Megyn Kelly didn’t mince words this week when she took aim at Jimmy Kimmel’s wife for an overwrought, celebrity pity-fest that blamed the country’s problems on hardworking Americans who voted for President Trump. Kelly’s blunt reaction tapped into what millions of Americans already sense: the coastal elite love to cry privilege while lecturing the rest of the nation about morality and “freedom.”

Molly McNearney used a high-profile women-in-entertainment breakfast to lambaste conservatives and to frame her husband’s short suspension as an assault on free speech, even likening the fragility of rights to a perimenopausal joke. The speech read like a Hollywood memoir of grievance, complete with talking points about being “thin-skinned” and fear of losing rights — a tone-deaf spectacle when so many Americans are worried about real security and economic stability.

If the optics weren’t bad enough, McNearney told the room that her daughter “burst into tears” when the family told the kids about the show’s brief removal from the air, and that her son even asked whether the president was responsible. Turning a workplace disciplinary episode into a family trauma tale is exactly the kind of performative melodrama that fuels elite resentment toward ordinary voters.

Let’s be blunt: Jimmy Kimmel’s on-air remarks — and the network’s brief decision to sideline his show for days in September — sparked consequences, not censorship theater, and yet Hollywood wants to portray itself as the assaulted party. The double standard is obvious: an industry that weaponizes outrage for clicks now plays the victim when the public pushes back, while lecturing Americans about compassion and rights from a throne of privilege.

That reality is the backdrop for why Megyn Kelly’s takedown landed with so many conservatives. Kelly didn’t merely point out the dramatics — she called out the sanctimony, the selective victimhood, and the frightening notion that political differences now equal personal annihilation for some elites. Americans should applaud any voice that refuses to let Hollywood’s guilt trips rewrite the rules of public debate.

Here’s the bottom line for hardworking patriots: don’t be bullied by emotional spectacles designed to deflect responsibility and silence disagreement. We can defend free speech without bowing to performative sob stories, and we should demand consistency from those who preach about rights while exploiting their celebrity to stoke division. Hollywood can hand out awards and speeches, but the country belongs to the people who actually build it, not the self-appointed moralists who weep on stage and tell the rest of us we’re the problem.