Accomplishing some real intersectionality, a certain Gregory Mehr has managed to insert himself as a bit-player in any number of grotesque evils of the day. Along with millions of other people, unfortunately, he has done his part to cover for those who enable pedophile priests. Hooked up to a sewer line connected to the pit in hell, he spews a particularly vile homophobic hatred for gay people. Your mileage may vary, but my own gaydar makes me wonder if this isn’t for him a kind of self-hatred. That it took him only two days after October 7 to start chanting the founding slogan for Hamas reveals him to be an antisemite, a Jew hater. A Catholic Integralist and therefore an Authoritarian, he hates Liberals, either of the Classical variety or the moderate-left variety, and aligns himself with the Islamic Fundamentalists in their fight against the Enlightenment. He cheers on these Islamic Fundamentalists when they storm school council meetings to try to prohibit any mention at all of gay people in school courses.
Full of hate at any number of lines of intersection, this guy is.
So who is Gregory Mehr? No one, really. I have no idea what he looks like, nor what he does for a living. To me, at least, he comes across as an undergraduate student, sharing the same unfortunate antisemitism (masked as anti-Zionism) that has become increasingly common in that cohort. His profile picture on social media, drawn from Japanese Manga, shows him to be young and innocent — a sweet child, maybe a bit prone to whining.
The enlarged eyes make the figures baby-like, full of hurt wonder and innocence, and eliciting the viewer’s protective instincts. Some personalities use this child-like appearance as a shield protecting their aggression against others and allowing them to evade responsibility for their actions. As the novelist James Baldwin noted, sentimentality is the mask for cruelty.1
The truth of this becomes especially apparent in the first image above, which depicts what I assume is an avatar for Gregory Mehr, wearing the uniform of a revolutionary guard, in front of an Iranian flag. Mehr doubtlessly feels a certain militant revolutionary energy flowing from the flag plus the uniform. But of course the subtext of these things is rather dark, connoting extremism, intolerance, repression, violence, and terrorism. The avatar sums up and distills into a single image images such as these two young men about to be hanged for the crime of being gay, and two teenagers just hanged for God knows what — being gay, jacking off, or whatever:
But Mehr’s infantilized, weepy avatar picturing him as a member of an revolutionary guard masks this brutality.
He has inscribed on both images the words “In this world there isn’t a cat owner that would stay quiet after his cat got bullied.” I have no idea what incidents prompted these words. Maybe those incidents, whatever they were, legitimate a bit of sympathy for the boy (and he is a boy, no matter what his chronological age is) who owns the bullied cat. But I do find it ironic that certain notorious elements of the nation he serves as an apologist for, the Palestinians, thought it would be cool to film themselves shooting a dog:
I think I should mention too that this prominent element of Palestinian society also thought it would be cool to murder entire families, and to burn lovers and babies alive.2
But with all the gravitas of a whining child, Mehr cries “unfair!” We need to place this in the context of the recent actions Israel has taken in Gaza to try to defend itself and to eliminate Hamas. What Mehr doesn’t consider, however, is that except in extraordinary circumstances self-defense is always moral, no matter how difficult it is to look at the terrible and awful collateral damage. Mehr contents himself with a rather tepid and pro-forma “condemnation” of Hamas, then has the gall to tell us that we are giving the wrong weight to the actions of Hamas compared to the IDF. But as long as Hamas’ cruelty is the whole point, it is impossible to give too much weight to the actions of Hamas and the other Islamic terrorists. Hamas’ actions are absolute evil. As I have pointed out elsewhere, yes, even the underdogs can be despicable people, and to avoid confronting them with their crimes is to sentimentalize them.
I can only tell the apologists “Shame! What is wrong with you people?!”
I have probably said enough regarding Mr. Mehr. I could go on at considerable length regarding his Jew hatred, his vile, sickening homophobia — which has been directed at me personally — his denialism regarding the crimes committed by the Catholic Hierarchy in general and Joseph Ratzinger in particular while making themselves busy covering up and enabling all the sickening sexual abuse; his not understanding what “evidence” means; his risible misuse of “literally”. (Sorry — the grammar police side of me had to get out.) So I will stop here.
2 https://checkyourfact.com/2023/10/16/fact-check-post-falsely-claim-image-of-burned-israeli-child-are-ai-generated/ The claim that the burned-baby photos are AI-Generated appears to be false
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