From the right: Epstein’s Death Stinks

Usually, the simplest explanation for a mysterious event is the most likely to be true. But “not so” when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein’s death while in pretrial custody, Will Chamberlain says at Human Events. “Assembling an innocent explanation of Epstein’s death requires assuming a staggering amount of incompetence on the part” of the staff at Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. “They would have had to innocently give their most infamous and high-profile criminal defendant the means and opportunity to kill himself, and in doing so, utterly fail at their most basic responsibilities.” More important, the probes have just begun, which means that “those journalists reporting that Jeffrey Epstein, in fact, did commit suicide are themselves ahead of the facts.”

Foreign desk: China Can’t Repeat Tiananmen

The size and persistence of Hong Kong’s mass-protest movement is “striking,” asserts an Economist editorial. But while “everybody is nervous about how this is going to end . . . few expect an outcome as brutal as the massacre of hundreds and maybe thousands of citizens” at Tiananmen Square in 1989. “If China were to send in the army,” the editorial argues, “the risks would be not only to the demonstrators” — but to the Beijing regime itself. Such an intervention “would undermine business confidence in Hong Kong and, with it, the fortunes of the many Chinese companies that rely on its stock market to raise capital.” Yes, the Communist Party “remains as determined to retain power as it was 30 years ago.” But “putting these protests down with the army would not reinforce China’s stability and prosperity. It would jeopardize them.”

Religion beat: The Unchecked Rise of Anti-Catholicism

“The rise in violence against Catholics has been strangely ignored and downplayed — not only by the media, but by Catholics themselves,” laments Matthew Schmitz at The Catholic Herald. Recently, vandals have vomited in the holy water stoups of Saint-Budoc à Porspoder in France and splashed paint on the faces and crotches of the holy figures in the Valinhos Way of the Cross in Fatima, Portugal. Yet “many Catholic are -understandably reluctant to complain about what Pope Francis has called ‘polite persecution,’ ” observes Schmitz, while others “fear that drawing attention to these attacks will encourage the scapegoating of Muslims, despite the fact that most of these acts do not seem to be perpetrated by Muslims.” Bottom line: “Our liberal culture has a highly developed vocabulary for protecting minority rights. But there is no set of terms for describing violence against the faith that in many ways defined the West.”

Historian: The Campaign To Silence Tucker Carlson

At The Hill, Victor Davis Hanson fumes over the liberal campaign to drive away sponsors from Tucker Carlson’s show. The Fox News anchor’s sin? He “has voiced some inconvenient truths that earn outrage but not refutation.” Among them, that “while white-supremacy ideology always must be monitored and can trigger the unhinged . . . it is no longer a ubiquitous movement as it once was.” Plus, “Carlson -emphasized that in comparison to America’s real existential challenges — homelessness, drug epidemics, the threat of Chinese mercantilism, keeping a vibrant economy going — white supremacy simply does not register with the general public as a major threat.” Add his huge ratings and heterodox conservatism, and “the net result is that Carlson’s leftist opponents” imagine they can and should take him down.

Science Buff: Jupiter’s Red Spot Is Here To Stay

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot “is one of our solar system’s most famous features,” explains Jacob Stern in The Atlantic. So when it began “flaking” and “shrinking,” the community of “die-hard amateur astronomers” who track it began to worry that they were watching its gradual demise. Professional scientists at NASA, however, insist that the spot isn’t dying. “It’s always doing this,” as one astronomer notes. For now, Stern writes, scientists have learned to “accept much of Jupiter’s behavior as random. By investigating the recent changes, though, some scientists hope to find clues to perhaps the planet’s greatest mystery of all: why the Great Red Spot is red in the first place.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board