Megyn Kelly didn’t just chuckle — she let the whole country see what sensible Americans have known for years: the media’s cultural elites are unmoored from reality and quick to tantrum when called out. On her show this week Kelly played the clip, laughed at the spectacle, and then calmly dismantled the self-pitying performance art that passes for conscience among Manhattan’s celebrity class.

The reason for the roast is painfully simple: Patti LuPone’s mea culpa came after a bruising New Yorker profile in which the Broadway legend made remarks so extreme they read like a symptom of elite entitlement rather than moral courage. The piece captured LuPone’s fury — including reportedly suggesting the Trump-era Kennedy Center should be “blown up” — and reopened a ledger of diva incidents and public slams that have long soured her reputation with colleagues.

The fallout was immediate and predictable. Fellow actors and industry groups publicly rebuked LuPone, and she issued an apology trying to walk back what her peers called disrespectful and, frankly, racist language toward other Black performers. The apology was covered by mainstream outlets and followed calls to limit her presence at industry events until she made amends.

Let’s not pretend this is an isolated lapse. LuPone’s pattern of shrill public pronouncements — like her 2023 on-air claim that there is “no difference between our Christian right and the Taliban” — exposes a mind that conflates disagreement with existential threat, and a culture that rewards theatrical outrage over honest debate. Americans tired of being lectured by celebrities have every right to laugh when the lectern collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

Megyn Kelly’s reaction was not cruelty for its own sake; it was a spotlight on a culture that forgives viciousness so long as it’s uttered by the right people, then demands blood when the same anger is directed back at them. Conservatives should relish the moment — not because we enjoy schadenfreude, but because accountability finally caught up with a cultural elite who have long set themselves above the rules the rest of us live by.

Here’s the takeaway for hardworking Americans: the left’s moral panic machine is nothing more than performance when it faces real consequences, and the media’s protectors of taste will fold under pressure. Keep watching, keep calling out double standards, and don’t let theatrical outrage be a cover for the kind of condescending, illiberal attitudes that want to tell you how to live while they jet between Manhattan gala dinners.