From the right: Masters of Unreality

“As weeks pass without a recession,” Conrad Black writes in American Greatness, it’s clear that all the negative talk about the economy is just “the latest ploy” of Democrats and “the anti-Trump media phalanx.” Attempts to ruin Trump began with the Russia investigation, then moved to charges of racism about the border. This summer, the president’s critics tried to tie Trump to the El Paso and Dayton shootings. Now comes the recession claim, which “contains no more substance than the chimeras that preceded it.” Fact is, economic growth, inflation, GDP, manufacturing job growth, minority unemployment and purchasing power are all at good levels. “The inconvenient truth” for Democrats, argues Black, “is that Trump has been a good president who has kept his promises.”

Theologian: A Lone Aussie Justice for Truth

In The Catholic Herald, Chad Pecknold cheers Justice Mark Weinberg, the lone judge to dissent from an Australian appellate court’s ruling this week upholding George Cardinal Pell’s sex-abuse conviction despite the absence of “any corroborating evidence that would normally be required.” By their own admission, the two judges in the majority were moved by the earnestness of the accuser to overlook the many discrepancies in his account. But, asks Pecknold, “since when do we convict people of crimes because their accusers sound earnest?” Especially in such a high-profile case, “charged with an anti-Catholic sentiment,” the appellate court “had a duty to carefully examine the evidence again and determine whether the jury should have had any reasonable doubts.” Judge Weinberg did exactly that, and as he wrote in his dissenting opinion, “my doubt is a doubt which the jury should have had.”

Libertarian: RIP, David Koch

Prominent businessman and philanthropist David Koch died at age 79 on Friday. With his brother Charles, David “ran one of America’s most prominent political giving machines,” writes Brian Doherty at Reason. Thanks to the brothers’ penchant for donating to political causes, the “Kochs became bêtes noires of the American left.” David Koch, a 36-year trustee of the Reason Foundation, was “often incorrectly described as a conservative.” In fact, he was “a lifelong libertarian whose work and giving reflected the values of free enterprise and limited government.” But what many might not know is that “the vast bulk of Koch’s philanthropy was not political. It included hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research,” as well as “major arts and sciences institutions, museums, schools, and public television,” much of it in New York City.

Hate watch: The Democrats’ Anti-Semitism Crisis

The Democratic Party is now “not just blind to anti-Jewish bigotry, but an engine of it,” warns Liel Leibovitz in Tablet magazine. The party has tolerated the Women’s March, whose leaders “sang hosannas to Louis Farrakhan,” and the obviously anti-Semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar. It was silent about Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Mideast trip being sponsored by a group whose Web site claimed Jews use “the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.” The latest: a bill — backed by “House Democrats who abjure anti-Semitism in theory” — that also evokes blood-libel imagery. Meanwhile the left wails that President Trump is the “greatest anti-Semite of our age.” Really? asks Leibovitz. Fact is, “the party we [Jews] thought would be ours for eternity appears to be well on its way to becoming something entirely hostile to Jews.”

Science beat: It’s Literally Raining Stardust

Scientists melted Antarctic snow, sifted it, threw it into an incinerator and discovered “something unusual: a radioactive form of iron” — which is “produced in abundance in space” when a dying star explodes but not often found on Earth, reports Marina Koren in The Atlantic. Physicist Dominik Koll calls the iron “actual stardust.” Some samples of it have been found before, and “the variety of the findings, in location and timestamp,” suggest it came not from one supernova but “a flurry of them.” Scientists don’t know how the dust ended up on Earth but believe the stardust continues to drizzle down even today. “The same kind of stardust still surrounds us,” Koren writes. “We’re still in the midst of the storm.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board