Conservative Supreme Court justice hit pieces: We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels.

“Wait till the next empty shoe drops.”

That’s how law professor Josh Blackman concludes a discussion of The New York Times’ open-mouthed discovery that law schools have summer study-abroad programs and sometimes they recruit celebrity professors, even Supreme Court justices, to teach them.

The Times believes it has found a scandal because George Mason’s Scalia Law School has one of these programs and seeks Supreme Court justices to teach in the summer.

My law school has one of these too. So does Blackman’s.

He comments: “Shocker! A DC law school works hard to connect its students with the leaders of the profession. My own law school has organized similar programs in the past with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg. (My students described it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)”

But, you see, the law school and the justices involved here are conservative, so the Times thinks — or, more accurately, wants its readers to think — there must be something nefarious going on, perhaps “collusion.”

Why, George Mason’s legal clinic sometimes files friend-of-the-court briefs in the Supreme Court, which the paper would like you to believe is some sort of conflict of interest.

Never mind that schools like Harvard and Yale were — until recently, anyway — much closer to many justices on the court than this.

(Note that every member of the court except Amy Coney Barrett is an alumnus of Harvard or Yale.)

There’s nothing there, but the Times doesn’t care.

The Supreme Court has ruled against the left on guns and abortion and is expected to strike down affirmative action any day now.

Thus it must be delegitimized in any way possible.

Just as the breathless coverage of the (entirely fake) stories of Donald Trump cavorting with Russian hookers in Moscow convinced some people that with so much smoke there must be fire.

Well, if the notion “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is popular, you can expect a brisk trade in smudge-pots, and smudge is what the Times is dispensing.

And other media outlets.

This follows an equally bogus ProPublica story claiming Clarence Thomas’ vacations with a rich friend, Harlan Crow, are unethical.

Crow had no business before the court, and Supreme Court justices have always been allowed to have friends. (Chief Justice Fred Vinson played poker with President Harry Truman.)

The point was for the press to make a big deal about it.

It even tried to make Crow out as some sort of Nazi for having a statue of Hitler, omitting that he collects statues of all sorts of deposed dictators, including Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

You’d think the Times — whose own Walter Duranty covered up Stalin’s Holodomor, a campaign of starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians — would be OK with that. (The paper even kept Duranty’s Pulitzer after his lies were revealed.)

It’s an empty shoe.

Former Justice Stephen Breyer, questioned about the Crow allegations in a PBS interview, responded simply that Thomas is “a man of integrity.”

Politico then got into the game with a hit at Neil Gorsuch for the sale of a house he held a share in — for less than the asking price, to a Democratic donor, which transaction the justice reported.

None of these stories would make headlines if the court were still reliably leftist.

The Democrats and the media — but I repeat myself — live by a principle of “Rule or ruin.”

They consider it treasonous to cast doubt on elections but have no trouble undermining democracy by casting unfounded doubt on our highest court’s honesty if it won’t play ball.

Some years ago — long enough that people thought it was a defense of Bill Clinton in his various scandals — Peter W. Morgan and I published a book on ethics called “The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.”

We made two arguments.

First, people who deploy the “appearance of impropriety” standard are generally trying to create appearances, which they intend to use in ways that are themselves unethical.

And second, a focus on appearances often distracts — and is often designed to distract — from things that are substantively much worse.

The former is obviously present here, but so is the latter.

The same news media that told us there were tough questions of “journalistic ethics” in publishing the (truthful) news of Biden family corruption gleaned from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop are trying to create false impressions of unethical behavior on the court.

By its fruit the tree is known.

And the fruit of today’s news media is poisonous.