Razor's Edge

Nov 04, 2025

THE FOLLOWING POST caused me to wax nostalgic…

My grandfather operated a barber shop on Elston Avenue in Chicago during the 1920s-40s. Troublemakers dropping in from the street were met with his straight razor. He also packed an ancient .38 caliber, black powder revolver that made a deafening roar and tons of smoke. I know, because after Grandpa passed away, we test fired the weapon. Once. That was enough.

I suggest the UK barber featured in this video get himself a nice long British colonial era saber a-la-Errol Flynn and sharpen it to a razor edge. It’s the only thing these migrant thugs understand.

Wannabe gangsters would visit the barbershop from time to time suggesting that my grandfather pay them protection money, what Italians know as the “bustarella.” Grandpa would cordially invite them to a free haircut then, after he got the unsuspecting victim all lathered up, snip off an earlobe. That’s what the three notches on his scissors signified.

Most people don’t appreciate that blades can be more dangerous than guns in a close quarters struggle. Also, small caliber guns (say, .22 to .32) aren’t very effective at stopping assailants, while their range is practically zero. A bullet fired out of a .22 handgun, or even a rifle, will penetrate the human body then bounce off the bones, carving a lethal path through the body in search of a vital organ. Or not. The assailant may bleed to death later, but he/she will likely finish you off first.

A larger caliber bullet (say, .45) is more like whacking somebody with a baseball bat and will likely stop the assailant before significant damage is inflicted on the defendant.

A knife, on the other hand, needs only to find your jugular. You bleed out within a minute.

What happened to both Charlie Kirk and JFK was the worst of both. A high caliber bullet found their jugulars and it was game over in seconds. Get close enough to a target with a knife, or even a razor blade, and you can accomplish the same task without all the hardware.

The 911 hijackers knew this. They boarded the doomed flights with box cutters. A box cutter utilizes a single-edge razor blade commonly employed in old-time safety razors that opens and closes like a switchblade knife.

I carried a box cutter while working as a teenage stock boy at Dominic’s Finer Foods. Gave me a sense of security, packed around in my jeans pocket, completely hidden from view. Fortunately, I was never mugged or called upon to use it in self-defence, but that isn’t today’s reality. It was even safe to ride the subway back in the day.

I still have Grandpa’s straight razors, so sharp that your eyes bleed just looking at them.

He used to shave my neck with those bad boys when I was a wee lad. Dad would place a fifth of whisky and a shot glass on the kitchen table for Grandpa while he worked, cigar stub clutched in his teeth. He’d closed the barber shop years earlier but still came to the house to give us haircuts. Grandpa would toss off a shot of rotgut then refill the glass for me, a simple gesture of camaraderie and defiance that defined our relationship. Like many of those old Sicilian immigrants, he had a nefarious past, but that’s material for another essay.

The New York Times

There was an enormous amount of prejudice levelled against Italian immigrants in the early part of the 20th century, and not all the pushback was unjustified. Along with the “tired and poor” came the anarchist bomb throwers.

Mind you, it was an era before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, ramping up to World Wars I and II, the most sanguineous period in human history. The saga of Sacco and Vanzetti typified the villainization of Italian immigrants. Hollywood soon picked up the theme with a torrent of gangster movies in which the bad guys were always Italians and/or Jews.

As it eased into the Great Depression, America needed to divert public attention away from economic and domestic problems it failed to resolve, so it naturally looked to the flood of immigrants for scapegoats: Italians, Irish, Jews, Mexicans, whomever. The mid-1930s New York Times ran a series of vicious articles insisting that Sicilians were non-whites and therefore barred from admission to the USA. Fortunately, both my grandfathers and grandmothers slipped in before the Golden Door slammed shut in the 1920s.

Here’s an excerpt from grandpa’s citizenship application of 1911:

The applicant was compelled to swear that he/she was **NOT AN ANARCHIST, NOR A POLYGAMIST,** NOR A BELIEVER IN THE PRACTICE OF POLYGAMY… “SO HELP ME GOD.”

Times have changed. Not only are polygamists welcomed in America but Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-Mich) and Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn) constituencies include thousands of them. Dearborn and Minneapolis are also the go-to centers for Female Genital Mutilation in America. Like President Trumps often says. “Some people didn’t know that…”.

My immigrant grandparents would have been scandalized. America is becoming what they fled Europe to escape.

What turned the tables on racial prejudice against Italian-Americans was World War II. Over ten percent of the American armed forces were comprised of Italian immigrants and their sons and daughters. Every one of my uncles was a combat veteran in Europe or the Pacific. My mother worked at headquarters company of the 242 Infantry Regiment, 42nd Division.

As for my father…

My paternal grandfather, the barber, was too old to enlist (b. 1876), but my maternal grandfather stepped forward at 59. He was never called up.

Still, the principle remains. While Italian immigrants were treated hardly better than Black Americans - and that wasn’t good - like Black Americans they didn’t plot to undermine democracy. Not only did they build the country’s sidewalks, skyscrapers, and electrical power grids, they took up arms to defend and preserve what they’d helped to create.

Asking the hard questions

In an America where Congresspersons call for globalizing the intifada and destruction of the American Empire, can their constituents be relied on to step forward and defend democracy on foreign soil as our antecedents did? Or even at home?

I think we all know the answer.

All the signposts are pointing to impending civil war in America. I’m not suggesting this with any relish. Who will these newcomers to Dearborn and Minneapolis and Islamic enclaves in Texas, not to mention New York City’s Muslim mayor, support in that struggle?

Muslims are notorious for refusing to assimilate as the situation in Europe attests, while the Muslim Brotherhood that finances terrorism and literally owns thousands of mosques throughout the USA has been deemed a terrorist organization. Muslim terror cells have perpetrated dozens of attacks on American soil since 911.

THINK OF 911 AS AN ENHANCED VERSION of the migrant with the knife in the British barber shop. The theme is identical. In the 19th century, Verdi or Donizetti could have composed an operetta around it. Enrico Caruso would have sung the tenor part at the Metropolitan Opera in what is now Zohran Mamdani’s NYC.

Like the barber and his customers who flee to the backroom of his shop when a Muslim terrorist barges in with a knife after slicing up innocent passengers on a Metro train, Americans have become overly complacent, addicted to cheap entertainment and saddled with woke guilt. They seem unable to initiate measures to protect themselves and their society from a totalitarian ideology dressed up as religion that mandates the murder of all non-believers in the world, especially Jews.

Like Italian-Americans who built and defended this country, Jewish-Americans deserve its gratitude and protection against the threat posed by Islam, a poison that has no known antidote. Americans can keep their anti-Semitism. It’s been relatively harmless, at least so far. They can continue to villainizes Italian-Americans in Hollywood and on Netflix.

For a society predicated on racism, bigotry, and greed, we still never managed to spawn a hate-driven movement like Nazism that led to the industrialized murder of over 11 million innocent victims of race hatred. The KKK? Clowns more dangerous to themselves than to the country. You probably get the picture. Or maybe not.

Nonetheless, times are changing. The latest generation of Americans has little or no sense of history, products of a piss-poor education system (26th in the world for science and math) whose institutions of higher learning have been captured by woke ideologists serving up past-their-best-before-date calls for Marxist revolution while debating what their pronouns should be. One could say that America needs more mental institutions than it needs prisons. Again, another essay by a better writer.

A society of morons

I have often pointed out that Americans are a society of morons beholden to a gang of liars and thieves. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, America’s most populous city and financial centre, where citizens elected a Marxist-Islamist playing to ghetto culture and Woke-Left trendistas.

Like the knife wielding migrant in the video, Mamdani is a recent immigrant whose agenda includes destruction of the society that welcomed his traitorous family. A vote for Mamdani was a vote for America’s demise. Perhaps two hundred-fifty years was enough. Still, I feel sorry for future generations.

A generation of Americans raised on TikTok, without the slightest appreciation of history, has signed off on their own country’s death warrant.