Recently, a video on TikTok has gone somewhat viral depicting a heated exchange between a customer and a sandwich artist at Subway who refused to serve him.
The 30-second video was shared by an account that seems to entirely revolve around promoting alt-right, Christian, and MAGA type content, and it currently has around 3 million views. Upon first viewing, you may be inclined to believe that the Subway worker is the one at fault, and the caption in the video even reads: “Subway Karen Refuses Service to Christians in Waunakee, WI.”
From what we see of the interaction and what we learn from the caption, it seems as if the customers are being refused service due to their religion.
Are we getting all the information here?
Of course, we’ve seen enough of these sorts of videos to know that something just isn’t right here – we’re definitely missing some context. The worker doesn’t seem like a Karen. After all, we’ve all seen Karen videos on TikTok, and they’re nothing like this.
So it seems obvious that the people behind the video have only shown us what they want us to see. In the video, the worker mentions the T-shirt the man is wearing, and the man clarifies: “because of my T-shirt?” However, he never shows us what’s on his shirt. Suspicious? I would say so.
Others in the comments also picked up on the red flags that suggest the video creators are being disingenuous in some way: “But why? We can’t get the whole story?” Another asked: “Are you refusing to show your tshirt?” In fact, not a single soul in the comments section was buying that these guys were being refused for nothing. Surely if this man was the real victim here, he wouldn’t have had any issues showing the audience what he had on his shirt.
What was on the T-shirt?
Luckily for us, internet sleuths have done their thing – they dug around and eventually a picture was found which shows the man and his friends standing outside of Subway with the shirts that got them kicked out. After seeing the picture, I can safely say, I understand why they were refused service now.
Homophobic, anti-choice shirts will rightly get you banned from most normal establishments (maybe they’d have better luck at Chick-fil-A?), so I think it’s a stretch to claim that blatant hatred printed on a shirt counts as expressing your religion. As @Jolly_good_ginger put it in his video: “I do find it ironic that you directly correlate your hate with your Christianity.”
These guys weren’t the victims here – they intentionally wore clothing they knew would upset and offend and then got all upset and offended when they faced consequences for doing so. After finding out what the shirts said, many comments praised the Subway girl: “yeah she wins this one. go girl,” while others have committed to buying and eating as much Subway as possible in support: “Saw the shirts! Eating at Subway for weeks in support!”
So it seems this attempt at playing victim has backfired tremendously for these guys. I hope they did call corporate like he threatened in the video, and I hope they told him where to shove it. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s almost lunch, and I think I’m craving some Subway.