davenewworld_/Instagram
January 17, 2021, 8:46 am
A video of aggressively confrontational anti-maskers in Salem, Oregon, is going viral after Trader Joe’s employees blocked them from entering the store.
Advertisement
Hide
The video opens with a store manager, Karim, trying to have a polite conversation with the group away from the entrance.
Advertisement
Hide
“I don’t want to tell you guys what to think, what to do, what to believe, anything like that…I would ask kindly that you guys understand that here at TJ’s, and what we’re doing…we’re just trying to work, make a living,” he said.
“The point you guys are going to make isn’t going to be made with us.”
Karim goes on to say he doesn’t want to debate policy and he respects their freedom to think whatever they want, but that they can’t come into the store without a mask.
“But it’s not a law!” the woman filming caws. “You can’t enforce non-law…You cannot deny somebody the right to commerce.”
The woman then spots two masked customers going into the store and rushes towards the entrance.
Karim jumps in between her and the entrance while reminding her she can’t go in without a mask. “Don’t touch me!” she cries, despite it being clear on her own video that he did not touch her and wasn’t trying to.
An extended 8-minute clip of the confrontation on Instagram shows members of the group throwing out everything they can think of from the anti-masker playbook — they claimed Trader Joe’s was violating state law, that medical exemptions should allow them to go maskless, that if everyone was presumed to have COVID-19 that meant everyone should be protected under the ADA, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being violated, etc.
Advertisement
Hide
The woman filming was particularly obnoxious. She repeatedly played dumb and insisted she was only there to shop, not “demonstrate,” and that she was not part of a group. However, mere seconds later, someone in the group she was a part of said that the store was letting masked customers come in through a backed entrance.
“We need people to go to the back!” she shouted. “Somebody needs to go back to the back, and then we need people to stay in the front.”
Advertisement
Hide
As we’re almost a year into this pandemic, it’s becoming more and more difficult to find any humor in these absurd anti-masker antics. Infection rates in the U.S. continue to skyrocket and, despite vaccines slowly becoming available, there’s still no end to all of this in sight.
Meanwhile, countries where people took the pandemic seriously and actually cared about their fellow citizens rather than screeching about their own personal freedoms to be terrible people have been able to start getting back to some normality.
Advertisement
Hide
It’s unclear how the Trader Joe’s incident resolved, as the video ended abruptly, but that the employees were willing to go to such lengths to keep other customers safe is heartening to see. However, the fact that they were put in that position in the first place just for trying to do their jobs is a genuine disgrace.
*First Published: January 17, 2021, 8:46 am
0 Comments