If you decided one day to go on YouTube looking for old Howard Stern clips, you’d have a lot of edgy, politically incorrect content to choose from. Stern’s many segments with an intellectually disabled dwarf comedian named Beetlejuice, for example, aren’t hard to find. There’s also a bunch of compilations of people fighting on Stern’s set, in the style of Jerry Springer, usually over money or adultery. There’s enough degeneracy to last you weeks, if for some reason you were inclined to watch it.
But there is some recurring Howard Stern content that’s not so easy to view, because by and large, it’s been scrubbed from most major video-sharing sites. The segments I’m talking about involve Stern speaking about his sexual attraction to children, specifically Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Again and again, for several years, Stern described the Olsen twins as sexually attractive. “They’re so amazingly hot,” Stern says in one of the segments, referring to the underage girls. In several cases, Stern brings up the girls unprompted, leading to awkward moments with his co-hosts.
Because it’s not possible to truly eliminate any content from the internet, you can still find this footage if you know where to look. A small handful of anonymous accounts have defied corporate censors and uploaded some of Stern’s many disturbing comments about children he finds sexually attractive. Here’s one example, where Stern laments that the girls, in his estimation, aren’t as attractive as they were when they were 13-years-old:
Stern show with call in talking about not liking how they look anymore, preferred how they looked when they were 13/14. Disappointed because they were counting down to 18th birthday to have sex with them. pic.twitter.com/JUyfOjS6rZ
— ProfitOfRegret (@ProfitOfRegret) September 20, 2023
There are many more clips like this that we could play. Some are even more disturbing than the one you just heard. This is a grown man, in his 40s at the time, repeatedly sexualizing children who are barely teenagers. Many people have had their lives destroyed and been reduced to groveling apologies for saying things that are not even a tenth as bad as what Stern says there. And that wasn’t even a tenth as bad as other things Stern said.
These clips were nauseating and creepy when he made them and they’re nauseating and creepy now. There was never a point in American history where it was acceptable to sexualize children like this. But for years, Howard Stern continued doing just that, right out in the open. No one stopped him. He didn’t seem ashamed of it at all. He tracked the Olsen twins from puberty to adulthood, commenting on their sex appeal, as he perceived it, at every turn.
But somewhere along the line, Howard Stern and his team decided that he had to stop talking about the Olsen twins. And more than that, someone decided that all of Stern’s past comments about the Olsen twins needed to be purged from the internet. All the other degenerate segments could stay online but the stuff where he lusts after young children — well that had to go. It was different from all of his other smut. It was just too damning.
With that evidence (mostly) expunged from the internet, Stern has embraced pretty much every agenda item of the Fortune 500. He is now officially a woke hall monitor, by his own admission. In fact this week Stern proudly identified as “woke.” Listen:
As part of his new “woke” persona, Stern attacked Lauren Boebert for her inappropriate behavior in a theater a few days ago. This is the guy who spent the first three decades of his career being a creepy, degenerate sex fiend. Now he’s playing the prude. He’s become a pathetic, old washed-up school marm but he’s now shielded by his new woke identity. He is immune from accusations of hypocrisy, just like he’s immune from accusations of being a dirty old man attracted to children.
It’s a revealing transformation, if only because it shows how little daylight there is between woke hall monitors and depraved pedophilic scumbags. Depraved pedophilic scumbags and woke hall monitors are not two destinations on opposite ends of the spectrum. They’re in the same neighborhood and there’s a lot of overlap. And they know it. Howard Stern knows it, which is why he’s sensitive about all those clips of him salivating over 13-year-old girls.
There are other old clips that are inconvenient for Stern, too, of course — clips that are particularly relevant after what’s just happened to Alex Jones. Jones, you’ll recall, was just ordered to pay something like a billion dollars to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting. It bankrupted him. Of course Jones was wrong in what he said about Sandy Hook; he admits that. But as far as we know, Howard Stern has never apologized for his decision to mock the victims of the Columbine school shooting. In fact, Stern didn’t simply mock these victims, he said their killers should have raped them first, before executing them. Listen:
This was Howard Stern the day after Columbine.
Yikes. https://t.co/rPVMjCTF4q pic.twitter.com/WanI7f5Pv6
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) September 20, 2023
That’s pretty much the most vile thing a human being could possibly say. I personally give people a lot of leeway for “jokes” made years ago, in a different time, when people weren’t as sensitive and edgy humor wasn’t as edgy. But this is way beyond the bounds of what would have been considered remotely acceptable even in the ’90s. This is, again, perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever heard anyone say, ever. He is not only joking about a school shooting right after it happened — a day later — but lusting after the survivors and saying that the shooters should have raped their victims. And keep in mind that said all of this when he was a grown man in his mid 40s. But Howard Stern has never been banned from every social media platform for these comments. He wasn’t ordered to pay a billion dollars. He didn’t have to pay anything.
That’s because, fortunately for Stern, he mocked the Columbine victims prior to this new era of woke enlightenment, where free speech is illegal as long as it’s sufficiently offensive. And now, just to cover his bases, Stern has completed his transition into the cult of wokeness soon enough to protect himself against cancellation. Now they’re not going to come after him because he’s on their team.
Meanwhile, Russell Brand is being demonetized based on accusations alone. Unlike Howard Stern, Russell Brand never publicly expressed his sexual attraction to 13-year-old girls. But he has expressed skepticism about big pharma and the war in Ukraine. And for that reason, this week a “culture committee” in the UK parliament sent Rumble a letter requesting that they demonetize Russell Brand. The letter reads: “I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand … We would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.”
In the most passive-aggressive fashion imaginable, the U.K. parliament also sent a similar letter to TikTok: “We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his TikTok posts, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him, and what the platform is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”
Let’s take stock of what we’re seeing here. This is the government of the U.K. effectively telling multiple social media platforms to demonetize one of the most influential commentators on the planet, solely on the basis of unproven allegations. There is no plausible deniability here; they’re being pretty much as explicit as they can possibly be. Before the Twitter files came out, this would have been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theory. You weren’t allowed to think that governments were colluding with big tech to censor unapproved voices. Now the government is just coming out and admitting that’s exactly what it’s doing. This isn’t just happening in the U.K.; the Biden administration does it too.
Unlike its competitor YouTube, Rumble emphatically rejected the request from the U.K. government, to their credit. But YouTube is the far bigger platform, and their decision to instantaneously demonetize Russell Brand sets a very worrying precedent. It’s also totally incoherent. As Elijah Schaffer points out, Cardi B is currently fully monetized on YouTube. This is in spite of the fact that she openly admitted to drugging and robbing men. It’s on tape. Watch:
Cardi B confessed — bragged about — violent felonies. Her history as a confessed date rapist has not precluded her from major corporate sponsorships or monetization on YouTube. “Double standard” isn’t the right term for this. It’s really one standard: if you’re useful to the Left, you can essentially do what you want. That’s the standard, consistently applied. No one can really deny that anymore. This is not an arbitrary application of shifting sets of standards. This, again, is one standard. Leftists are immune. That’s the rule.
With that in mind, what’s the appropriate response? Pointing out hypocrisy isn’t going to do anything. We’ve learned that much over the past few years. What’s needed is some courage. We need more of what Rumble is doing. Rumble knows that Russell Brand might actually be guilty of what he’s accused of doing. After all, he was an admitted sex-addicted degenerate back when these crimes supposedly occurred. It certainly isn’t outside of the realm of possibility that he did treat the women the way he’s accused of treating them.
But the leadership of Rumble understands that it makes no sense to un-person Russell Brand based on mere allegations, when we know for a fact that Brand’s critics are entirely motivated by politics. They want to mete out punishments only to enemies of the regime while its allies and lackeys are given exemptions. Kowtowing to these wannabe strongmen is not a smart or sustainable strategy. All we can really do now is ignore everything that the system says and assume, for all intents and purposes, that everyone they demonize is innocent. If we’re being honest, that’s not always going to be true. Sometimes we will be wrong, and we will defend people who are guilty.
Sometimes the system will say something true or villainize someone who actually is a villain. But they lie so often about so many things and are so blatantly driven by ideology and narrative and are so wildly dishonest all the time, that we have to ignore them completely at this point. By defending and promoting the most odious among us — by embracing ghouls like Howard Stern and Cardi B — they’ve left us no choice.