Monday

April 20th, 2026

Insight

Pick Your Poison: Droned? Or Raped and Stabbed?

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published April 20, 2026

Pick Your Poison: Droned? Or Raped and Stabbed?

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Putin is apparently doing this to demoralise the citizenry before his push to seize the entire Donbass by late summer - plus Sweden's version of Kharg Island. The target of the above drone was the Bernadine monastery and church, just around the corner from me. They were last attacked in 1587, by Mikołaj Jazłowiecki, a supporter of the Habsburg claimant to the Polish throne, Maximilian III. So they had to be rebuilt in the early 1600s. Still, four hundred years isn't a bad run. So, after Alison brought it up, I toddled round to take a look. The drone had hit the beautiful bell tower but damage was minimal because it had evidently ricocheted from there to do more damage to surrounding buildings. The windows were all boarded up, but so they are on all other Lviv churches. I'm glad the giant crucifix just in front of the scaffolded statue (see photo above) survived, because I observed, from under the exhortation to "Pray for Ukraine", a striking number of Lviv's more elderly female pedestrians stopping to genuflect before Christ.

Still, I'm not sure Mr Mylovanov is quite right about the ease with which a Shahed drone can take away your "sense of future". I love Lviv for the same reasons, as Mark Steyn Cruisers may recall, I love Trieste on the Adriatic: it has an old mediaeval quarter of narrow cobbled streets and then around it a newer Habsburgian development; likewise, the cuisine is excellent and the girls are pretty - and they all stroll around, enjoying a fine if war-wearied quality of life and without giving much thought as to whether Russo-Iranian military cooperation is taking away any "sense of future". A few said to me that they preferred nighttime drones to daytime ones (as do I, if that's the choice) but they perambulated in pretty spring outfits without fear. As do I, if rather less appealingly accoutred. As I write, the air-raid warning has just gone off - and we're all ignoring - customers and waitresses - the instruction to go to the shelter and continuing to whoop it up in gay abandon on the terrace.

For what it's worth, I always feel safer in Lviv, and Košice and Budapest, than I do these days in, oh, Paris and Berlin and New York. Why? Because, in the former, lack of diversity is their strength. Diversity has made every western city sod-bollockingly the same - and from the metropolis it spreads. News from England's leafy home counties:

Are you worried about "illegal" immigration? You're so right. At least poor Lauren Bullis, an employee of the bleepwittingly named "Department of Homeland Security", was shot six times in the face and fatally stabbed by a man her colleagues decided to make one of her "fellow Americans":

What was it that Ukrainian tweeter said?

The goal is to break people — to show they can reach you anywhere and take away a sense of future.

Who needs drones to do that when you have the Department of Homeland Bollocks?

Gee, that Secretary Mullin sounds a real hard case. Oh, wait, here he is twenty-four hours later...

Anyone who says "nation of immigrants" is on the other side. The distinction in the dying west between "legal" and "illegal" migration is entirely false. There is no such thing as "illegal immigration": almost all of it is, whether at the Rio Grande or the White Cliffs of Dover, is enabled by the relevant state authorities. I was opposed to Markwayne Mullin's nomination because he hugged the psycho cop who murdered Ashli Babbitt. But, if the above is the best a Republican Homeland Secretary can do, never mind a Trump Homeland Secretary can do, we should just cut to the case and get on with the civil war. I'm not saying I'd like Secretary McArsepants to be shot six times in the face and then stabbed ...but get back to me after another six weeks of this disain for the electorate.

Countries east of the Iron Curtain at least get the basic idea of nation-states - that a nation is a people, and that a Somali warlord or a Sudanese clidoridectomist is not a Ukrainian in waiting, or even a Pole in waiting:

Yet Trump, under cover of the Iran war, gave one of his key cabinet posts to a man who hugs the murderers of Trump supporters. We have had people threatening to quit The Mark Steyn Club because I'm not one hundred per cent on board with Trumpal infallibility. Well, I'm not on board with the new Secretary of Homeland Security.

However, in an effort to get with the programme, I was thinking of giving a big thumb's up to this presidential Truth Social:

Image

Preach it, Mr President! Yes, they did spy on you, by using the rubber-stamp FISA surveillance of Carter Page to backdoor their way into your communications and launch the phony-baloney Russia investigation that pretty much killed the entire administration of the forty-fifth president. I was opposed to FISA even before I had the misfortune to endure an extremely long day before the same judge who signed off on the Carter Page tosspottery - one Judge Frank Maas, a woeful specimen even by the standards of the American judiciary, yet who was able singlehandedly to provide the means by which an entire presidency was crippled.

So I was all set to write an entire column on how Trump was so right to "kill Fisa" after what it had done to him. But that was Friday April 10th. On the very next business day, Monday April 14th, the President was Truthing anew

Will the real Donald J Trump please stand up? Or at least give us tips on whiplash cures? I'm presently skipping the bomb shelter for drones, but I'd go there to avoid incoming tweets like the one above.

Genuinely interested in hearing how our Trump one-hundred-percenters rationalise the above.

I remind you that this is a once-per-demi-millennium moment. See the now defenestrated Viktor Orbán:

We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation.

In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; the British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans.

But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to...

So, when Trump's Homeland honcho can do no more than bleat "nation of immigrants" bollocks, all he's doing is ensuring that not enough Americans will wake up in time. I'd recommend Putin re-direct the drones I'm currently under to Mullin's HQ. But he'd probably just be succeeded by ...Eric Swalwell?

It's the home front.

Oh, well. At least the sirens are drowning out the Ukrainian folk troupe...

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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