Lionel Nation - Howard Stern Is FINISHED—Why Everyone’s Finally Had Enough

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July 24, 2025 - Lionel Nation

12:42

Howard Stern Is FINISHED—Why Everyone’s Finally Had Enough

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	Well, you know and I know Colbert's dead.
	It's through, it's over.
	But it's not just him, it's elsewhere.
	Look at Howard Stern.
	Look at Howard Stern.
	Best example ever.
	There was a time, remember this, it was a time when Howard Stern was king.
	He ruled the air waves like a vulgar king, like a vulgarity king.
	A time when Stephen Colbert stood as the sharpest satirist in late night TV.
	But that time has long since passed, my friend.
	Today, these men, these once cultural powerhouses are nothing more than artifacts, museum pieces, overrated relics of a bygone media era, an empire that no longer knows how to connect with an audience outside its own elitist coastal echo chamber.
	And if you want to understand how far our culture has fallen and how badly the legal media class is losing, oh my God, look no further, my friends.
	Than the husk, the chanking, the remnants, the pits, the pith.
	The remainder of Howard Stern and the collapsed parody of one Stephen Colbert.
	And Kimmel, you're next.
	Let's begin with Stern.
	Once the king of all media, he now clutches desperately to the title like a washed-up prize fighter, pretending the belt still matters and that he's still got it.
	Stern's career thrived on controversy, on edge, on irreverence, and a wit and a smart and an uncanny ability to say what others wouldn't.
	I mean, he was a free speech icon long before free speech was a political flashpoint.
	But now, oh, God, now he's become the very thing he once mocked.
	A sanitized, frightened billionaire lapdog broadcasting from the corner of some Sixth Avenue play, I guess, while lecturing Americans about masks and vaccines and how bad orange man Donald Trump is, a man that he once loved.
	And that's not Edge.
	That's not punk.
	That's not rebellion.
	That's an HR memo in human form.
	It's over.
	It's done.
	It's finished.
	It's through.
	He's an anachronism.
	He used to lambase celebrities and media phonies.
	Now he's, what, brunch buddies with them.
	He used to rail against censorship.
	Now he's a walking PSA for the CDC.
	And he went from the uncensored king to corporate court jester.
	And he, you know, gleefully, now he's nodding along, nodding along and agreeing with and basically supporting the very institutions that he once tried to cancel and that tried to cancel him.
	And for what?
	A few more years on SiriusXM where his audience has shriveled to a pittance of its former size?
	Howard Stern isn't dangerous.
	He isn't even funny.
	He isn't irrelevant.
	He's the dad rock, the mom genes of talk radio.
	It's over.
	And it's over not just because of the trajectory is over.
	It's over because the attitude woke killed him.
	You want proof?
	Ask anyone under 35 who Howard Stern is.
	And you get blank stares or maybe a passing mention of that old guy or that guy used to have porn stars on and retarded people and butt bongo that one.
	His name means nothing.
	Means nothing to the digital native generation.
	It means nothing.
	He's the past, my friend.
	He's an anachronism, a neutered, ossified, concretized fossil, polished and burnished by wealth and scared of losing social acceptance.
	And between you and me, when he finally gets off that thing, let's see how long his loved ones hang around.
	That's all I'm going to say.
	You see, the man, the icon who once made the FCC quake, the man who stood for something, the guy who was really something, now sounds like he's trying to impress Joy Behar on the view or something.
	But if Stern is dead, Colbert is already beyond lowered into the cultural grave.
	He is beyond irrelevant as he's clawing and clinging.
	And instead of going out with some clash or panache, his cancellation under the polite, I should say, euphemism of hiatus or production shift or whatever you want to call it, it's not just the end of a show.
	It's a symbolic implosion of the fake resistance comedy model that late night TV tried to use as a weapon against Trump and, frankly, common sense.
	And it's switched.
	It's over.
	And they're going to blame everybody but themselves.
	Oh, no, it's Sherry Redstone.
	Oh, no, it's the deal.
	Oh, it's the FCC.
	No, it's Trump.
	Call it what you want.
	If it was making money, you couldn't get him off the stage.
	And look at Jon Stewart, who was at the top of his game and he gave it all up to, what, run a petting zoo in Jersey?
	I still don't know what the hell that one's about.
	Stephen Colbert, at one particular time, was a genius.
	His work on the Colbert rapport was biting.
	It was clever.
	And it was absolutely culturally important.
	It was really good.
	He skewered both sides.
	He played a character.
	He took risks.
	He was good.
	But when he stepped behind the CBS desk, something broke.
	Something happened.
	He traded satire for sycophancy.
	He traded character for conformity and comedy for some kind of weird oak or woke ideology or something.
	I don't know.
	His entire shtick became an endless sermon to the MSNBC base.
	It was contaminated and laced with lazy applause, lines about Trump and Russia, vaccines, and whatever blue state gospel the New York Times was pushing or promoting, whatever it printed that morning.
	No more jokes, just smug agreement and some kind of an attempt at monoloy.
	Colbert became the late-night Rachel Maddow, and they didn't even see it coming, and it didn't work.
	And that's what this is about because people don't want to be lectured, they don't want to hear moralizing, and they don't want to hear bad punchlines followed by this dead-eyed clap, you know, clap from a studio audience.
	It sounds like it was trained in a FEMA camp or something.
	It's weird.
	It's like Clockwork Orange.
	It's funny.
	The Orange Man Bad routine got old fast.
	And instead of evolving and spreading and adapting, Colbert just doubled down until the walls caved in until it was over with.
	And his ratings tanked.
	The internet stopped caring.
	Gen Z and millennials or whoever it was stopped showing up.
	And his fans, let's be honest, his fans are the type who think a daily show clip counts as doing research.
	They're there, I guess, but dwindling in number and significance.
	Colbert's cultural power was entirely independent.
	I should say, it was, well, it was independent of that which was political.
	But now it's dependent on the existence of Trump.
	No Trump, no Colbert.
	Without him, there's no villain, no foil, no fire, no nothing.
	He's like a resistance wizard or something after the battleground's been destroyed.
	He's wandering, lost, and irrelevant.
	Colbert's fall, and Howard's as well.
	They signal something deeper, though.
	The collapse of the cathedral comedy model.
	You know, the idea that one man in one New York studio can shape the national narrative through clever quips and forced laughter.
	Can be the next Lenny Bruce or Carlin or Bill Hicks.
	No, no, no.
	That model is over.
	It's done.
	And the audience is too fractured, too disillusioned, too online.
	YouTube creators and podcasters and live streamers and citizen comedians, now they, we, all of us, we own the conversation.
	And we don't need the approval of CBS or Pfizer to say what we're doing.
	And that's the key because Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert don't just represent the old media.
	They represent old gatekeeping power structures, you know, where certain messages were acceptable, certain jokes were permissible, and certain narratives, you know, were no good, off-limits for a boat.
	Today's audiences, you know, and I know, are breaking those walls and breaking them down with a sledgehammer.
	And Stern tried to evolve, but he evolved into a boot-licking sycophant, some lickspittle, you know, millionaire type telling working-class Americans to shut up and take the shot.
	We'll never forget that.
	And Colbert, with that dancing, watch him dance.
	That's all I want to say.
	Colbert tried to stay relevant, but only by parenting the Democratic Party and committing to rote memorization the talking points.
	I mean, he sounded like a press secretary with cue cards.
	I mean, it was awful, and it failed.
	Because the audience isn't stupid.
	You're not stupid.
	Surprise, you're not stupid.
	We're not stupid.
	We see the phoniness.
	We see the desperation.
	We see the pandering.
	And we're turning away in droves.
	That's what we're here for.
	This is what this is about.
	This is what MAGA's about.
	This is what Trump's about.
	Today's humor isn't found in the studio with a script and applause sign.
	It's in live rants, weird memes, and savage tweets and rogue YouTube monologues and fearless comedy clubs where no topic is off limits.
	That's where it's at.
	Stern and Colbert were emperors with microphones, but the crowds moved on.
	And now they're just kind of old men yelling into the void.
	They're not hated.
	Worse, they're ignored.
	We're indifferent to them.
	They're inconsequential, and that's worse.
	The irony is thick.
	It's immutable.
	Howard Stern once called out media phonies and the half-hearted.
	And now he became one.
	Colbert once mocked cable news clowns.
	Remember this?
	And he did it.
	It was very good.
	Now he's turned into one.
	And they didn't just lose the culture war.
	They surrendered to it.
	And the audience knows this.
	So what are we left with?
	A hollowed out kind of a shell or a version of once great voices.
	Corporate puppets reading from sanitized and carefully redacted scripts, carefully curated edge and rage, delivered kind of like a wink and a nod, you know, to their handlers.
	Is this okay?
	Is this all right?
	And we're supposed to pretend it still matters?
	Well, it doesn't.
	Howard Stern is over.
	Stephen Colbert is through.
	And their decline, their finis, their denouement, their valedictory is the funeral bell, ladies and gentlemen.
	The funeral bell for a media empire that thought it was untouchable and permanent.
	And they weren't, and they aren't, and we're better off without them, and they are done.
	And the audience has left the building and the mic.
	Well, who has the mic?
	The mic belongs to us now.
	We have the mic.
	It's ours.
	We're it.
	So behold, my friends, and enjoy and behold, and watch the reality of what we're seeing right now.
	It's a beautiful time to see what's happening.
	It's a beautiful time to be alive and a beautiful time to see how things have changed so greatly.
	So do me a great favor, my friend.
	Thank you so much.
	Please accept my thanks, my utter thanks for watching this.
	Remember, what you are seeing right now is not the future, it's the present.
	And you're a part of it.
	You are part of it.
	Participatory front and center.
	Orchestra section, my friends.
	And I mean that sincerely.
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	And by the way, look at the questions I provided in the comments section.

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