Zohran just played colleges’ race game, Dems’ anti-city ‘paucity’ agenda and other commentary

Libertarian: Zohran Just Played Colleges’ Game

“If you want to be mad at someone” over news that Uganda-born Zohran Mamdani checked the box for “black or African American” on his 2009 Columbia application, “be mad at colleges that incentivize applicants to be misleading about their skin pigmentation because false value is assigned to it,” argues Reason’s Robby Soave. Democrats who call this story “a giant nothingburger” likely probably feel differently if, say, South African Elon Musk checked the same box. Still, “I don’t really blame [Mamdani] for getting creative in order to (imperfectly) capture the nuances of a complicated ethnic background,” though it does show why assigning merit based on broad racial categorization “is fraught and inadvisable.” “There are two groups of people who obsess over race as a category: old-school racists, and college admissions departments.”

From the right: Dems’ Anti-City ‘Paucity’ Agenda

Liberal elites’ “abundance” agenda “called for easing regulations to boost the supply of housing, energy, jobs and more,” but socialist Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani offers a “paucity platform that calls for higher taxes on the rich, greater income redistribution, and expanding government control,” notes the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley. Both camps “believe government should re-engineer the economy and society to their desired liberal ends.” But those policies like California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “phony permitting reforms” have resulted in “an acute shortage of single-family homes,” “sky-high prices” and rents that “average about 50% higher than in the rest of the country.” As progressives’ policies make cities unlivable, they are “driving people who don’t share their politics to leave.”

Eye on Cali: So Long, One-State Auto Standards

“For decades, California has made environmental policy as if it were a sovereign nation,” adopting more stringent auto-emissions standards than the nation because it supposedly faced “uniquely urgent challenges,” recounts Kerry Jackson at City Journal. Automakers had to produce vehicles that met Cali’s tougher rules, since making one set for the state and another for everyone else was too expensive. But “that arrangement may finally be unraveling,” thanks to “legislation signed by President Trump” that’ll “end California’s practice of nullifying federal law.” The Golden State may be “unique,” but too many of its decisions “affect other states, whose voters don’t have a say” in them. The “country would appreciate more cooperation and less separatism from California, along with some overdue political humility.”

Conservative: Conspiracy Theorists’ Remorse

“How do you get a conspiracy theorist to stop believing in the conspiracy? Put him in charge of revealing” it, smirks National Review’s Jim Geraghty as Justice Department bigs Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino admit the supposed Jeffrey Epstein coverup is a nothingburger. Bondi and the gang long “had no problem creating a false impression” that there was plenty of hard evidence of a “client list” detailing all the compromised power players. Bongino and Patel are now contradicting “conspiracy theories about Epstein’s activities and his death” that they had long promoted. “Apparently, sometimes you overturn a rock, and you just find the bottom of a rock.”

Culture critic: Porno Regs Help Kids

“There is a seedy underworld of the pornography industry that does not care who is seeing its content, let alone being affected by it,” warns Elisha Krauss at The Washington Examiner. But we’ve just seen “the Supreme Court make a decision that was a win for states’ rights and protections for minors in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton,” which lets states require porn sites to verify users’ ages. “Not having protections in place to make sure minors do not have access to violent sexually explicit material is a hellish reality we cannot allow.” Research shows that “addictive pornography use is linked to triggering and recidivism in men in violent and domestic sexual assault situations.” “Serving up dangerous materials that historically show negative effects on grown men, let alone children, is not a road we need to go down as a nation.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board