Jimmy Kimmel has no one to blame for losing his show but himself

Make no mistake here: Jimmy Kimmel doomed himself with his lunatic lecture Monday night, the latest in a long string of partisan rants rarely even pretended to try for humor.

And it was the complaints from ABC’s affiliates — likely based on what they were hearing from their viewers — that led the network to suspend his show late Wednesday.

Yes, Brendan Carr muddied the waters earlier on Wednesday, when the Federal Communications Commission chief, touching on Kimmel, suggested the FCC is “going to have remedies that we can look at.”

Yet the “comedian’s” goose was surely already cooked, since he’d literally tried to turn the assassination of a leading conservative — a civilian father of two young kids — into reason to be outraged at the right.

“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,” Kimmel smarmed.

No: Not a whit of evidence ever pointed to Tyler Robinson being MAGA in any way, though many on the left spent the first week insisting otherwise.

Initial reports suggested his parents are Republicans — in Utah, a largely Republican state, but also one where the GOP is less MAGA than anywhere else in America. (And while Mormons may be very “other” to Hollywood types like Kimmel, they’re not particularly MAGA either.)

Sure, a host of lefties spent much of the weekend on social media telling each other the “he was MAGA” lie, but every actual fact that was coming out pointed the other way.

The world knew on Friday about the antifa-style, left-wing messages scrawled on the killer’s cartridges.

So Kimmel had zero excuse for his Monday claims, and even less for staying silent on Tuesday, despite rising public outrage: No retraction, apology nor even words of regret.

His only “excuse” is that he lives in a coastal bubble, utterly removed from anyone who’d challenge the increasingly unreal left-liberal narrative.

It’s a problem for most elite US media, of course, but also for the late-night hosts who’ve dived so deep into political commentary — and been hemorrhaging viewers as a result, turning shows that once minted money into loss-leaders.

Cold business calculations already cost Steven Colbert his show; Kimmel was surely on the watchlist before now — and Seth Meyers, too.  (Hold out some hope for Jimmy Fallon, who still seems to understand that viewers just want some fun.)

 As for Brendan Carr: He was waving at his duties when he talked of looking at “remedies” for what seems a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.”

The FCC is charged with regulating the broadcasters it licenses, and knowingly spreading false information is highly problematic. Maybe it’s time to rethink those laws, but that’s not Carr’s job.

Nor is it his fault that late-night comedy is dying: It was the late-night comics that did it in.