An Akron bar owner’s attempt “to capitalize” on 9/11 with a $4 shot special has critics across the country calling the move bad karma while free speech advocates say the “cancel culture” is just trying to censor to death another business with a different view.

“Today’s special, the 9/11 shot only $4!!! Because why not capitalize on something that happened 18 years ago,” Karma Kafe owner and manager Chris Sedlock posted on Instagram with an ambiguous emoji of a little man shrugging.

Impressed by one of his bartender’s red, white and frothy blue concoctions, Sedlock pushed the shot online. Within minutes, he was assailed from coast to coast.

“Seriously? What’s next? Trail of tears martinis?” a commenter jabbed.

“Can’t wait until you close,” another piled on.

Sedlock edited the post within a half hour, removing “because” and all that followed. Too late. Commenters from California to New Jersey captured the original post and spread it to other social media platforms.

The gloves came off.

Sedlock told the “lame-Os” who “can’t handle sarcasm” that “all publicity is good publicity,” having just learned that his controversial post landed on a Facebook page dedicated to marketing fails.

“Cool. Come in and buy the shot for your fallen fellow man as a remembrance?” Sedlock responded when a woman called the post “absolutely disgusting.”

Another commenter criticized Sedlock for calling a critic a b----, then deleting the comment. On Sunday, Janet Maiman was among multiple people looping in the media.

“As a native New Yorker who lost three friends on 9/11, lived on Long Island and lived it, this is reprehensible,” Maiman wrote in an email to the Beacon Journal/Ohio.com. “When customers have reviewed [Karma Kafe] on Yelp mentioning their disdain for their post, their response was ‘would it be better if the freedom shot was $3.00?’”

Reached by phone, Sedlock gave only his first name. He feared more public backlash, a possible hit to his business, if the post landed in his hometown newspaper. A reporter found his last name on documents trademarking his downtown Akron bar in 2011.

He said he has a dark sense of comedy and admittedly has no filter. People just don’t get the irony, he said. From discounted cars and mattresses from Memorial Day to Labor Day, “Isn’t capitalizing on tragedy the American way,” he told the Beacon Journal.

“Me, I’m an honest guy. I don’t lie. I’m the kind of person that what you see is what you get,” Sedlock said, claiming that it wasn’t until the public backlash that he first thought of his post as political cynicism: a critique of terrorist attacks that launched a protracted war costing trillions of dollars, thousands more lives and years of comedian Jon Stewart shaming lawmakers before Congress passed a 9/11 victim’s compensation fund.

Sedlock asked the rhetorical question: “When do you have the right to talk about it? … They don’t see this as irony. I see the irony in it. It’s dark humor.”

With less than 1,000 followers online and posts that barely get noticed, Sedlock never “intended for this to go viral.” Sometimes, he said, businesses suffering through road construction on Main Street downtown “might as well try to stay in business anyway you can.”

Told about Maiman, who lost friends on 9/11, Sedlock was indifferent.

“I have to feel like that,” he said, “because I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why people are so upset.”

“Yeah, you passed away,” he said to the victims. “And I’m sorry, but so much has happened since 9/11 and you can’t just focus on the dying anymore.”

Social justice warriors on the left skewer him for the insensitive “dark humor.” From the right, he’s compared to American congresswomen of color told by the president to “go back” and fix “the crime infested places from which they came.”

“I think they’re uneducated,” said Sedlock, who was raised in Akron. “They’re saying, ‘Hey Chris, go back to your own country. They assume that because I own a bar, I’m foreign, which is stupid. I was born in America. My parents are American.”

And it’s unclear if the attention has hurt. It’s too soon to definitively gauge the financial impact, Sedlck said. Online, his reach has grown.

“Your (sic) social media famous!” a critic wrote. “Probably lost half the business you didn’t have! Congratulations!!”

“Actually,” Sedlock wrote back, “we are already busy, gained followers (like you) and have had over 400 profile visits in the past 15 hours.”

On Yelp, where customers rate services, his bar’s reviews have doubled. He’s dropped a star in the ranking. And nothing after 9/11 has been positive.

“Ironically, this place is called 'karma,'” one of the final posts read.

Reach Doug Livingston at dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3792.