Culture beat: Royally Wrong

At The Federalist, Sumantra Maitra snorts at far-left British writer Afua Hirsch’s claim that racism drove Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from Britain. Hirsch, whose “entire worldview and existence is colored by race,” is either “utterly deluded” or, worse, “deliberately race-baiting,” Maitra charges. After all, millions of Britons “lined the streets” for Harry and Meghan’s wedding. The real problem is “pure liberal-individualist narcissism”: The couple couldn’t tolerate royal life, which requires “duty, stoicism, propriety and patriotism.” You can’t simultaneously be “a Hollywood hypocrite” and “an aristocrat above daily politics” — so Harry and Meghan chose the first option.

Conservative: China Deal Only a Ceasefire

The phase-one trade deal President Trump signed with China on Wednesday is “simply a truce in a battle that will likely resume after ­November’s election,” warns The Washington Post’s Henry Olsen. The agreement meets “each side’s short-term needs”: “China gets tariff relief” and the United States gets “Chinese promises to purchase” more US-made goods. But the deal doesn’t “resolve any of the issues underlying the dispute,” since “China will still subsidize its industries and conduct practices tantamount to intellectual-property theft.” Worse, “it is increasingly obvious that China is building a techno-totalitarian state capable of suppressing internal dissent and imposing its will around the world. And it’s doing it with US money, US intellectual property and access to US markets.” Eventually, some president must “start the long and painful process of ­reducing US support for the Chinese regime as quickly as practicable.”

Ex-prosecutor: America’s Foreign-Vetting Crisis

The Saudi Air Force trainee who shot up a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., in December is a terrorist, says the Justice Department, and the United States is expelling 21 other Saudi trainees after the FBI found that their ­Internet activities included jihadist rhetoric and/or child porn. It all goes to show America needs to do a better job “vetting foreigners, including the thousands of foreigners enrolled in training programs run by our armed forces, for anti-American ideology,” says National Review’s Andrew McCarthy. One such ideology is “Shariah supremacism,” which aims to impose worldwide “a fundamentalist construction of Islamic law.” The United States doesn’t bar aliens from entering unless they have active ties to terrorist violence — meaning “we have been cowed into the concession that it would be ‘Islamophobic’ bigotry to vet Muslim aliens for Shariah-supremacist ideology.” Having thus “straitjacketed” ourselves, we are at the mercy of dubious governments like Saudi Arabia to do our vetting for us.

2020 watch: Warren Channels Clinton

Elizabeth Warren pulled “a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone,” argues Spectator USA’s Matt McDonald. Her team leaked details of a 2018 meeting between Warren and Bernie Sanders “during which Sanders allegedly said ‘he did not believe a woman could win.’ ” He denies the allegation, but “does it really matter whether it’s true? Once more people are talking about the latent sexism of the Sanders campaign and the mythic ‘Bernie bros,’ regurgitating a popular Clinton-supporter allegory from the 2016 primaries.” Warren seems “eager to lean on the Democratic machine’s old ways,” and this “latest stunt merely suggests that Liz is just another backbiting elite politician, more interested in getting ahead than standing for decency.”

From the left: CNN Guns for Bernie

The moderators of Tuesday’s Democratic debate “brought out the bat and swung it hard” at Bernie Sanders, observe The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, Aída Chávez and Akela Lacy. CNN’s Abby Phillip started the pile-on by asking Sanders why he told Liz Warren he “did not believe that a woman could win the election” — something he had already said he didn’t say. Phillip then “waved away” his fresh denial and asked Warren what she thought when Sanders said it. And moderators’ passive-aggressive slams of Sanders continued all night. Yet, despite the “pummeling,” Sanders’ campaign had its “best fundraising hour of any debate thus far.” Another failed media effort.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board