Consider this twisted scenario: A national publication unearths an essay written decades ago by a conservative Republican candidate for the White House in which the man describes, in deviant detail, women who fantasize about being gang-raped. He also writes about men who get thrills by imagining episodes in which they physically force females into degrading sex acts capable of making readers of Hustler rise up in revulsion.

Shock! Outrage! The National Organization for Women would launch a petition drive calling for the man’s head and other body parts.

President Obama would warn that the offensive piece of writing contributes to an “epidemic’’ of sexual assault on college and university campuses. Across America, ladies enrolled in institutions of higher education would earn course credit by schlepping around mattresses on their backs as forms of protest/performance-art projects.

Well, the creepy essay is real, but it was not written by a Republican. The imaginary tale of sexual assault, pleasure and pain was penned by presidential candidate Bernard “Bernie’’ Sanders, 73, the independent junior senator from Vermont.

A self-described “democratic socialist,’’ Sanders champions such leftist causes as ending global warming and combating income inequality.

The reaction from members of the Democratic Party?

Silence.

The piece, titled “Man — and woman,’’ was published in the Vermont Freeman, an alternative newspaper, in 1972, when Sanders was 30 years old. He wrote it after studying psychology at Brooklyn College in his native borough, after he embraced socialism as a student at the University of Chicago, and before he was elected mayor of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, in 1981.

“A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees. A woman tied up. A woman abused,’’ it begins.

“A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by three men simultaneously.’’

The essay was not exposed by some right-wing dirty trickster, but was reprinted in the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones. The most striking part is not that Sanders reveals his deep-seated thought crimes — it’s a dirty little secret that rape fantasies are harbored by a variety of people, even liberals.

But in the piece, Sanders denies an article of faith among progressive circles: Women must be infantilized, treated as children in need of protection.

And he disgusted me by writing, “Do you know why newspapers with the articles like ‘Girl 12 raped by 14 men’ sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?’’ Did Sanders confess that he finds real-life instances of sexual violence against children titillating?

Sanders is spinning the piece as fast as he can. “It was very poorly written and if you read it, what it was dealing with was gender stereotypes, why some men like to oppress women, why other women like to be submissive, you know, something like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, referring to the sadomasochistic novel and movie.

The left is giving Sanders a pass for an obvious reason: He’s seen as the progressive hope for defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he’s challenging for the 2016 Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency. While a recent University of Connecticut poll shows that Clinton has 57 percent of Democratic voter support, crackpot Sanders leads the rest of the pack, favored by 15 percent of voters polled.

(A new CNN/ORC poll gives Clinton 60 percent of party voters’ support, Vice President Joe Biden 14 percent and Sanders 10 percent — but 57 percent of respondents say they don’t find Clinton “honest and trustworthy.’’)

Traveling to Iowa last week just before a group of Democrats abandoned its effort to draft leftist Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a candidate for the White House, Sanders talked before packed rooms across the state in which the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses are to be held Feb. 1. This caused dumbstruck New York Times reporters to conclude that Sanders is a viable contender.

The wild card may be former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a political independent who was approached, Post columnist Michael Goodwin reported this week, by New York Dems who urged him to run for president as a Democrat.

As a 2012 candidate for the Republican nomination for the White House, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who’s running again — drew outrage from the political left and right after he said that women who get pregnant after being raped should “make the best of a bad situation’’ and give birth.

That year, Todd Akin, then a Republican US representative from Missouri, lost his bid for a US Senate seat after he declared that victims of “legitimate rape’’ rarely get pregnant.

But Sanders is excused — because he’s a liberal.

The hypocrisy on the left is stunning.

Kim, try showing some (cl)ass

What has Kim Kardashian got left to expose? The egotistical reality-TV creature, 34, is pregnant with baby No. 2 by her egomaniacal rap-mogul hubby, Kanye West, 37 — ready to produce a sibling for adorable daughter North West, who turns 2 years old on June 15. The female half of Kimye announced the reproductive miracle on the TV show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’’ in which the couple’s struggle to conceive a second child got a regular public airing.

Kim K. was photographed nude and oiled-up in Paper magazine in a “break the Internet’’ spread in which her prodigious backside was an object of awe. Will she put on clothes now?

I wouldn’t count on it.

The Odd Mom Lout

Wealthy New York City socialite Jill Kargman’s best bud is Gwyneth Paltrow. Her twin brother, Will Kopelman, is married to Drew Barrymore. Her dad is ex-Chanel President Arie Kopelman and her mom’s first name, no kidding, is Coco.

Kargman, 40, a married mom of three from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is the creator, star and a co-executive producer of Bravo’s scripted TV comedy series “Odd Mom Out,’’ premiering June 8, about a Jewish matron trying to make it in a WASPy enclave in which some pill-popping mommies receive cash bonuses from their rich husbands in return for staying home with the kids.

In 2011, Kargman published the children’s book “Pirates and Princesses’’ co-written with her then-8-year-old-daughter, Sadie.

It’s based on a real-life incident in which the child, at age 4, told a boy, “F–k you!’’ in the playground of the pricey private nursery school they attended after he called her dress “hideous.’’

“At least she got the context of the word right,’’ the foul-mouthed Kargman told complaining school administrators.

I’ll stay in Brooklyn.

Cait doesn’t look . . . 65

She’s leggy. She’s dolled up in a cream-colored corset. She’s Caitlyn Jenner, the woman formerly known as male Olympic gold-medal decathlete Bruce Jenner, in a photograph on the July cover of Vanity Fair magazine.



I’m shocked.

Did plastic surgery help this 65-year-old woman maintain such a dewy complexion? I wish brave Caitlyn well.