing video games or eating food, when people can just do these things themselves. I wonder how many of these same people listen to a radio show about a rich man who goes to night clubs and talks about seeing anatomical features that half of all people have?

Another point one can make about Stern is that he talks as though he thinks we’re still consuming the same old news stories that were going around at the early part of the pandemic:

“The other thing I hate is that all these people with COVID who won’t get vaccinated are in the hospitals clogging it up.”

Howard Stern

Remember back when they opened stadiums up with hospital beds, to prepare to treat an expected influx of patients? Remember when they closed those makeshift treatment centers down because, as it turns out, they didn’t need them? What hospitals is he going to that he couldn’t get in because of all the COVID patients?

What’s more, Howard is blowing his stack, saying that people who refused the vaccine should be denied medical care, overlooking the fact that people can refuse the vaccine for some compelling reasons, such as the suspicion that it hasn’t been sufficiently tested before being released to market, or due to concerns over spike proteins.

It’s easy to see past all the bluster and realize that the real reason why Howard is so salty is because we’re going to be the ones writing the history books, by reason of the fact that we’re the ones going out and living life and procreating.

What’s really sad about this is that we lived to see the day that Howard used his platform to proclaim the following:

“Fuck their freedom.”

Howard Stern, whose entire career is owed to free expression and the private ownership of the means of production, is apparently selective when it comes to what freedoms are applied, and how.

Because Howard Stern (and leftism in general) is out of touch with reality, they lack the cognition that freedom is not granted by human government, it’s axiomatic in a similar sense to natural law. Everyone has a right to their own sincere convictions. Everyone, when attacked, has a right to defend themselves. Everyone has a right to their own property, without it being unjustly or unfairly extracted. If any humanly devised system ignores these axiomatic fundamental rights, they still exist, and the system itself is in the wrong. Whether you’re a celebrity, radio personality, or king, if you ignore or act contrary to these rights, you are wrong.

But no one has a right to a life that’s free from risk. Risk, including the risk of getting sick, or getting attacked by an animal, or ending up impaled on something, is an intrinsic element of the reality that we live in. Attempts to alleviate those risks are usually reasonable, but sometimes not. Attempts to eliminate those risks are often wrongheaded.

If COVID is something you’re concerned about, you can plan accordingly for yourself. What you can’t do is limit another person’s freedom of movement or bodily autonomy. Whatever choices you make for yourself, you do with the possibility of whatever consequences that follow as a result.

While Howard Stern is free to have his own opinion, that includes his right to a misinformed or misguided opinion, a right he’s done nothing to waive. While Harlan Ellison may not like it, people do have a right to be ignorant.

But if you’re one of the few people left who still listen to Howard Stern, you should ask yourself what you’re listening to. When you listen to a rich man with a radio show hobnob with strippers and ruthlessly lampoon members of his own cast, is it really because there’s nothing else to listen to? As a person who gets up early in the morning, goes to work, comes home to eat poor people food, and usually barely pays the bills, it’s easy for me to say that Howard Stern doesn’t speak for me.