Goodbye Howard Stern?

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It seems over the past couple of years, although it's ramped up recently, there's been a shift in the media that is rather significant if one is really paying attention. The woke left has just become a little too crazy for most people's tastes. Make no mistake, James Carville is as crazy as they come—but even he had to say once, "We're not going to win elections talking about where we want to put tampons. The American people just don't care about that BS, and it just makes us sound kooky." Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" was of course the latest thing to go on the chopping block. Jimmy Kimmel might be next. And before that, there were major shifts among the on-air ranks at MSNBC that were rather interesting. Now, Sirius is considering cancelling the Howard Stern radio show as listener numbers fall like a rock and his contract is nearing its end. No one is saying out loud it's due to ratings, or wokeness, or an exhausted audience pelted hourly with TDS rhetoric. But it's the obvious underpin. It's gotten out of control. It's gone over the top. People have tired of it. "Okay, we get that you guys don't like Donald Trump. But come on, man. End of the world? Dictatorships and kingdoms? Economic destruction worse than the Great Depression—it's getting a bit Chicken Little-ish, here, actually." It just doesn't feel real anymore to most people, or even genuine. They can recognize the difference between insanity and having a rational argument. The View may be somewhere in this mash up as well eventually, although there have been no indications of that. But it's as crazy as it gets when it comes to the rhetoric, and if you talk to most people, the only reason they tune in is for the shock value to see what crazy thing they will say next. Their audience is mostly made up of people who aren't at all interested in going to see NASCAR races but seeing fiery crashes. In other words, they aren't there to participate in the non-stop TDS. They're there to watch it unfold. Even Bill Maher, who's still as woke as they come, has had to step back a bit and admit, "This is more than a little nuts, guys." Everything and everyone has a boiling point. A point at which things just get a bit too far off into left field and it all starts to go asunder. The audience can no longer suspend their disbelief for an hour or two with a straight face and keep their own senses intact. The funny thing about guys like Colbert and Stern is that these are guys who don't realize their disease and what it has done to them and their careers. They're like the guy sitting at the bus stop now, forever talking to people that don't exist. It's all real to them—this world that has been imagined. And people, the ones with clear heads, who happen to be the majority, can see it. They aren't watching the guy at the bus stop and trying to figure out who's there that they can't see—they know he's just no longer living in the real world, and that's a very hard thing to watch. More and more I think the writing is appearing on the wall. What seemed like a world turning to chaos was an illusion sported by the media, making the rest of us scratch our heads and wonder if all this we were seeing really was the new majority opinion. It isn't. It wasn't. It never was. They just got away with it for a long time. And because they could, they doubled down on the rhetoric and stretched the crazy to the breaking point. They've been playing with a really stretchy, resilient rubber band. It's given them a lot of fun. But it seems it's suddenly snapped. Game's over.