Liberals have identified a new culprit in Hillary Clinton’s plummet over the last few weeks — the patriarchy.

It is not, they would have you believe, a series of seemingly endless revelations regarding her private email server involving a stunning disregard for national security. Nor is it her apparently pathological fear of facing the press. Nope, say liberals — it is those mean old men doing their damnedest to keep their Hillary from breaking that glass ceiling.

“At this point in the campaign, Lauer’s obvious sexism is not simply a problem of unfairness in the treatment of the individual candidates … such performances have serious consequences for the fate of the nation.”

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In an unhinged screed that an objective observer might mistakenly think was from The Onion, Siri Hustvedt, writing for liberal website Slate, decried the “subtle misogyny” in Matt Lauer’s interview with Clinton Wednesday night.

“Matt Lauer has done the country a service, and I thank him for it,” writes Hustvedt. “Interrupting women, treating them with condescension and disdain are symptoms of the low-grade infection caused by the virus that has afflicted millions of people in the United States, and not only in red states.” What is that virus exactly? Why it’s the “misogyny illness,” of course.

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This illness apparently “lurks behind phrases such as ‘even-handed’ and ‘fair-minded,'” the Slate piece reads. It is the “low-grade fever that caused Matt Lauer to continually interrupt Hillary Clinton.” Then the piece asks, “Would our ‘fair-minded’ journalist have treated a male candidate the way he treated Hillary Clinton?” The implied answer is, of course, “no.”

In truth, any fair-minded, fully functioning human being in touch with reality would have noticed that Lauer also interrupted Trump throughout Wednesday’s forum, and that, like he did with Clinton, declined to offer up hard-hitting follow-up questions to the soft answers he was given by the candidates.

Hustvedt is not the only one who saw a misogynist monster lurking behind Lauer’s eyes. “When questioning Clinton, Lauer was all alpha male, interrupting her and tsk-tsking her for criticizing her opponent after he had asked her not to do so,” wrote Adele M. Stan for The American Prospect.

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“At this point in the campaign, Lauer’s obvious sexism is not simply a problem of unfairness in the treatment of the individual candidates,” she continued. “Such performances have serious consequences for the fate of the nation.”

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Not even the Clinton campaign had the audacity to ascribe Lauer’s conduct as a result of sexism, although it has complained that “many outlets in the press apparently lack the wherewithal to call [Trump] out” on his alleged lies.

The notion that the mainstream media — which has accused Trump, his campaign, and its supporters of everything from racism to bigotry to misogyny — is in the bag for the GOP candidate is as laughable as the idea that Matt Lauer’s lukewarm moderator performance was in any way the result of misogyny.