Breaking the Barrel

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

 

The Cracker Barrel farce that Jonah Goldberg wrote about last week is the first case of “cancel culture” I’m aware of in which the accusers couldn’t articulate why the accused was being canceled.

 

Which was to their advantage, I think. An offender charged with a particular thoughtcrime can answer the charge but an offender charged with nothing in particular has little choice but to surrender. Which is what the company did on Tuesday.

 

Broadly speaking, Cracker Barrel’s critics objected to its effort to “modernize.” That effort began when it changed its distinctive decor, shifting away from tchotchke-bedazzled kitsch designed to evoke a southern grandma’s dining room. But the gauntlet was thrown when the company purged the kindly farmer in overalls—and the eponymous barrel—from its famous logo and switched to a text-only brand instead.

 

“We said we would listen, and we have,” management said in a statement on Tuesday in response to the outcry. “Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain.”

 

Jonah already put his finger on the absurdity of feeling earnest nostalgia for a chain restaurant that trades on fake nostalgia. Cracker Barrel isn’t a relic of 1920s America; it was founded in 1969 at the height of hippie culture. And if it’s authenticity—or a campy simulacrum of it—that you crave, you should favor the new logo: The company’s original branding was text-only, years before the old white coot in overalls was phased in.

 

Hardly anyone alive right now is old enough to remember the general-store culture that the restaurant is mimicking, in fact. “The only nostalgia Cracker Barrel evokes for most people today is their memories of eating at Cracker Barrel,” our friend Andrew Egger said at The Bulwark, aptly describing the company as “a Xerox of a Xerox.” So why were the usual populist suspects so irate about it?

 

They couldn’t explain. The Twitter account for Hillsdale College, ostensibly an institution of learning, compared the logo change to leftists tossing paint on a statue of George Washington with the pithy comment, “Same energy.” Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida denounced the “woke rebrand” amid reminiscing about becoming born-again in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee linked the logo change to Joe Biden, which places this episode alongside the riots and lockdowns of 2020 in the category of things that Republicans insist on misremembering as having happened under a Democratic presidency.

 

Soon some of the leading geeks in this movement of freaks stepped in to try to backfill an ideological rationale for guillotining Cracker Barrel. The Federalist founder Sean Davis sputtered about diversity initiatives the company has undertaken as proof of its devotion to “gay race communism.” Christopher Rufo, probably the New Right’s most influential culture warrior, admitted that he’s never set foot in the restaurant but declared war on it nonetheless in the name of making an example of any business “considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”

 

“The Barrel must be broken,” he announced with no apparent irony. If a progressive culture warrior had said something as clownishly imperious, self-important, and Stalinist as that 10 years ago, right-wingers would still be making scornful jokes about it today.

 

Needless to say, Cracker Barrel’s online agonistes did not throw a collective tantrum over its logo change because they were mad about obscure DEI policies. If there was any concrete “move that might appear to be ‘wokification’” that bothered them, it was the “old white coot” erasure from the now-defunct text-only logo.

 

But even that didn’t bother them much on the merits, I think. What bothered them was the fact that a company that’s associated with right-wing culture was attempting to weaken that association. In Donald Trump’s America, the cultural ratchet is supposed to turn in one direction only.

 

Redefining ‘woke.’

 

“Not everything is woke,” National Review staff writer Caroline Downey said last week on CNN of the Cracker Barrel criticism. “I think we’re abusing the term a little bit too much, where it’s losing its meaning. And that’s really important because some things actually are woke and we should call it like it is.”

 

I wouldn’t say the term is being abused. I’d say it’s being redefined.

 

“Woke” used to describe progressive initiatives to challenge and reduce the social power of traditionally dominant groups—men, whites, straights. Under that definition, you need to squint to find wokeness in the Cracker Barrel rebrand. Yes, granted, they expunged the white (and presumably straight) man from their logo, but they didn’t replace him with a pierced, purple-haired lesbian BIPOC, did they?

 

They dumped him for elementary financial reasons: Their customer base is dying out and having a senior citizen as their brand isn’t the most obvious way to attract a younger clientele.

 

The meaning of “woke” changed on November 5 of last year, though. “Woke” now refers to any cultural change that isn’t directionally aligned with the right-wing cultural revolution that supposedly conquered America when Donald Trump was reelected president.

 

That’s what Rufo was getting at in his clumsy way when he condemned “any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’” Dumping the “old timer” in the logo wasn’t woke in the traditional sense, but insofar as Cracker Barrel hoped to rebrand as something less distinctively old, rural, and southern—i.e., right-wing—it affronted the right’s new cultural order. The company was subjected to a struggle session not because its descent into wokery was egregious but because it wasn’t, to show the rest of American society that even minor infractions won’t be tolerated.

 

It was cancel culture in full flower, which is itself extremely woke, ironically—or maybe not so ironically. The postliberal right has always seemed more jealous than resentful of the postliberal left’s cultural bullying. They’ve never wanted an America where people don’t get canceled; they want an America where they get to do the canceling.

 

And now they have it, thanks to Trump.

 

The president himself finally weighed in on Cracker Barrel on Tuesday, coincidentally just a few hours before the company announced it would keep the “Old Timer” logo. That gave him an opportunity to take credit for the decision and of course he seized it. It was revealed later that one of his advisers had spoken with management earlier, although it’s not clear which side initiated the call. Did Team Trump dial up Cracker Barrel executives and threaten one of its usual extortions if they didn’t relent? Or did Cracker Barrel dial up Team Trump and try to preempt the extortion by capitulating preemptively?

 

It would be pathetic beyond words for any other president to carve time out of his day to liaise with a corporation about its mascot but this sort of thing matters to our glorious leader. It’s not just that he imagines himself as a “cultural pontiff,” one of his many duties as “the dominant authority in all spheres of American life.” It’s that muscling public and private institutions into adopting the postliberal right’s priorities is a core part of his political remit.

 

Republicans wanted a strongman who would force American society to look the way the right wanted it to look. What was Trump supposed to do when Cracker Barrel made a tentative move in the opposite direction? Pretend not to notice?

 

Flag-burning.

 

It’s interesting to me that, while this was playing out, the president coughed up a new executive order that purports to ban flag-burning. Sort of.

 

Flag-burning is not a serious problem in the United States, any more than removing a farmer from a corporate logo is. It does happen but not often, for obvious reasons: So many Americans find it offensive that the practice is self-defeating. It’s impossible to imagine a cause growing more popular, not less, when it’s associated with torching the Stars and Stripes.

 

It’s so counterproductive that Trump’s order might plausibly be viewed as bait. Prohibiting the act could tempt the dumber elements of the Resistance to defy him by burning the flag more often in protest, which would make for some dandy Republican campaign ads next fall.

 

But Trump didn’t actually ban the practice. He just wants you to think he did.

 

Flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment, at least for now, and the fine print in the president’s order acknowledges that. Essentially, he instructed the Justice Department to pursue charges only in cases where the First Amendment might not apply—i.e., when someone burns the Stars and Stripes in a way that violates a local fire safety law or damages another person’s property.

 

It’s an unusual order, Charles Cooke notes in National Review, in that it’s designed to seem more oppressive than it is. It’s unconstitutional in spirit, seeking to punish an act because of the disfavored political opinion that motivated it, but “prosecute this whenever it’s legal to prosecute it” is a lawful directive by definition.

 

The question is: Why now? If ever there was a moment when Americans shouldn’t need extra reason not to burn the flag, you would think it’s when the president is militarizing U.S. cities and publicly threatening his enemies multiple times a day. “Be careful, we’re watching you!” he warned George and Alex Soros just this morning, calling for them to be charged criminally for funding violent left-wing protests.

 

Citizens in a country that’s collapsing into fascism don’t need to be formally informed that desecrating the national standard won’t be tolerated. It kind of goes with the territory.

 

But Trump did tell us, and I think he did so for the same reason that his fans were so irked by Cracker Barrel’s logo revamp. Pride in the American flag is associated with right-wing culture, and disrespect for right-wing culture simply won’t stand under the president’s new “anti-woke” cultural order.

 

That’s the only way to explain Hillsdale’s social media team finding the “same energy” in a restaurant chain’s marketing makeover as protesters defacing a statue of Washington. It’s a preposterous comparison in a vacuum: The “Old Timer” who graces the entrance of the place old people go to feed at the trough of mediocre southern slop isn’t even an A-list corporate mascot, let alone a figure of national reverence.

 

But through the narrow lens of culture war, there’s a throughline. In both cases, a cultural symbol that the right claims exclusively as its own has been assailed. Southern farmers, the Founding Fathers, the American flag—the right lays claim to all three, to some degree because the left often seems to have little use for any of them, and in Trump’s America you don’t get to take away or impugn what belongs to the right without paying a price.

 

That’s what cultural hegemony, the dream of Trumpism, means.

 

Hippies or authoritarians?

 

So it’s no surprise that the right-wing intelligentsia might see more virtue in banning flag-burning today than it did just a few years ago. “I think burning the flag is stupid and gross but obviously it is free speech,” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh declared in 2019. “‘Free speech doesn’t include desecrating a piece of cloth’ is a really weird position that cannot be intellectually justified.”

 

In 2025, his position has changed. Boy, has it. “The people who burn the flag are, without exception, degenerate communist filth who want you and your family dead and your nation destroyed,” he wrote on Tuesday. “You don’t have to debase yourself by defending these scumbags just because five random Supreme Court justices in the 80s decided out of nowhere that burning the flag is a God-given right.”

 

Typically political movements grow more radical as they lose power. Walsh belongs to one that’s as powerful as it’s ever been, not just politically but culturally, yet here he is suddenly frothing at the mouth over a scourge of cloth-desecration that doesn’t actually exist. Did he change his tune simply because Dear Leader—or, more to the point, paying Daily Wire subscribers—demanded it?

 

Maybe. But one can also read his change of heart as reflecting the seemingly earnest, if abhorrent, ideological devolution across the broader right.

 

Liberalism in the GOP was down to its embers by 2019, as we would all discover following the 2020 election, but I think the right still remained generally committed at the time to Reaganite suppositions about maximizing individual liberty by shrinking big government. (They sure did with respect to pandemic restrictions.) Most of that is gone now. The postliberal right prioritizes cultural hegemony and sees big government as its tool to achieve it, whatever that might mean for liberty. And so its converts are destined to change their position on flag-burning to favor state power over individual rights.

 

The endless national debate over that issue ultimately comes down to this: Do you loathe the idea of the government getting froggy about punishing dissent more than you loathe the idea of hippies torching Old Glory? That question is easy for liberals. But it’s easy for postliberals too.

 

“I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it,” Christopher Rufo said last year, reminding us why Jacobins tend to make better leftists than rightists. The right, after all, seeks to preserve the status quo—it’s just that the status quo that the modern right wants to preserve is one it remembers, or thinks it remembers. That’s how we ended up with pants-wetting threats to “break the Barrel” for the sake of protecting a decades-old logo at a failing restaurant chain. We must destroy the status quo in order to save it.