The declining restaurant chain Cracker Barrel recently made the unfortunate decision to rebrand its sign, which—if you’ve ever hung out at a strip mall on the side of a freeway—you will probably recognize. The old sign, which we are now being told is “iconic,” previously featured a mascot known as “Uncle Herschel” (based on the store’s founder’s real uncle) and a barrel. The new sign, a study in bland minimalism, nixes both the barrel and Uncle Herschel, replacing them with a vaguely rounded and cylindrical shape that could look like a barrel if you squint really hard and cross your eyes a little. In general, the public consensus seems to be this: the new sign is terrible.
Today, even a simple corporate rebrand can’t escape the terrible digital nexus of politicization and invective known as social media, where Cracker Barrel’s hapless marketing misstep was soon transmogrified into some sort of nefarious “woke” plot to destroy a Once Proud American Brand. The latest victim of right-wing “cancel culture,” Cracker Barrel has since been subjected to a significant drop in stock market value, calls for a boycott, and now, the Trump administration’s latest attempt to grasp for whatever vestigial goodwill remains within its increasingly souring MAGA base.
Over the past year, Trump has increasingly alienated his voters by embracing tariffs (bad for small businesses), AI (bad for workers), state-sponsored capitalism (bad for the “free market”) and the military industrial complex (bad for everybody), all while continuing foreign wars (something he promised not to do) and perpetually kicking the can down the road when it comes to the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Since Trump can’t materially deliver on any of his campaign promises (except the one about psychotically cracking down on America’s immigrant population), the White House’s only real remaining tactic is to latch onto dubious social media controversies and virtue signal to its base that, despite many broken promises, its heart is still in the right place.
Thus, on Tuesday, Trump and his cronies predictably waded into the Cracker Barrel “scandal” and planted a flag. “Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Tuesday. “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again.” The White House chimed in with a simple tweet: “Go woke, go broke.”
© Screenshot/X/GizmodoTrump’s doofus offspring, Donald Trump Jr., also manned the battle stations on social media. “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” the president’s wild-eyed spawn wrote on X, tagging the unfortunate restaurant chain. A gaggle of rightwing influencers followed suit, lobbing low-hanging critiques at the restaurant to stir up their followers.
MAGA has decried Cracker Barrel’s new logo as “woke,” but it’s unclear what exactly is woke about it. As far as I can tell, there’s no far-left constituency devoted to ridding America of the white capitalist oppression posed by barrels. Indeed, there’s nothing particularly political about the logo at all—it just looks terrible. As Forbes notes, it’s not a particularly unique design choice, either, as “modern minimalist trends see many corporations wipe the personality from their logos, often leaving only their names written in simple font.” If you’ve been in a McDonald’s at any point in the last few years, you’ll know this bizarrely boring architectural style well.
If there’s anything that could be construed as “woke”-adjacent about the rebrand, it’s that Cracker Barrel has a relatively new CEO, Julie Felss Masino, who is, you know, a woman. In the eyes of MAGA’s most craven ideologues, this alone would seem to make her a suspicion-worthy diversity hire that is now necessarily desecrating a beloved traditional brand with devious barrel erasure.
“Cracker Barrel’s new logo isn’t an accident — it’s CEO Julie Felss Masino’s project,” whines Woke War Room, a conservative X account. “She scrapped a beloved American aesthetic and replaced it with sterile, soulless branding.”
Those close to the White House have even sought to attack the restaurant legally, taking the efforts to score weird symbolic culture war points to a whole other level. Indeed, America First Legal, the legal non-profit founded by WH ghoul Stephen Miller, announced last week that it had filed “civil rights complaints calling for federal and state investigations” into Cracker Barrel over what it called “illegal discrimination.” What the law firm appears to be referring to is the company’s ongoing DEI business policies, but if we find out there are any laws against bad graphic design, we’ll update this post.
What seems most notable about the Cracker Barrel episode is just how bread-and-circuses the whole thing feels. More so than any other administration in recent memory (including Trump’s first term in office), this particular government seems obsessed with committing a not insubstantial amount of time and resources to purely symbolic gestures and conversations—whether it’s this, french fries, or Sydney Sweeney’s ass. At least one Democratic lawmaker seems to have picked up on this, and summed it up nicely on Tuesday: “You’re struggling to make ends meet, put food on the table, and afford basic health care. Donald Trump is focused on Cracker Barrel’s new logo,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) on X. That’s a bullseye, Rep.
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