It’s quite possible that I love Cracker Barrel more than any other opinion columnist in America.
I took my first date to Cracker Barrel when I was 16 years old. My family used to eat at Cracker Barrel every New Year’s Day to set our New Year’s resolutions, and when we debated where to eat on Sundays after church, I was the one putting my thumb on the scale for Cracker Barrel’s country-fried steak and mashed potatoes.
Despite all that history — all those hours eating Southern comfort food in a regional chain restaurant designed to look like an old general store — I absolutely do not care what its logo looks like.
Once again, I find myself out of step with much of the modern right.
If you follow right-wing media at all, you know that two of the biggest stories of the last month involve completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes. First, at the end of July, a few voices online criticized an ad campaign by American Eagle that featured Sydney Sweeney, an actress and model.
And second, Cracker Barrel had the audacity to change its logo, replacing the older version that featured a man (Uncle Herschel, in Cracker Barrel lore) leaning against a barrel with a new logo that simply featured the words “Cracker Barrel” in a plain font.
Neither of these incidents has the slightest material impact on any person’s life (except perhaps Sydney Sweeney’s), yet stories about an ad and a logo in some cases dwarfed the right-wing coverage given to various Trump scandals. And that just might be the point: to distract.
At the same time, they also perfectly represent the way in which right-wing media both mobilizes its base and bends political reality.
The American Eagle ads feature Sweeney in various suggestive poses with the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The meaning was so clear that it seems almost absurd to say it: As a beautiful woman, she has great genes and she is wearing great jeans. It was a silly pun, but a few people looked at the ad and saw the company using a white woman as a symbol of genetic supremacy.
A core part of the business model of the right-wing media ecosphere is finding the weirdest, most extreme brands of leftist thinking and blasting that radicalism into millions of conservative homes. The Sweeney story fit the bill, and then some. It didn’t just highlight the extremism (or better yet, the humorlessness and weirdness) of some people on the left; it also gave Fox News and other right-wing outlets the excuse to flood their feeds with pictures of Sweeney.
As CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter reported, Fox News mentioned Sweeney 766 times on air in one week. By contrast, it mentioned Jeffrey Epstein 53 times that same week.
Eventually, Donald Trump himself weighed in. The president of the United States posted on Truth Social that “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ’em Sydney!”
The great Cracker Barrel logo controversy began almost immediately after the Sweeney news cycle came to a merciful end. But this time, the weirdness was all on the right. A cohort of right-wing voices online looked at the new logo and declared it to be … woke.
The hypocrisy here is rich. Right-wing activists did the same thing that they mocked the left for in the Sweeney affair. They looked at a completely normal, innocuous marketing effort, deemed it to be deeply politically coded and then lashed out.
Except the difference here was that the left-wing attacks on Sweeney were confined to a small number of online voices, while the assault on Cracker Barrel spread across the length and breadth of right-wing media. Those voices never really explained how a plain logo with the restaurant’s name was woke, but the accusation was made, the online mob was mobilized and word went out: “The Barrel must be broken.”
That’s an actual quote from Christopher Rufo, a very online right-wing activist who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He explained in a post on X: “It’s not about this particular restaurant chain — who cares — but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”
Again, this is referring to a logo that simply has the name of a restaurant on it. If that logo is woke, then the word has no meaning. It’s now a stand-in for anything MAGA dislikes.
Rufo was not alone; the commentary on this subject was unhinged. Sean Davis, the chief executive of The Federalist, a right-wing website, posted pictures of what appear to be various company diversity initiatives and wrote, “Cracker Barrel’s CEO and leadership clearly hate the company’s customers and see their mission as re-educating them with the principles of gay race communism.”
Hillsdale College, one of the most respected academic institutions on the right, posted a picture of the new logo next to a picture of a statue of George Washington defaced with paint and wrote, “Same energy.”
It didn’t take long before Trump himself got engaged in the campaign. “Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo,” he wrote. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again. Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. One year ago, it was ‘DEAD.’ Good luck!”
And when, hours after that post, Cracker Barrel caved to the pressure and announced that the old logo would stay, the White House took credit.
On one hand, it feels ridiculous to write about Sweeney and Cracker Barrel — after all, I’m writing this column at the same time that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is waging a reckless war against the foundations of our nation’s public health. But these incidents are important because they’re illustrative of the way the right sees the world, and they demonstrate the new right’s theory of power.
If you had to sum up the mission of right-wing media in a sentence, it would be: Democrats are weird, humorless and evil, and they want to destroy your way of life. No distinction would be made between the Democrats and the far left — anything that any far-left activist does is automatically attributed to the Democratic Party — and so the Democratic Party has to answer for anything the far left does.
Sometimes right-wing media can highlight genuinely troubling extremism and intolerance. It has closely covered antisemitism on college campuses, for example, and there have been several genuinely disturbing and intolerable incidents.
But if there’s a conflict between telling the truth and stoking outrage, time and again, the right chooses outrage.
The cardinal example, of course, is participating in Trump’s fundamentally dishonest campaign to overturn the 2020 election, but there’s something profoundly dishonest about even the Sweeney and Cracker Barrel stories. There was no actual groundswell of opposition to Sweeney. There was no evidence that Cracker Barrel’s redesign was “woke.”
It’s also fantastical to claim that the restaurant is somehow committed to “gay race communism” (an odd position for a private company that’s obviously trying to fix its declining stock price and reverse its diminishing net income).
The process of stoking outrage has another effect: It crowds out the news cycle. Most Democrats I know would be shocked at how little the average Republican knows about Trump’s actual conduct and his actual wrongdoing. Republicans can, however, cite chapter and verse about left-wing outrages and left-wing overreactions to Trump.
That creates a reality where they simply can’t conceive of how any reasonable, rational person would vote Democratic or oppose the president and his policies.
The Sweeney and Cracker Barrel stories highlight the new right’s theory of change. It sees the social liberalization of America as primarily an elite-driven phenomenon. According to this narrative, the left seized the most powerful institutions of American life and then imposed its delusional and unnatural ideas from the top down, in part through shaming, fear and bullying.
The solution, then, is obvious. Either seize or destroy left-dominated institutions, replace them with right-dominated institutions and elites and then impose conservative values on society, if necessary, through the same intolerant means.
This is why you see some figures on the right turning even to Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci, to inspire them to “cultural hegemony.”
In this version of the right, cancel culture is only a problem if you’re not the one doing the canceling. The conservative argument for liberty for all is replaced by a populist will to power, one so all-consuming that it exercises veto power over corporate logo redesigns it does not like.
At the moment, MAGA’s cultural power is on the rise, but it’s ultimately on a fool’s errand. Can anyone look at the history of the last 10 years and say that bullying or intolerance helped the left? Or is it more accurate to say that the worst excesses of left-wing cancel culture helped trigger the public reaction that ushered MAGA back into power?
MAGA’s intolerance won’t fare any better. Constant outrage is energizing, at least for a while, for partisans and activists. It’s exhausting for everyone else. The more that MAGA tries to bully America, the more resentment it will build. Bullies only win for a while, and when the backlash to the backlash comes, MAGA will have only itself to blame.
Source photograph by Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images.
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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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