After a video went viral of conservative influencer Christian Walker accosting Kehlani in a Starbucks drive-thru, the singer is ready to give people the context they’ve been missing.
In a since-deleted TikTok video, Kehlani addressed the incident and broke down how Walker’s behavior both to her and to the baristas at her local Starbucks ultimately led to the viral confrontation in which he stormed out of his vehicle and yelled at her for calling him an “a–hole.” “I wasn’t gonna address it, but I think we should tell the truth,” she said in the clip with a smirk. “I know you’ve all seen the video by now, let’s talk about it.”
The original video posted to Walker’s Twitter account saw the conservative personality exit his car, walk up to Kehlani’s car, and begin berating the “Up At Night” singer for allegedly speaking negatively about him to a barista. “Get your drink and go away. I can have an opinion like everybody else, why are you entitled to an opinion and not me,” he said in the clip. “You’re the a–hole. Get your drink and go.”
According to Kehlani, before he started recording them, Walker was recording another video in which he was “visibly losing his s–t” over a series of Pride flags hung around the outside of the Starbucks, and using his phone to record videos of the workers and the flags at the chain. “He proceeds to get to the little order-box thing, and is clearly harassing whoever’s behind the order-box,” they said. “I felt like, ‘Oh, this man is about to come up to the window and harass all of these workers.’”
(Walker had posted videos to Instagram Stories Wednesday in which he’s doing what Kehlani described, yelling about “these flags from hell” and how “Pride Month ended 13 days ago.” He continues in another clip, “I’m going to ask them if they need me to frickin’ deliver an American flag.”)
So, pulling up to get her order, Kehlani says she told the baristas — who she says were mostly people of color and people who “seem queer to me” — that Walker was coming up behind her, and that the workers should be prepared for him to be yelling and recording them. “They were like, ‘Yeah, I know that kid.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s a f–king a–hole,’ because I’ve just watched him be an a–hole for the last 10 minutes,” she said.
Apparently, Walker had been yelling at Kehlani before he started recording the video, allegedly saying things such as, “‘B—h, you’re holding up the line .. b—h this, b—h that.’” But once the artist called Walker an “a–hole,” that’s when the influencer whipped out his phone and began recording.
Kehlani went on to say that during the interaction, they were having a virtual therapy session, where they were “coincidentally talking about people misplacing anger when they’re mad at something else.” Having an “a-ha moment” with their therapist, Kehlani proceeded to analyze the situation and control their response to it.
“I know what you want to do,” she said of Walker’s thought process. “You wanna get a reaction out of me so that you can go viral and then you can post this as some kind of take on people with my political stance, or assumed political stance, and people from my community, people like me. Lo and behold!”
That is, in fact, what Walker did. In his caption of the interaction, the influencer wrote, “This mediocre singer that everyone’s forgotten about, Kehlani, told my baristas at Starbucks that I was an ‘a**hole’ and to be ‘safe around me.’ Well, I set her straight. I’m tired of these fake woke people being rude to everyone and acting like they’re the good ones.”
He later went on, after the video went viral, saying, “Leftists are coming at me right now because unlike most of the people they’re used to bullying, I stand up for myself. Start standing up to these miserable blue haired people.”
Check out the fan-captured recording of Kehlani’s response to Walker below:
Kehlani explains the story behind their viral altercation with alt-right influencer Christian Walker at a Starbucks drive-thru. pic.twitter.com/1IBH5sN2wT
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 14, 2022
