The Right Notches Its Latest Win
The Right is once again seeing the fruits of strategically wielding power in the cultural arena. Its latest focus is Cracker Barrel, the Tennessee-based restaurant chain that was founded during the Nixon administration.
In its own kitschy way, Cracker Barrel served as a bridge of sorts to an older Southern tradition in America. It brought patrons into its doors by featuring classic country food, a themed gift shop, and porches filled with wooden rocking chairs.
But it’s faced harsh criticism in light of the attempts of its CEO, Julie Felss Masino, to reboot Cracker Barrel after the pandemic hit the chain hard. Reactions to news of the brand’s planned $700 million overhaul—which included a new logo sans its famous “Uncle Hershel” character and a Joanna Gaines-esque interior makeover—were swift and furious.
The company lost $100 million in market value last Thursday. And it slid even more last Friday afternoon and into Monday.
Due to the outcry—which was mainly from the Right, as the mainstream media has recognized—the company reversed its position and has now promised to keep the “Old Timer” logo. As of Wednesday, Cracker Barrel is trading at close to its pre-logogate level.
The logo saga even earned a comment from President Trump, who had earlier been critical of the company’s moves: “Congratulations ‘Cracker Barrel’ on changing your logo back to what it was. All of your fans very much appreciate it. Good luck into the future. Make lots of money and, most importantly, make your customers happy again!”
Like many other major restaurant chains (especially buffet-style ones), the COVID policies the United States adopted hurt Cracker Barrel markedly. The company is facing declining retail numbers and a hefty loss in market value since 2018. Cracker Barrel’s descended from a high of $164 to trading more than $100 less per share in 2025.
At base, Cracker Barrel’s problem is a mismatch between what the brand represents and the desires of its executive leadership. Instead of preserving Cracker Barrel’s traditions, the CEO and its board of directors followed the suggestions of an out-of-touch consultant class—the same type that thought it was a good idea for Zohran Mamdani to bench press in public.
In a call to board members in May 2024, CEO Julie Felss Masino announced she’d hired a new agency to help turn the company around. Sardar Biglari, a Cracker Barrel investor and also the CEO of Steak ‘n Shake (its recent attempts to rebrand as a MAHA-friendly chain mask its own issues), lambasted Cracker Barrel’s plan at the time as “obvious folly.” (It’s also worth noting that Biglari has been trying to get a seat on Cracker Barrel’s board of directors for years.)
Like many other CEOs have done, Masino hired consultants who seem to prefer a trendy aesthetic and care little for preserving specific cultures or traditions—the fruits of a homogenous globalism that flattens all distinctions into an unappetizing blob. As Nate Fischer notes, the botched rebrand shows the “failure of left-leaning managerial firms to steward brands associated with any distinct cultural identity.”
It is no secret that the unique aesthetics that used to define restaurant brands have slowly gone away over the last couple of decades. Out is the Pizza Hut experience of the ‘90s that many still pine for—where customers sat in booths under vintage lights and took trips to the salad bar as they waited for their piping hot pan pizzas. In are the drab, monotonous mini-Borg cubes adorned with almost indistinguishable logos, complete with food that’s probably better fit for a trough than served on a table.
Fortunately, increasing numbers of Americans have had enough, as Julie Felss Masino recently found out.
With Target, Bud Light, Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson—and now Cracker Barrel—the Right has been able to effectively exert its influence. They are now seeing how to make companies cater to them rather than the other way around, which was the default position in previous decades. The object of scorn by the leftist media—and even some establishment conservatives—as the project of unenlightened rubes, boycotts are clearly making their mark and changing the trajectory of entire brands.
Though the “don’t care” segment of the population that’s tired of politicization is understandable, it is nevertheless a losing position in the digital age. Even if you haven’t personally eaten at Cracker Barrel in years (like me), that doesn’t matter.
The point is not about your own personal tastes, inclinations, or preferences. You may not care about Cracker Barrel—but the managerial class that’s actively trying to destroy every vestige of traditional American culture, however tacky, needs to be stopped. Americans should care that their traditions, history, and mores are being systematically taken apart, one by one, and mostly against their wishes.
Even Christopher Rufo, the doyen of the conservative counterrevolution against woke public institutions, initially wrote off the Cracker Barrel saga, having never set foot inside any of its restaurants. But he quickly changed course after talking with activist Robbie Starbuck. The latter made the case that the restaurant chain, “whose customer base is heavily white, conservative, and rural, had spent the last few years adopting all the fashionable left-wing corporate policies: DEI, Pride, pronouns, race politics, and the rest.”
Starbuck was put on the trail after Upward News founder Ari David discovered that the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest LGBTQ political lobbying organization, had its hands in Cracker Barrel’s recent support for Pride Month (a promotion showed its rocking chairs clad in the “Pride” rainbow) and other LGBTQ causes. As Megan Basham reported, Cracker Barrel even hired a member of the Human Rights Campaign’s advisory board to lead its management training division.
Even better news than the logo staying is that Cracker Barrel has also taken down its DEI and LGBTQ pages on its website, Starbuck notes. Continuous pressure needs to be applied to ensure that the policies themselves are actually changed, and not simply moved underground.
In the case of Cracker Barrel, it’s not ultimately about just a logo or shiplap aesthetic: it’s about corporate genuflection before the idols of our age. It’s about the corporate war not only against Christmas—but also against the very natural order that God set in place.
Though some may ask where the outrage was when earlier Southern-inspired restaurant chains folded or when Confederate statues were being torn down during the Summer of Floyd, that anachronistically reads back our present vibe shift. While there should have been a greater outcry at the time, the Right simply didn’t have the will. Now, however, that is changing.
As the Right continues to gain confidence, it should be setting its aims higher and higher, keeping its focus after winning a skirmish so that the larger war can be won. The Right will know it’s in the driver’s seat when companies don’t even consider supporting Pride Month due to the huge backlash they’d face.
Now that the Right has the will to resist, it needs to stay the course and keep racking up wins. Only by making its presence felt continuously will a culture that’s conducive to Christianity begin to re-emerge.
