Hillary Clinton rails against an “epidemic” of fake news, Lyin’ Brian Williams hunts for untruths, and wacky Dan Rather is alarmed at pretty much everything. Not to be outdone, the New York Times spies a nation soul-searching for truth in a sea of lies.

Allow me to help our mendacious doomsayers, whose frightfulness conjures images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Step One is to get their heads out of their own posteriors.

Step Two is to locate the source of their fear and loathing, and they don’t need a shrink for that: It’s Donald Trump’s resounding victory. Because they can’t handle the truth, they are turning their tantrums into a witch hunt and wild conspiracy theories. The sudden fascination with fake news and Russian hacking reveals only their rage against reality.

Yes, it’s true some websites carry stories cut from whole cloth. There are also well-regarded newspapers that treat their own biases as holy writ.

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. They aimed to scare the country into supporting Clinton by turning their front pages into editorial pages, where “straight news” became an oxymoron.

With their distortion magnified by copycat broadcasters and left-wing cable bile, it’s no wonder the scaremongers never imagined a Trump victory. No dissenting voices were permitted to interrupt their groupthink, and none did.

Yet even now, instead of trying to understand where they went wrong, they pound the table and declare that everybody else is wrongheaded. To the media clergy, the Earth is still flat.

One result is the hysteria sweeping college campuses, leftist basements and Hollywood salons. Having drunk the national media Kool-Aid, they are bewildered that the sun still rises. How could life possibly go on with Trump in the Oval Office?

Another result is the defeated left’s search for “solutions” to the proliferation of ideas beyond their control. Their proposals run the gamut from foolish to dangerous as they aim to restrict free speech by any who dare challenge their monopoly on truth.

And so the Trump deniers enlist social-media gatekeepers to block everything from fake news to “hate” speech, with definitions set by the like-minded. How comforting.

Most political truths are like that, in the eye of the beholder.

Here’s one example of the tangle they face: Is burning the American flag patriotic or a form of hate speech? Who’s to make the final decision, the people who burn the flag or the people who fought to defend it?

Or consider that President Obama claims the problem with the media is “segmentation,” meaning people gravitate to what they like, as if that’s a bad thing. In the next breath, he singles out Rolling Stone magazine for doing “great work.”

That’s odd, given that the magazine just lost a libel suit over a false campus rape story it retracted. Ah, but here’s Obama’s truth: Rolling Stone featured him on the cover 10 times, so of course it’s doing great work. It agrees with him!

Most political truths are like that, in the eye of the beholder. That’s why the Founders created a system based on the concept of the more voices, the merrier.

The First Amendment was designed to produce a cacophony of competing views instead of establishing a single one. And no single authority would decide what speech is true and what speech is false.

Justice Louis Brandeis, who revered the American ideal, wrote that when confronting falsehoods and fallacies, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

On another case, Brandeis wrote, “In frank expression of conflicting opinion lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action; and in suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril.”

The suppressors are out in force now, thrashing about in their fever and determined to silence speech that doesn’t conform to theirs. The only sensible response is to tell them to keep their hands off the First Amendment. It’s perfectly fine the way it is.

Behind the tragedy

Articles about the tragic scalding death of two young children in the Bronx focused on city homeless officials who placed the family in the apartment, inspectors who failed to see the faulty radiator and the building’s owner. Mayor Bill de Blasio called it a “freak accident” and pledged “a very full investigation.”

By all means, let’s find out how such horror could end those innocent lives and why they were tenants of a landlord labeled among New York’s worst.

But there is another party to the horror that is largely being overlooked, except by The Post. That would be the parents of 2-year-old Ibanez Ambrose and her 1-year-old sister, Scylee.

Both mother and father are recovering drug addicts on methadone and have been the subject of six child-welfare cases in New York, Maine and New Hampshire, police sources told the paper.

One case started last month when mom Danielle Ambrose allegedly kept the babies out in the cold while she played the guitar on the street and panhandled for money.

The father, Peter Ambrose, has four other children living in Maine, the police said, and was busted in the city last year for possessing a hypodermic needle.

The family reportedly lived in the apartment for more than a year, with the Hunts Point building a homeless “cluster site,” meaning the city rents apartments to get families out of the chaotic shelter system. De Blasio denounced the program as a candidate because many buildings were slums, but has expanded it since taking office. The annual cost is $125 million.

The Ambroses are understandably devastated, but it remains a stubborn fact that a welfare bureaucracy can never take the place of good parents.

Giving the fanatics free rein

The animal-rights zealots harassing horse-carriage riders and drivers are another example of the decline in the quality of life in Bill de Blasio’s New York. The screaming and intimidation tactics are in keeping with the anti-police hooligans and anti-Trump demonstrators de Blasio encouraged.

And it’s more than a bit suspicious that, once again, the protesters are in sync with the mayor’s politics. He tried to ban the carriages, then tried to move the horses to Central Park before the City Council said neigh.

So then, are the protesters doing the mayor’s dirty work for him? Is he happy to have them out there spoiling tourists’ experience and disrupting a legitimate business?

Until he makes an honest effort to stop them, the answer must be yes.

Donald on the brain

A correction in the Wall Street Journal shows that you-know-who is stalking our brains:

“The surname of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was misspelled as Trumpka in a Page One article Friday about President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet choices and business regulations.”