Jimmy Kimmel was just the start. America is undergoing a tectonic shift. And the liberal Left, sick beyond help, are totally unprepared for what’s coming next: MAUREEN CALLAHAN

Beware false prophets — and false martyrs.

Let’s get real: Jimmy Kimmel is making a gourmet meal out of this ‘censoring’.

Truly, it’s the best thing that could have happened to him. His late-night show was the next to fall after CBS informed Stephen Colbert, in July, that he was being taken off air.

Reports were circulating back then that ABC had no interest in renewing Kimmel’s $48million contact when it expires next year.

Ratings for network late-night shows are plummeting, and grossly overpaid hosts such as Kimmel and Colbert, in full TDS, have been lecturing to their echo chamber while alienating the majority of the country — a majority that voted for Donald Trump.

So for Kimmel to be playing victim here is beyond cynical. It’s the ultimate power play, a shrewd career move that will leave him stronger than ever — at least while the liberal media plays along.

Imagine Kimmel’s diminished stature had his contract simply not been renewed.

Colbert won an Emmy last Sunday not despite his failure, but because of it.

Let’s get real: Jimmy Kimmel is making a gourmet meal out of this ‘censoring’

Kimmel has long been lecturing to his echo chamber while alienating the majority of the country – a majority that voted for Donald Trump. So for him to be playing victim here is beyond cynical

For in Hollywood and legacy media, the prevailing — and false — narrative is that Trump did Colbert in.

Not so. Colbert did Colbert in, just as Jimmy Kimmel can no longer wear the mask of a decent man.

His on-air, factually incorrect statement about Charlie Kirk’s assassin — claiming that the shooter was full MAGA, when all evidence, including etchings on the bullets and text messages, indicates the shooter was a gay man in a relationship with a trans-identified furry — followed Kimmel’s half-hearted expression of sympathy, on Twitter, for Kirk and ‘all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence’.

Kimmel couldn’t even acknowledge that Kirk, a husband and father of two, was killed in a targeted assassination.

He couldn’t acknowledge the rank hypocrisy of his own side. He couldn’t condemn those woke leftists who implied that Kirk had his own murder coming because of the things he said.

How’s that for First Amendment absolutism?

Look at MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd, talking head and longtime boyfriend of Maria Shriver, who said, on air, hours after Kirk’s assassination: ‘Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which lead to hateful actions… You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.’

Dowd was fired, rightly so.

Back at ABC, the on-air embarrassment known as Matt Gutman waxed rhapsodic over text messages the killer sent to his transgender partner in the immediate aftermath.

‘Obviously, Charlie Kirk was murdered brutally in front of a crowd of thousands,’ Gutman intoned, before embarking on one of the most ill-advised, idiotic attempts at woke pandering ever.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a press conference in which we’ve read text messages that are, A) so fulsome, so robust, so apparently, so allegedly self-incriminating and yet, on the other hand, so touching — right? With the suspect reaching out to his roommate, who was allegedly his boyfriend, who we understand, you know, identified as male at birth, now identifies as female. And the terminology he used, he was trying to protect him. He kept calling him “my love”, “my reason for doing this is to protect you”, you know, but also asking him to delete the messages and not speak to law enforcement. So there’s this, this heartbreaking duality that we’re seeing very tragically playing out here.’

Hey, Jimmy — this moron still has a job at ABC, and you know why? He apologized.

Really, Gutman should be fired. Not for what he said, but for being too stupid even for network news.

Kimmel had an equally simple solution presented to him: Apologize (just as he once did for wearing blackface), make a donation to Kirk’s Turning Point USA and boom — get your show back.

Kimmel, according to reports, has refused. Not only that — a Kimmel source told the Wall Street Journal that he had planned to tell his audience, before he flounced off on Wednesday, that it was people in the MAGA movement who had ‘purposefully twisted’ his words.

Wow. Talk about the courage of your convictions.

This quote-unquote ‘firing’ — trust me, that’s how he and his lackeys in the media will spin it — frees Kimmel to float away on his golden parachute, start his own podcast, and attempt to become the left’s answer to Joe Rogan.

Good luck with that.

Again, the notion that Kimmel has been muzzled by Trump is a fallacy. It’s a fairy tale. But the left is electrified by the idea that they’ve got a real live martyr in Jimmy Kimmel.

Note that of all Kimmel’s celebrity friends and defenders — including Jason Bateman, David Letterman, the vanishing late-night cohort and Jon Stewart, who fled his New Jersey manse to do a special edition of The Daily Show (!) — his most famous pal has remained silent.

Whither Matt Damon? Where, oh where, is Jimmy’s top A-lister?

Nowhere. Nowhere near this vicinity. Trust me: Matt Damon’s not saying a thing. He’s too smart for that.

This isn’t a First Amendment issue. It’s the marketplace speaking. The brass at Sinclair and Nexstar, owners of over 60 ABC affiliates, decided to ‘indefinitely’ yank Kimmel’s show after hearing from outraged audiences and advertisers.

Is current FCC chair Brendan Carr also outraged? Yes. Is there a $6.2billion merger on the table that Kimmel has potentially jeopardized? Yes.

But that’s on Jimmy Kimmel.

The Constitution does not guarantee any of us, least of all the unfunny Kimmel, a late-night talk show in perpetuity.

The media landscape is undergoing tectonic, irreversible shifts, and liberal shills like Kimmel — who has successfully buried his vile, misogynistic past, not to mention that infamous blackface skit — have only themselves to blame.

The bulk of Americans are tuning out of linear television and an infotainment complex that, under the banner of free speech, insisted, for years, that these baldfaced lies were true:

* The Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t real.

* Covid lockdowns were necessary.

* Donald Trump is Hitler.

* Joe Biden was in top mental and physical condition to run for a second term.

That last whopper was the death knell for liberal corporate media, embodied best (or worst, really) by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who insisted on-air that Biden’s poor debate performance was caused by a childhood stutter, then turned around and co-authored a book about the years-long cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline.

Tapper was back at it again with the equally odious, smarmy Brian Stelter on Wednesday night.

Stelter: ‘Kimmel was expressing what we’ve heard some other liberals say in recent days, that the motives are unclear’ — they most definitely are not — ‘and that maybe the suspect in this case was a Republican or was some sort of far-right fringe figure.’

He is not.

Tapper: ‘What [Kimmel] said specifically was, “The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” That can be read in several ways’.

No, it cannot.

America is done. The New York Times didn’t publish a single op-ed about Kirk’s killing in their physical paper the day after he was assassinated. The Wall Street Journal gave it short shrift, framing his murder in the next day’s edition as a ‘talking point’ that MAGA would use to its advantage.

But when Kimmel gets yanked? The New York Times had five stories blaring from the top of its homepage, with an op-ed right beside them. The Journal, too, led with Kimmel.

It’s beyond sick. They seem more upset over Kimmel giving up his talk show than Charlie Kirk losing his life.

So, finally, the likes of ABC overlords Bob Iger and Dana Walden are waking up.

Jimmy Kimmel had it coming.

If the left could cancel, or try to cancel, the likes of Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, JK Rowling (to name but a few) — well, turnabout is fair play.

Now they know what it feels like. Good.

The latest reports have the ladies (imbeciles) at The View worried that they may be next.

In the interest of intelligent, fair and reasoned civil discourse, let’s hope so.