Rumors that the Orlando gay nightclub shooter was really just a repressed homosexual and not an Islamic terrorist acting out on the tenets of his faith generated thousands of otherwise serious news articles and broadcasts. The narrative that Omar Mateen massacred 49 people out of self-loathing quickly overshadowed the verifiable news that he dialed 911 to affirm that he did what he did in the name of Islam.

The gay-terrorist narrative has proved false.

But instead of focusing on the hard facts pointing to religious motivation, the mainstream media seized on unsubstantiated rumors from the gay community and insisted on spreading the preposterous story of a sexually conflicted man who mass-murdered gays simply to maintain his macho image.

That narrative, incredulous as it was, lasted for weeks, leading the front pages of newspapers and newscasts and once again misleading the public about the true source of another deadly act of terror on US soil. And outrageously, it’s still being kept alive by some editors and producers who are hoping against hope it’s true.

Now that the media elite know better — thanks to investigators who say they’ve exhausted all leads and found zero evidence to support the contrived narrative — they won’t tell you that it was false. You won’t hear CNN or ABC, NBC or CBS correct the record in prime-time newscasts, where the majority of the population still turn for politically related news. Why? Because the gay-terrorist narrative serves as a convenient red herring to distract from the real motive behind the attack — Islamic jihad.

To be fair, virtually everyone bit on the story, even the conservative press, many of whom conceded that questions about Mateen’s sexuality were at odds with his extremist religious agenda.

But now the gay publication that started the rumors, “The Advocate,” is backing off its story. The paper interviewed a gay man, Josh Taylor, who worked as a security guard with Mateen at the Saint Lucie County Courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., and who said he doubted the rumors.

“Taylor remains skeptical of suggestions that Mateen was a closeted gay man,” The Advocate wrote. “While there have been reports of people seeing Mateen on Grindr (three men told The Advocate they saw him online in the Fort Pierce area), Taylor never saw him on any dating apps. And knowing about Mateen’s removal from the courthouse job, he believes Mateen simply was radicalized.”

There you have it: Mateen was radicalized by his homophobic faith to hate gays with a homicidal passion.

Meanwhile, the FBI says it has found no evidence Mateen frequented gay night clubs, used gay dating apps, or had male lovers.

Agents have searched his laptop and cell phone and found no photos or text messages or emails or apps or chatroom posts which would confirm rumors that he was gay. They have uncovered no gay porn, either.

At the same time, investigators have found nothing in the electronic communications of gay male witnesses to corroborate their claims Mateen solicited them for sex, or dated them or even communicated with them. Nor have they located evidence of Mateen posting online profiles or messages on any of the gay dating websites on which gay witnesses allege they communicated with him, including Grindr, Jack’d and Adam4Adam.

FBI investigators can’t even confirm rumors that he frequented gay bars and nightclubs after examining security camera video tape recordings and cell-tower location data generated from Mateen’s mobile phone.

What about the testimony of “Miguel,” the gay Latino who went on Univision in disguise, voice altered, to proclaim he had unprotected sex with Mateen after meeting him on the gay dating app, Grindr, and that Mateen sought revenge against the gay community because he contracted HIV?

Investigators have dismissed him as a witness, too, concluding his account is not credible. Miguel changed his story each time in the three interviews he gave to agents, and he cannot produce a shred of evidence to back up his claims — not even a single selfie taken over the course of their supposed two-month affair. He claimed that surveillance footage from the hotel he and Mateen allegedly stayed at together would prove that Mateen was with him, yet hotel security video recordings failed to reveal any such tryst.

The story that a twice married Muslim man with a young son had a secret gay life never added up, and now the whole media-fabricated yarn has unraveled.

But deleting the myth from the public mind won’t be easy. Regardless of the facts, the media still like and embrace the myth and will let it linger because it “challenges” the idea that Mateen was truly motivated, like all the other Muslim terrorists who have attacked America, by jihad and sharia supremacy.

As Vox breathlessly reported, the gay-terrorist narrative was “a remarkable twist in the emerging narrative of how and why the worst mass shooting and anti-LGBTQ hate crime in modern US history happened. It would challenge the idea that Mateen was truly motivated by terrorism or allegiance to ISIS. And it would mean that it was no accident the Pulse shooting happened on Latin night — that the attack was a hate crime specifically against gay Latino men.”

Trying to stamp an expert imprimatur on the rumors, ABC News even interviewed a Harvard psychiatrist who speculated Mateen may have been “trying to deal with internalized feelings” of homosexuality, and that “some men with repressed same-sex desires may express anti-gay views.” It quoted another shrink who said “people who are struggling to come to terms with their sexual identity” sometimes act out in “violent outbursts.”

The mainstream media, always anxious to exonerate the “Religion of Peace” from responsibility for the atrocities done in its name, has misled the public about the source of terrorism in an echo of the Benghazi cover-up orchestrated by the White House and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“It worked much the same as the false narrative on Benghazi,” said terrorism expert Patrick Dunleavy, former deputy inspector general of the New York State Criminal Intelligence Unit.

“Then it was, Blame it on an inflammatory anti-Muslim video,” he said. “Now the media jumped on the sexual ambiguity issue.”