James Taranto and John Brimelow, that is.

While James Taranto rarely agrees with John Brimelow, or the rest of us at VDARE.com, on immigration, race relations, profiling and so-on, based on three recent columns, Taranto seems to be agreeing with John Brimelow’s theory that “the biggest casualty from Hurricane Katrina is going to be race relations.”

Taranto’s columns don’t emphasize the looting, raping, shooting at helicopters and general chaos, but rather the pointless whining of black spokesmen, and the general divorce from reality of the black electorate. Here’s what Taranto had to say three days in a row, shortly after Katrina:

• The Truth About Race in America

  The truth about race that Katrina illuminates, then, is that, at least when it comes to matters involving race, black Americans are extreme political outliers. This is why attempts to play the race card are politically futile: They have to appeal not just to blacks, but to a substantial minority of whites. The Gallup poll results makes clear that the current racial appeals are not resonating with whites.

• The Truth About Race in America–II

  Of course it is human nature to empathize with people who are “like us,” which is why people care more when a disaster strikes their country than a foreign land. Thus it’s perfectly understandable that black Americans would respond with a heightened fervor to the sufferings of fellow blacks after Hurricane Katrina.

  But it makes no sense to expect nonblacks to empathize with blacks because they are black. Transracial empathy must be based on what people of different races have in common: that we are fellow Americans, or fellow human beings. The use of a natural disaster as an occasion for racial grievance is a hindrance, not an aid, to national solidarity and empathy.

• The Truth About Race in America–III

  It’s hard to make people feel guilty when they personally have done nothing wrong. It’s hard to argue that racial disparities are the product of extant racism when there is no direct evidence that such racism is anything but extremely rare, and when public policy actually favors blacks over whites.

  On Tuesday we noted that black Americans have sharply different views on racial matters than do white Americans and, therefore, than do Americans as a whole. What we are arguing today is that the views of whites are likely to move even further away from those that blacks now hold.

So it seems that John Brimelow was right about the fallout from the storm, if it’s even afflicting the Wall Street Journal. In fact, Taranto later linked to this Minneapolis story about a white telephone repairman being shot by black man, [A shooting with disturbing implications Tom Ford, Star Tribune September 16, 2005 ]

Under the heading There Oughta Be a Law Taranto wrote

An unwritten rule against harming people whose work brings them into different parts of the city was broken when the telephone repairman was shot as he did his job, Assistant Minneapolis Chief Tim Dolan said Thursday.

“If that line starts to be crossed, the quality of life here is going to be seriously affected,” he said.

Shooting a telephone repairman in Minnesota breaks “an unwritten rule”? In some states it would actually be against the law.

If Taranto keeps this up, the WSJ may start looking like American Renaissance. [Congratulate Taranto.]

Over at la Times in Los Angeles, a Mexophile columnist is already cheering the cultural loss of New Orleans to Hispanic illegals arriving to “help.” (Cajuns and other Louisianans are capable of making even French sound good in their wonderful musical tradition, but adding large numbers of Mexicans to the unique culture would be putting arsenic in the gumbo.)

NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It’s the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate. ["La Nueva Orleans" LA Times, 9/25,05]

President Bush has already greased the skids for Mexicans by suspending Davis-Bacon (which requires government contractors to pay prevailing wage) and halting sanctions for employers who hire “undocumented” workers. Even in the most serious national situations, Bush always gives advantage to Mexicans over Americans, and Katrina is no exception.

El Presidente Fox is licking his big wolfish chops at the New Orleans suffering, and could hardly wait for Katrina’s winds to die down before he was pushing Mexican workers, whom he sees as obedient remittance senders (with the amount likely topping $20 billion this year).

Thanks to House member Charlie Norwood who told Vicente Fox what he could do with his workers from the scab nation, remarking “We should not allow our national tragedy to become Mexico’s gain.”

Amen, brother!

Our contributor Paul Belien notes in his Brussels Journal that Chokri Ben Chikha, a Tunisian-descended artist in Flanders, is receiving a subsidy from the Belgian Ministry of Culture for his play “Our Lady of Flanders“, which attacks anti-immigrant discrimination and is being advertized with a poster featuring a bare-breasted Madonna. Last year, as Belien reported for us, Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim “Dutchman” for making a film featuring abused Muslim women with Koranic verses on their naked backs. (Fairly discreetly, judging by Belien’s picture).

Money vs. murder - that’s an incentive structure that sends a message!

Check out this article on How Race Wrecked Liberalism by
James Nuechterlein. [First Things, August/September 2005: Articles]

If you’ve forgotten the old riots of the Sixties, you might be interested to know some of these things:

Infinitely more troubling to political moderates were the violent racial protests in the North that began in 1964 and continued, in escalating severity, every summer for several years. Within two weeks of passage of the civil-rights legislation of 1964 a major riot broke out in Harlem, followed quickly by outbreaks in other northeastern cities. Just five days after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 came the conflagration in Watts, one of the deadliest race riots in the nation’s history.

It would be difficult to overestimate the damage that those and subsequent riots did to the cause of civil rights. White guilt dissipated; white outrage flourished. Moderates had assumed that in supporting civil-rights legislation they were both doing the right thing and purchasing social order. When that implicit bargain broke down, they felt betrayed, and they became increasingly dubious about arguments that only further legislation would make possible a break in an endless series of “long, hot summers.”

The reaction to the riots on the Left further unsettled moderate whites. King, not surprisingly, blamed specific outbreaks mostly on official misbehavior—often police brutality—and put increasing emphasis on the economic roots of black protest. He called the Watts riot a “class revolt” of the underprivileged. Many white liberals, while insisting that they did not condone black violence, so emphasized the importance of understanding the frustrations leading to its occurrence that they seemed to be justifying it.

And the riots weren’t happening in the Jim Crow South, where blacks could complain of genuine oppression; they were happening in places like Los Angeles, where black already enjoyed equal rights, as a matter of California law.