The American Left’s determination to blame virtually anything other than their alienation of millions of working-class Americans for the defeat of Hillary Clinton is finally coalescing around a prevailing idea: “stupid” voters were conned by “fake news.”

If one likes a good fake news story, the high-profile Washington Post screed about the Russian-generated fake news propaganda campaign that ostensibly put Trump in the White House goes right to the top of the list. How fake? After its publication, the paper’s editor added a “clarifier” at the top of the story, disavowing a group of anonymous “experts” calling themselves PropOrNot, who had named several fake news sources in the original article. The Post’s editor subsequently decided the paper could no longer “vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings.”

Why? The New Yorker’s Adrian Chen reveals PropOrNot’s methodology for determining fake news was so flawed it “could include … nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself.”

In short the Post’s story about fake news … was fake news.

Nonetheless, this weekend the Post, joined by other major Leftmedia outlets, doubled-down with both claiming “secret sources” within the CIA have come to a “consensus” view the Russians helped Trump win the election. Yet the Post was forced to admit a CIA presentation on the subject “fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies,” and some disagreement remains because “some questions remain unanswered.”

Despite those unanswered questions, The New York Times said American intelligence agencies concluded the Russians hacked both the DNC and RNC computers, but only released the DNC information to hand the election to Trump. The same agencies ostensibly concluded the Russians gave WikiLeaks the DNC documents.

That contradicts what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress in November, when he admitted America’s intelligence agencies “don’t have good insight” about a direct link between WikiLeaks and the Russians.

Clapper is not alone. An unnamed senior FBI official questioned for two hours by both Democrats and Republicans during a secret meeting of the House Intelligence Committee refused to confirm the CIA’s assertion that Russia tried to help Trump.

In a dead giveaway, the Washington Post explains the “cultural differences” between the agencies. “The bureau, true to its law enforcement roots, wants facts and tangible evidence to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. The CIA is more comfortable drawing inferences from behavior.”

In short, the Times and the Post have conflated inference with proof. It doesn’t get more fake than that.

Yet the leftist beat goes on, even as they remain immune to the breathtaking hypocrisy that animates it. Hillary Clinton led the way during an appearance at an event celebrating retiring Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) career. She spoke about the “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year,” and the “real world consequences” that attended it. “This isn’t about politics or partisanship,” she insisted. “Lives are at risk.”

At risk? Lives were lost in Benghazi. And to maintain Obama administration credibility toward the end of the 2012 presidential campaign, Clinton and Barack Obama perpetrated the most despicable fake news story of the decade, blaming the deaths of four Americans on an offensive video. Perhaps the hand wringers at the Times and the Post might ask themselves which is more egregious: an unproven fake news campaign disseminated by the Russians, or a thoroughly documented one disseminated by the Obama administration.

And then there’s Reid himself who penned a New York Times piece insisting “the responsibility for separating what is real and what is fake will fall on Democrats.” One is left to wonder if such Democrats include Reid himself, who not only used the floor of the Senate to make an unsubstantiated claim about Mitt Romney’s failure to pay taxes for 10 years, but subsequently bragged that his lying helped to defeat Romney.

As for Democrats tasked with separating “what is real and what is fake,” what could be phonier than celebrating the career of perhaps the most ethically challenged person to ever sit in the Senate?

Former NBC anchor Brian Williams gets in on the action as well, declaring that “fake news played a role in the election and continues to find a wide audience.” That’s the same Brian Williams given a six month suspension by NBC for perpetrating fake news stories, especially the whopper about being nearly shot down during a helicopter flight over Iraq. Ironically, Williams won the 2009 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism and was praised by Cronkite, who called Williams a “fastidious newsman.” That’s the same “Uncle Walter” Cronkite never held sufficiently accountable for his lie about America losing the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A lie that prolonged a conflict ultimately costing 54,000 Americans their lives.

“Fake news is hardly a new phenomenon,” Greta Von Susteren aptly asserts. “For decades, Americans have had an appetite for fringe stories, from grassy knoll conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination to the alien secrets of Area 51 and the baseless notion that 9/11 was an inside job.”

Von Susteren lays the blame for fake news squarely where it belongs. “Part of the reason fake news is so easy to believe is that fringe stories no longer read or sound all that different from too many of the real stories. Too often, both have little or no sourcing; they lack context and they get disseminated with almost no fact-checking.”

Maybe that’s because the Left’s determination to embrace the moral and cultural relativism that appeals to emotion in lieu of objectivity — makes fact-checking subservient.

Subservient to what? The Narrative, in all its “hands up don’t shoot” reality-twisting, divisiveness-inducing and ratings-generating glory.

Add calculated errors of omission to the mix, along with the fact these major media players have a reach that dwarfs that of the fake news purveyors they rail about, and it becomes clear who the most egregious disseminators of fake news are — and whose agenda they are determined to serve, at the price of journalistic integrity.

“Recall that the Times and its co-conspirators created a fictional Trump held aloft by goose-stepping brownshirts and toothless bigots rising from the swamps,” columnist Michael Goodwin explains. “They aimed to scare the country into supporting Clinton by turning their front pages into editorial pages, where ‘straight news’ became an oxymoron.”

Turning straight news into an oxymoron is an integral part of a progressive ideology and their “never let a crisis go to waste,” “win by any means necessary” worldview. The worldview animated by the disciples of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” who include our current president and Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, their Alinsky-advocated vision to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” just got steamrolled by a trash-talking, Twitter-posting political neophyte whose own bona fides — or lack thereof — have yet to be established.

Regardless, Donald Trump has already done the nation an enormous favor: In the course of winning the election, he exposed millions of self-professed “tolerant” leftists as the hateful hysterics they truly are. Better still, it is an “emperor has no clothes” revelation that cannot be walked back in the foreseeable future — all the fake news in the world notwithstanding.