Tea at Trianon: Incredible Impact

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Incredible Impact

From The Epoch Times:

Jaco Booyens, the founder of SHAREtogether, said former President Donald Trump’s efforts to create an office dedicated to fighting sex trafficking made an “incredible impact” over the last four years. SHAREtogether is a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating child sex trafficking.
Booyens was interviewed by NTD on Friday and asked to expound on the big sex trafficking bust that occurred in California this week. Sixty-four people were arrested and two women were rescued in an anti-human trafficking sting in California’s Riverside County. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said the arrests were part of Operation Reclaim and Rebuild, an annual statewide operation. The sting “ran for four consecutive days before concluding on January 28, 2021,” the department said on Tuesday.
“It’s a big orchestration, to execute a sting or a bust, like what we’ve just seen in California, and it takes months and months of planning and funding. And that’s why it’s very important for both local and federal, local, state, and federal government to support the fight against sex trafficking, because you cannot do it on your own,” Booyens said.
He noted that for these operations to succeed, they need to be able to be conducted in a way that they can have standing in court, and some connections between the judicial system and the police have to exist.
Booyens said that before Trump “we’ve never had an office in the White House designated and dedicated to fighting sex trafficking. No former president in the history of this country has used his or her platform to denounce the exploitation of children and then appropriate funding. So we’ve seen an incredible impact over the years, over the last four years, particularly towards the support for law enforcement.” (Read more.)