Let’s Take Kamala Up on Her Proposal of ‘No Bad Ideas’

Townhall 

It’s getting tougher and tougher not to wish ill on Democrats, as they promise to trample the Constitution and commit to treating all Americans like we’re a young starlet and they’re Harvey Weinstein at the height of his powers. They are telling us what they’re going to do to us; how they’re going to force their will on us in any way they like, and each of them is taking things further and further down the rhetorical toilet. Maybe we should take failed 2024 Democratic presidential nominee and former Willie Brown side-piece Kamala Harris up on her proposal to implement a series of “bad ideas” before they have the chance to do it to everyone else?

Harris, on some random race-based podcast (Democrats have a lot of those, it’s their heroin), tried to rally Democrats Nuremberg-style (seems like old times for them) to do anything to seize power — saying there were “no bad ideas,” then listed off a bunch of horrible ones.

That list included packing the Supreme Court, ending the Electoral College, expanding House Membership to include multiple Members from the same district (multi-member districts), killing the filibuster and making DC and Puerto Rico states to get four more Democrat Senators.

These fascistic power-grabs were not met with horror or denounced for the totalitarian threats to American stability of our freedoms that they are; no, they were cheered as “proof” Kamala was “ready to fight” the Republicans.

Well, when someone is ready to fight you, get ready to fight them back harder.

Democrats are openly talking about packing the Supreme Court — bringing the total of Justices up to 13 from nine. Let’s do it now. President Trump should take Democrats up on their offer and appoint four more Justices before the left has a chance to think about what is hitting them.

Kamala talked about “multi-member districts,” which is simply taking existing districts and making 2 or more Members represent it. It’s really that basic, and really that stupid.

She wants to hold nominees for judges to account for lying in their confirmation hearings. I agree. You need to have been weaned on lead paint chips to believe Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t understand what a woman is; she should be impeached for perjury, removed and then prosecuted for it. It’s what Kamala Harris wants, so it would be racist not to do it, right?

The biggest change – and the dumbest in a sea of stupid – was granting Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico statehood to get four new Democrat senators. Putting aside the fact that DC is expressly denied statehood in the Constitution, why should Republicans wait to watch Democrats create new states when there is plenty of red in the country ready sliced and diced into new states?

Personally, I’d rather see Puerto Rico given its independence in exchange for a stripping of citizenship for its residents, but that’s just me.

Since that is unlikely, the next best thing would be to beat Democrats to the punch and create new states ourselves.

North and South Florida would be fun, don’t you think? East and West, North and South Dakota would make great vacation destinations, if you ask me. Eastern Montana is big, flat and farmland; Western is the Rockies — call them whatever you like, but they could easily be separate states with two new senators each.

Then there is California. The state is too large and has too many people, and its politics are dominated by Los Angeles and San Francisco, which regularly impose their will on the rest of the state, which is more conservative than anyone would suspect. Break it up. LA and SF together, along with the coastal areas between them, can be one state, with the rest of California sliced into three or four more.

Think of all the new Senators Republicans could create for themselves. I mean, if Democrats are proposing these things (and more) as “no bad ideas,” then they shouldn’t object to them, right?

Of course, they will – they’ll scream like a little girl with a skinned knee. But then, they always scream like little girls with issues, so why should this be any different?

Give Democrats a huge dose of their own medicine, led by an ad campaign of them saying these things themselves, spewing this stupidity like it’s the cure for cancer, then name it after them – the Kamala Harris Senate Expansion Act, or the Barack Obama Supreme Court Modernization Act. Have fun with it in the way left-wing absurdity deserves to be mocked. Put those morons on their heels and make them back away from the edge.

If they don’t, make them jump over it and crash on the rocks below. Either way, it’ll be fun and worth it. Let them learn the hard way that there are plenty of “bad ideas,” and they emanate from the vacuous minds of Democrats.

Podcast thread for May 24

 

quiet day

Here Is What’s Wrong With the Republican Party

Townhall 

A few quotes to begin this article, quotes which I fear too often describe too many “leaders” in the Republican Party.

     1. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (Edmund Burke)

Can you say “SAVE Act”?

Can you say “child mutilation”?

Can you say “men in women’s sports and bathrooms”?

Can you say “illegal immigrants”?

     2. “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.” (attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and others). "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." (Jonathan Swift)

The greatest success error has ever had is convincing countless numbers of people that its lies are the truth. The “Big Lie” is that eternal truth does not exist.

     3. “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” (Exodus 23:2)

Notice, please, that it is a “multitude” that does evil. For whatever reasons, the “multitude,” the “majority,” everywhere and at all times, has always pursued the “evil,” and, in this verse, God, through Moses, felt compelled to command the Israelites not to do that. Well, a subsequent reading of Old Testament history reveals that the Jewish people didn’t obey God’s instructions in Exodus 23:2, any more than anybody else in history, including modern Americans, has ever done. We never listen to God or learn from history. It is part of the problem with both political parties in America today.

The Democrat Party, and its evil, Leftist philosophy and morality, has unquestionably taken over American culture in the last few decades. Many things that we had never even heard of when I was a child (in the 1950s and ‘60s) are commonplace now, accepted by huge numbers of, and often by most, Americans, and some of this crass decadence is not even debated anymore. Abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, same sex marriage, “MAPs” (“Minor Attracted People”), child “grooming” and drag queens, transgenderism, men in women’s sports and bathrooms, child mutilation for sexual purposes, the “f” word as common as dirt, criminals as “victims” and allowed to roam the streets at will, illegal immigration, a massive welfare system that enslaves millions to government, people urinating and defecating on the streets—these, and similar things, are the culture the Democrat Party has given us, and defends as mightily, and often as violently, as they can.

Some of the things mentioned above were indeed totally unheard of when I was young; some were happening, and we knew it. But those who practiced them were ostracized from society to protect our children (especially) from such decadence and filth. “Men don’t kiss each other,” Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) told his robot friend Hymie (twice) in episodes of the popular 1960s comedy, Get Smart. Yes, in the 1960s, homosexuality was a perversion, and we all knew it. But don’t say that today.

Our language and Hollywood are much to blame for this—except, We, the People, have allowed it—it is now gutter language. I know a retired American living here in Thailand and the only adjective he knows is “f***ing.” I’m pretty sure he’s a Democrat, but it isn’t uncommon language in “conservative” circles, too. The Democrats have led and we have trotted right along behind—following the multitude to do evil. We’ve redefined evil in order to find solace and justify our current lusts and cultural decadence. And evil triumphs, not just because good men do nothing, but because “good” men do the same things! How do we ever expect to bring people back to truth and righteousness when we are as degenerate as they are? If we talk like they talk, go where they go, fornicate like they fornicate, do what they do, well, we’ll end up exactly where they are, if only arriving a little bit later. That’s the Republican Party today.

Folks, we aren’t just in a battle over political agendas and how much money the government is going to waste. We’re in a fight for the hearts, souls, and minds of men, for America, a fight of good versus evil, truth versus lies, righteousness versus decadence and depravity. If Republicans don’t even know the war we are in, how in the world can they ever expect to win it? Republicans like Sen. John Thune (R-SD) have no clue who the enemy even is, what they should be fighting for, what Democrats are fighting for, and thus what Republicans ought to be fighting against. So, is it any surprise we’ve been getting our butts kicked for the past few generations?

Democrats know exactly what they want. Too many Republicans don’t understand what Democrats want, or what they must do about it. 

Another example (one among countless I could give): Republican Derek Dooley is attempting to gain the GOP’s nomination for Senate in Georgia this year against John Ossoff. Recently, Dooley said that he may have to consider “both sides” of the illegal alien question. There is absolutely no doubt that, if elected to the Senate, Dooley would compromise on illegal immigration. He would give the Democrats what they want—just like the Republicans, for generations now, have been giving Democrats everything they’ve craved. Ultimately, on this vital issue of our time, what is the difference between Dooley and a Democrat? Well, he says he would consider “both sides,” which Democrats never do, of course. But do you have any doubt which “side” Dooley would end up on after he has announced, publicly, his willingness to consider the Democrat Party’s position?

Dooley would compromise because he is a weak man of no strong moral character. He would “follow the multitude (Democrats) to do evil.” And he has many, many cousins in the Republican Party today. And that is what is wrong with the Republican Party. Doing nothing—or doing the same things—and allowing evil to continue to triumph.

The New Barbary Pirates

American Thinker 

President Trump this week called Iran's new leaders "lunatics," because they just didn't seem capable of making a deal.

As he told Fortune magazine, "[T]hey make a deal, and then they send you a paper that has no relationship to the deal you made. I say, 'Are you people crazy?'"

The latest Iranian response to the U.S. was "leaked" to the Saudi daily al Arabiya on Thursday, and it's as much a non-starter as every other Iranian "plan" to end the war. The U.S. makes all the concessions, and Iran gets all the goodies.

If you read the details, it doesn't even mention Iran's nuclear weapons material, its enrichment capabilities, or its missiles. Talk about arrogant!

At the same time, the Iranians were telling the Saudi media of their agreement to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz they published their own map, which showed them claiming the entire Strait -- right up to the shoreline of the United Arab Emirates and Oman -- was in Iran's territorial waters.

They are behaving like the Barbary Pirates. 

Remember them? They were the ones who prompted President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to dispatch the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps because they were raiding U.S. commercial ships plying the Mediterranean and taking U.S. sailors as slaves. So we landed "on the shores of Tripoli," and the rest is history.

I say it's time to treat the Iranian regime the same way. Let's call it “the shores of Kharg and Lavan Island.” 

Leader Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly told his followers that there was no way he would agree to send Iran's stockpile of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) out of the country.

President Trump said that's not what the negotiators told him. But alas, all he knows is what the negotiators tell him.

The Iranians are clearly not negotiating in good faith, and in my view -- I know my Iranians -- they never will. Why? Because they are terrorists. 

The only good news this week has been reports from inside Iran of growing tensions between the IRGC and the artesh, Iran's conventional army. How credible those reports are, alas, is anyone's guess. But they are persistent.

So is the recent video of Hamid Resai, a cleric and member of parliament, who questioned the government decision-making process and even the legitimacy of the new Supreme Leader in a public address.  

So what is the plan?

The president seems willing to give the Iranians a bit more time to come to their senses. How much is anyone's guess.

They have already filled the oil storage tanks at Kharg Island and have been bringing thirty-year old crude carriers out of mothballs to serve as floating storage so they can keep on pumping oil.

The Saudis called the president this week and asked him to delay any return to hostilities until the end of the annual hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) which begins on May 25) and extends through Friday, May 29.

The Iranians have said they are preparing to launch a pre-emptive strike -- presumably against the UAE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia -- if they sense the U.S. and its allies are preparing to resume hostilities.

Perhaps they don't know what the centuries-old U.S. military term "locked and loaded" means.

The president has indicated that we have been learning a trick or two from the Ukrainians, and that our forces used the past month's ceasefire to install Ukrainian (and U.S.) counter-drone technology in theater to protect the oil fields, refineries, storage tanks, and pipelines on the Arab side of the Gulf.

Presumably, those protections will extend to the Gulf Arabs' massive desalination plants as well.

Those desalination plants could present an even more tempting target than the oil fields to an Iranian regime that sees itself going down. If they were taken out, it would be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

Such an attack by Iran would just solidify the impression that they have become the Barbary Pirates of the 21st century. It would also unify all the Gulf Arabs with the United States and Israel against them.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

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The Left Will Never Stop Justifying Political Violence

Townhall 

The Left has a political violence problem, and any accusations hurled at the Right are pure projection. A Bernie bro tried to kill Republicans at the Congressional Baseball Game, a Leftist tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and another tried to assassinate President Trump for the third time, along with other Cabinet members. 

Luigi Mangione is charged with murdering Brian Thompson, and Democrats blamed Thompson's work as CEO of UnitedHealthcare for the crime because UnitedHealthcare sometimes denies insurance claims. This, coming from the same people who openly endorsed denying medical care to the unvaccinated, is the peak of Leftist hypocrisy.

And, as we all remember, last September, contrary to what Jimmy Kimmel so asininely claimed, a Leftist assassinated Charlie Kirk in Utah. 

When Leftists aren't trying to shoot us, they're destroying our property and burning our cities to the ground. We had a rash of keyed and torched Teslas at the start of 2025, which is darkly ironic given the fact that the Left wants us to exclusively drive such vehicles to save the planet and all that.

What's the carbon footprint of a burning Cybertruck, by the way?

In 2020, while Democrats across the country made me stay home and refused a funeral for my Vietnam veteran father, BLM riots were allowed to take place because COVID knew racism was a virus, too, apparently.

And — six years later — the Left is still defending it.

That 'very limited' destruction cost at least $2 billion, far exceeding the cost of the Los Angeles riots in 1992. In addition, at least 42 people were killed.

Hostin has a funny definition of 'limited,' it seems.

Of course, the comparisons to January 6 abound, where there was actually limited property damage and no direct deaths, despite the Democrats' pretending to care about law enforcement for a moment and attributing officer deaths to the protests.

This is the game the Left plays, however. During COVID, if you opposed the lockdowns, the school shutdowns, the mask and vaccine mandates, you were evil. You were 'grandma killers.' You were anti-science. Protests objecting to such tyranny were verboten, of course.

But when George Floyd died, he not only got three fully-attended funerals, the riots that followed were exempt from lockdown orders, from curfews, from basic laws against arson, vandalism, and looting. Why? Because the Left supported the mission and aim of the BLM riots.

In the same way, when Leftists set up blockades and ID checkpoints in Minneapolis to 'protect' illegal aliens from ICE, those tactics are no longer marks of fascism, but 'community safety.'

For them, everything. For their enemies, the law. And if they justified BLM, just like they justified the murders of Thompson and Kirk, they'll justify any act of violence and injustice. Don't forget: Susan Rice, J.B. Pritzker, Hakeem Jeffries, and others have vowed to weaponize government against Trump supporters, conservatives, and the rest of their political opponents if they retake power in November.

There will be no limit to their retribution. And gals like Sunny Hostin will applaud it.

Elon Musk on Why We Don't Need Colleges: 'Learn Anything You Want for Free'

RedState 

For those of us who grew up in the days before the internet, even now it's rather amazing that we have all the knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips. When I was a kid, if I wanted to know something, I looked in books; if my parents' rather extensive library didn't have the information I sought, there were a couple of city libraries within an hour or so by car, and I could generally find what I sought there.

Now, though? If I'm not sitting here at my desk in front of four 27" screens and access to the entire internet, I can squint at the tiny screen on my phone and find pretty much the same information. Granted, the internet being what it is, there's an awful lot of chaff to be sifted through before one finds the wheat, but sometimes disappearing down those rabbit holes is part of the fun.

I'm also a guy who went to college. Twice, in fact, in the mid-1980s for an undergraduate degree in biology, then in the early Oughts for an MBA in technology management. In the case of my undergraduate degree, in those days, I only used a computer to write up research reports and to run a very elementary biostatistics program for some of my research. That MBA, though? All of that was information that I could have found on the internet.

Elon Musk has now taken the interesting position that this technology is making the university system obsolete. He might have a point.

Here's the key point from this:

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial.

Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise.

Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.”

For a thousand years, universities held one monopoly. Access. You paid the toll or you stayed ignorant.

The internet erased that in a decade.

Every lecture. Every framework. Every textbook. Free. From any screen on Earth.

The six-figure tuition is no longer buying knowledge. It is buying a signal.

Yes, everything you want is free, but there is a certain discipline required to attain and absorb that knowledge to the point where it's marketable. Colleges and universities can provide that discipline, or, rather, they can enforce that discipline. But here's the question: Should they have to?

Our system of higher education is badly broken. The system once brought a young skull of mush discipline and knowledge, but now, it seems increasingly like a rubber-stamp for... what?

Elon says these days that college is "basically for fun." Not everyone agrees with Elon.

Gen Z’s relationship with higher education has never been more fraught. Soaring tuition costs and a brutal entry-level job market have left many young people questioning whether getting a degree was worth it at all.

But Valerie Capers Workman, who served as vice president of people at Tesla, has a sharply different message for the graduating class of 2026: Don’t buy the noise. This comes even as her former boss, Elon Musk, is part of the chorus of powerful voices casting doubt on college.

“Do not let anyone, not a tech founder, not a headline, not a podcast host, convince you that your education was a waste,” Workman said last week at the Defining the Future conference at California State University, San Bernardino. “It was not. It is more valuable today than it has ever been.”

Color me skeptical. The American university system isn't functioning. It's not focused on producing young adults with marketable skills. It has been co-opted by the far-left, coddled by leftist politicians, and devoted to spewing out a plethora of useless Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies degrees. Maybe only the few that are dedicated and focused enough to learn on their own should be employed in fields where they are, in essence, selling their knowledge. That's how the world worked for hundreds, even thousands of years. Now, with all the knowledge in the world at our command, why shouldn't it work that way again?

New Report Reveals CIA Director John Ratcliffe Dropped One Heck of a Boss Move on Cuban Regime

RedState 

As we reported, while President Donald Trump was in China about ten days ago, CIA Director John Ratcliffe took a surprise trip to Cuba. 

The CIA announced the trip by posting pictures of the meeting Ratcliffe had with Cuban leaders, with the faces of some of the CIA folks sitting with him blurred out. He reportedly delivered a message from Trump that the United States was prepared to "engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes."

Just the CIA being there was likely a message in itself. The CIA is not normally fronting diplomatic outreach. It was a "Understand our capabilities — you don't want to hit the 'find out' stage."

But as it turns out, Ratcliffe put even more of an exclamation point on that message, according to a CBS report, with one heck of a boss move. It's important to note in explaining this report that the former Venezuelan leader, Nicholas Maduro, had a Cuban security detail. In part because so many Venezuelans hated him. So it was safer for him than having Venezuelans in the detail. But in the capture of Maduro, Cuba claims that a number of those Cuban security people were killed. 

According to the report, when Ratcliffe was in Cuba meeting with Cuban officials, he brought along the  "paramilitary officer" involved in the mission to capture Maduro earlier this year.

Ratcliffe made a point of introducing the paramilitary leader to the Cubans as the one who killed their people in Venezuela, several sources said. 

The presence of a paramilitary officer who was involved in capturing a key partner of the Cuban government just months earlier may have been intended to send a signal.

Ya think? Talk about a message. 

Add to the other pressure the U.S. is putting on for change, including the indictment against former leader Raúl Castro. At this point, they've already had a lot of people in the streets, protesting the failures of the government. Then, too, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group is also in the area. Although its deployment was planned for a while, it's also something that they would have to keep in mind. 

If they're not getting the message that a change is coming, they're not paying attention, at this point. I think if I were them, I'd be considering making some of those serious changes Ratcliffe was talking about. But, ideally, the people just say enough and take out the Communist regime after all these years. 

Lockheed Martin Unveils New AI Superweapons to Destroy Drone Swarms

RedState 

One of the major problems any military force has is this: All too often, they train to fight the last war, and neglect looking around at current conflicts for lessons. One such current conflict is the Russo-Ukrainian War, which is still somehow dragging on; another is the United States' takedown of the 7th-century barbarians running Iran. Both of these conflicts have given us plenty to consider when it comes to one of the newer weapons of war: Drones.

Drones, especially drone swarms, pose the possibility of overwhelming traditional air defenses and causing significant damage, not only to combat forces but also to an army's logistical trains; that's something that Ukraine in particular seems to have a knack for. Now, the American company Lockheed Martin has announced the development of some new weapons systems that combine AI with the weapons themselves, specifically to counter drone swarms. So far, the company isn't revealing a lot of detail, but Lockheed Martin's CEO, Jim Taiclet, recently handed out a few hints.

A top U.S. defense contractor pulled back the curtain on next-generation AI-powered systems designed to hunt down and destroy swarms of enemy drones as the U.S. rapidly expands its next-generation warfighting capabilities.

"We are inserting technology of all types into our systems," Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet told FOX Business on Thursday, detailing the company's AI-powered counter-drone system, Sanctum.

Taiclet said the system uses artificial intelligence to detect incoming drones, determine whether they pose a threat and predict where they are headed before they can be intercepted or disabled.

Knowing where a drone swarm is headed as long as possible before it could arrive, obviously, would give defenders a big advantage. T'was ever thus; the advent of radar and its use by the British made a lot of German bomber aviators maladjusted during the Battle of Britain, when they would fly across the English Channel to find several flights of British Hurricanes and Spitfires neatly arranged on their flight path. The same would seem to apply here, with drones and drone swarms; the sooner we can discern their targets, the better.

Lockheed Martin isn't talking about just hitting drones, either:

"This technology alone is fantastic in being able to essentially hit a bullet with a bullet in space and destroy an incoming ballistic missile that's threatening our people, threatening our bases, threatening our allies," he said.

"But along with that, we've got to match — with technology — other threats, and we want to match the threat to the cost of our counterthreat."

The company is also focusing on a device called MORFIUS, a system capable of flying close to small enemy drones and "zapping" them with high-powered microwave pulses before moving on to the next target.

"This drone that we're building with the help of AI will enable us to attack 50 different drones with one mission without firing any weaponry," he shared.

A little short on details, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless; and it is perhaps belaboring the obvious to note that it's not really a good idea to broadcast all of the capabilities of a potential new weapons system, especially one like this, that's on the cutting edge of modern combat force. Lockheed Martin seems to get that. 

Drones are a fairly new tool of war. Ballistic missiles, not so much, but they remain difficult to counter. But the United States can either stay on the cutting edge of these new technologies, or we can lag behind and run the risk of being overrun. The War Department seems inclined to the former. And, honestly, the American taxpayers should be, as well; this is something that is actually a constitutional responsibility of the federal government, as well as part of the one primary purpose of government: To protect the liberty and property of the citizens.

Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain's Journey

 

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. ~ John 15:13 (RSV)

"Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain's Journey" is a documentary that explores the extraordinary heroism and sacrifice of U.S. combat chaplains throughout American wars, highlighting their role as spiritual warriors who provide courage and comfort to soldiers without carrying weapons. The film follows a former Army chaplain and features stories of chaplains from various faiths who have served and made the ultimate sacrifice.

~ Search Assist

This ~ 73 minute documentary is well worth the watch. 

https://tubitv.com/movies/100058006/fighting-spirit-a-combat-chaplain-s-journey

Images: screen grabs from the film.

Trailor:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew1m9v_kSDY

Sunday Scripture

 

Reflection from Search Assistant 

This verse emphasizes the grace and favor of God. It serves as a reminder of His kindness and the blessings He bestows upon us. Seeking God's grace can inspire us to extend kindness to others in our daily lives.

Application

• Encouragement: Use this verse to encourage someone who may need a reminder of God's grace.
• Prayer: Incorporate this verse into your prayers, asking for God's smile and grace in your life and the lives of others.

This verse can be a source of comfort and hope, reminding us of the loving nature of God.

Sunday Surprise !

 This Unique Castle Has Been One Family’s Home Through 34 Generations and for Over 800 Years

A fairytale castle in Germany has survived since the medieval era under the care of one single family. Thanks to a community effort and the family’s dedication, the castle stands unscathed by war and demolition and is now beloved the world over as a piece of history, a stunning photo hotspot, and a testament to beauty through the ages.

Eltz Castle, or “Burg Eltz,” is nestled in the hills above the Moselle River between Koblenz and Trier in Germany and has been owned and cared for by at least 34 generations of the Eltz family since it was built in 1157. Many of its original furnishings remain, as does an armory, a treasury, and a collection of gold and silver artifacts.

More of a home than a fortress, it was built to house the Eltz family and secure trade routes between the Mosel and Eifel regions. It was once even featured on the 500 deutsche mark bill.

The castle decorates the skyline, sitting on top of a 230-foot (70-meter) rock spur surrounded by the Elzbach river valley, dense forest, and numerous hiking trails. Eight stories high, the main structure of the castle houses the family’s living quarters, once home to up to 100 family members in 100 rooms.

Its eight towers soar up to 115 feet (35 meters) into the air, giving the castle its fairytale silhouette, according to the castle’s website. Staff and craftsmen servicing the castle were once employed from a village that existed on the south side of the castle, in the valley below.

The entrance to Eltz Castle circa  1860 BeckenhamBear/CC BY-SA 4.0

Despite being conquered in the early 14th century by Elector Balduin of Trier, Eltz Castle remains one of only three in the Eifel region, alongside Bürresheim and Lissingen Castles, which has never been destroyed.

The care of Eltz Castle was regulated by formal contracts called “burgfriedensbriefe,” or castle peace deeds, that set rules for its community’s joint responsibility to preserve the castle. Ever since the 12th century, the oldest son of the Eltz family has been at the helm. Today, that man is Count Johann-Jakob zu Eltz, to whom his parents passed the baton in 2018.

The inner courtyard of Eltz Castle as pictured on May 25, 2017 Don Mammoser/Shutterstock

Johann-Jakob, who lives nearby, grew up in Eltz Castle and still likes to spend time there. He enjoys and takes care of the fastness he still considers home.

“I have no staff looking after me, those days are long gone,” the count told Hannah Hummel of DW Travel during a castle tour. “I live a very modern life. ... I work here, so I get out my laptop in the morning, I drink my coffee that I made myself in my kitchen, in my coffee machine, and I answer my emails.

“I think many people would recognize it as being similar to their own lives, I’m just very, very fortunate that the surroundings are very beautiful.”

An antique medieval stone arch inside the castle Titolino/Shutterstock

The natural beauty of Johann-Jakob’s surroundings owes to the rich endemic flora and fauna in the surrounding Eltz Forest Nature Reserve. Classified as an “arboretum,” the forest also boasts a variety of rare indigenous and introduced tree species.

The castle opened for tourism sometime around 1820. A team of 100 staff now runs the site as a business subsidized by government funding, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each year searching for a unique insight into German architecture and castle life over almost nine incredible centuries.

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