PARIS — Late-night TV talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is guilty of wrong-speak about conservative influencer Charlie Kirk’s assassination. What he said doesn’t even matter. Nor should it, frankly. At least not inside a free speech zone.

But of course, that era is light years in the rearview mirror. These days, every offhand remark gets treated like the Cuban Missile Crisis — especially once it lands on the internet, where outrage is monetized. And that’s exactly where clips of Kimmel’s remarks ended up. Suddenly, they morphed into a political football being tossed around between two factions.

Enter US President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, to grab that ball and run with it like the star quarterback in an ideological Super Bowl. “It was appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact that probably one of the most significant political events we’ve had in a long time, for the most significant political assassination we’ve seen in a long time,” Carr said of Kimmel’s controversial late-night monologue qualifying the “MAGA gang” as “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

Kimmel’s network, ABC, read the regulatory risk tea leaves and yanked Kimmel off the air indefinitely. An ironic turn of events, given that Carr once derided media censorship himself.

But it’s not hard to imagine why Carr could be tempted to give the censors a taste of their own medicine — now that he was chief censor.

But is the solution really just to double down on the same chilling effect and have everyone walking on eggshells, terrified that the next quip could end their career? It’s not free speech if the only freedom is guessing which words are off- limits depending on who sits in the Oval Office.

It never used to be this way, and you have to wonder what happened. It wasn’t that many decades ago that Americans, regardless of ideology, were entertained by a debate like the headliner aired in 1968 on ABC News between William F. Buckley on the right and Gore Vidal on the left, or by anti-Equal Rights Amendment crusader Phyllis Schlafly having it out with feminist and “The Feminine Mystique” author Betty Friedan on ABC’s own “Good Morning America.”

That was back in the day of a whopping, like, five channels — and you had to physically walk up to the TV to change them. Today, in our 500-channel universe, you sit down, flip through all of them three times while scrolling on your phone, then give up in favor or something less boring. Like washing your hair.

Coincidence? Nope. Everything is beige and “corporate.” If you want to watch a real ideological brawl, you have to go online, where people are figuratively — and sometimes literally — setting themselves on fire to claim a slice of the “attention economy.”