A man on TikTok went viral after claiming that he owned several successful restaurants and had fired over 40 vaccinated employees in order to circumvent President Joe Biden’s new rules for businesses regarding the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As the video, and its controversial claims, began to make the rounds on social media, some people began to voice their doubts and do their own research into the matter. After the restaurants’ real owner stepped forward with an announcement, those internet sleuths are feeling vindicated.
Conservative TikToker Goes Viral For All The Wrong Reasons
A man identified as Jody Pendleton was behind a recent viral video that claimed he was a business owner with four restaurants who had fired all 46 of his vaccinated employees. In a TikTok video, on an account by the name of @cancelledconservative that has since been deleted, Pendleton claimed he’d fired those employees in order to avoid a new policy enacted by President Biden.
The policy in question requires businesses with more than 100 employees to either have those employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or to regularly test them. The policy is mischaracterized in the viral video by Pendleton, who said the policy required all employees to be vaccinated. He went on to say that he had 138 employees and that only 46 of them were vaccinated. He’d allegedly decided to fire every vaccinated employee in order to duck beneath the 100 employee threshold.
See The Original Video Below
Naturally, many people were outraged about the claims and some began to dig into Pendleton’s background to see how true his allegations were. As it turns out, there were several lies Pendleton told, starting with his identity. One internet sleuth, who goes by @thatdaneshguy on Instagram, quickly figured out that Pendleton filmed his video outside of the restaurant Papa Roni’s and was able to locate and communicate with the restaurant chain’s true owner, a man named Michael Brown.
In reality, Pendleton, though he worked at the chain as a manager, does not have the sweeping authority to fire that many employees. Brown eventually made a statement to his local news station, explaining, “It was a completely fabricated story. I’m not going to say he had good intentions because it was a bad idea, but he wanted to trigger people based on this vaccination hot topic and he wanted to flip that to say this is how we feel about people being terminated for not being vaccinated.”
The Video Updates Just Get Weirder
Instagram user @thatdaneshguy later confirmed that Pendleton had been fired from the company, though it’s been made clear that he and actual owner Brown are on friendly terms with each other and Brown defended his former employee via his restaurant’s social media pages. Though it seems like this saga has finally finished for good, we suspect the consequences will last a while longer.