Howard Stern On Stupid Voters
Howard Stern is a deeply unfunny man who has parlayed amorality into a form of media immortality by creating a niche, the “shock jock,” in which unfunny people can pass themselves off as humorists merely by being willing to say what semi-civilized people would have the decency not to say in public. He is thereby peculiarly responsible for vulgarizing the taste and gutterizing the language of public discourse, in the process actively undermining respect for the civilizing distinction between the public and private spheres, which Milan Kundera identified as one of the essential moral premises of the modern world, without which modernity itself would disintegrate. We might properly say, then, without a hint of exaggeration or cuteness, that Stern has been to American radio what Donald Trump has been to American politics: the great leveller who calculated that his own interests would be best served by appealing to the worst, ugliest tendencies of his fellow citizens, thereby toppling them, and indirectly the whole society, into levels of indignity and pettiness to which they had previously resisted falling, all for the sake of his own trivial material advantage.
Amusingly, and perhaps tellingly, Howard Stern has reiterated his old mantra to the effect that he “hates” Trump supporters, that he “has no respect” for them, and that they are all “stupid.” I can think of quite a few likely Trump voters off the top of my head — both individuals I know personally and individuals I have heard or read in public forums — whom, to put it very politely, I would rate as far less stupid, far more respectable, and far less worthy of hatred, than Howard Stern himself. And the peculiar pot-calling-kettle-black projection of Howard Stern, a man who has made the degradation and vulgarization of American society his personal financial racket for forty years, living parasitically on the lifeblood of formerly respectable, ordinary human beings whom he has infected with his sub-lowbrow entertainment, knocking Trump’s negative influence, puts us in mind of an important point about all these “Trump voters are idiots” declarations. The point is the extent to which modern political discourse consists of nothing but half-truths more dangerous than outright lies.
Is voting for Trump stupid? Well, yes, I happen to think it is. And what about voting for Kamala Harris? A wise move? No, another stupid move, but one conveniently overlooked if we put all our focus on Trump.
“But if we want to prevent Trump from being president, what else can we do?” say the Stern-like stupids. Right, and how many million Trump supporters turned to him in the very same desperation, thinking, “How can we prevent the Democratic socialists from taking over the White House and dismantling everything good about our country?” Stern is merely serving as a particularly obnoxious mouthpiece for the slavish “binary choice” tribalism that has devoured American politics, the anti-logic according to which the statement “Voting for Trump is stupid” inherently implies the statement “Voting for Harris is smart.” No it doesn’t.
Howard Stern’s opinion of Trump voters — his hatred in particular — must be put in context. Stern is a lunatic germophobe who refused to return to his studio for ages during the Covid pandemic because he was certain that everyone who breathed in the same room with him was a walking death sentence, who joined the idiots chorus who chanted the official “pandemic of the unvaccinated” lie at everyone who dared to doubt, and who publicly called for unvaccinated Americans to be coercively excluded from ordinary life, and said that they should be denied access to hospitals and told to “go home and die.”
“F— their freedom,” he exclaimed in 2021, in the kind of proud declaration of abject cowardice that was so typical of the most wormlike among us back then (and now). The man who was so petrified of the Covid virus that he demanded universal vaccine mandates, wanted the unvaccinated to be cut off from society and left to die, and expressed an absolute disdain for the idea that people who disagreed with his uninformed Fauci-fostered certitudes should be allowed to live free, thinks he has the moral authority to tell Trump voters that they are stupid. It would be beyond his wee mind and quivering spine, of course, to experience, upon (self-)reflection, any little revelations about why so many “stupid” people continue to cling to the irrational dream of Donald Trump.
