President Donald Trump has been at the forefront of the patriotic pushback in the culture war, fighting on a variety of fronts against the left’s comprehensive and multifaceted efforts to make Americans ashamed of their own culture, history, and values, which is all a prelude to inducing us to give them all up. And so it’s altogether fitting and proper that the president would weigh in on the Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy. Whether or not one restaurant ditches its Americana roots and goes all woke cosmopolite on us is a minor issue amid all the troubles the nation has today, but Trump has always been a man who understands the big picture. And big picture issues are at play here.
The president wrote on Truth Social Tuesday:
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. 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. 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!
Trump’s advice to the restaurant’s new woke overlords is simple and direct, as all true wisdom is. First and foremost, he says the Cracker Barrel top dogs should “admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll).” Wow, what an idea! You mean, Mr. President, that a business should cater to the values and preferences of its customers rather than using its influence over those customers to try to impose upon them an alien set of beliefs and values? Why didn’t anybody think of this before?
The president is working from some basic facts that Cracker Barrel executives should have had uppermost in their minds all along: the nature of the company’s branding since 1969 has given it an overwhelmingly rural and patriotic customer base. To drop some of the leading features of that branding — the overall-wearing fellow on the old logo, “Uncle Hershel,” being foremost among them — amounts to a repudiation of that customer base.
The Cracker Barrel rebranding is tantamount to joining the chorus of voices that have been telling America-loving patriots for decades now that their country is bad, and that they are bad for loving their country, and that the least they could do is be muted about their patriotism and national pride. Trump, who has brought unabashed national pride back into the mainstream, knows this all too well, and so is exhorting Cracker Barrel to reverse itself. Self-styled “progressives” who are certain in their Marxist assumption that “history” is inevitably moving in the direction of statism and total government control will insist that there is no going back, what becomes woke stays woke, just as Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed about Soviet power: “What we have, we hold.”
But the Soviet Union ultimately found itself in the dustbin of history, and in the realm of marketing blunders, so did New Coke. And thus so can the new, featureless, chastened and toothless Cracker Barrel that hopes you won’t notice that it’s a beloved element of that land between New York and Los Angeles that is so irritating for making the flight between the two so long.
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So far, however, the restaurant has just doubled down, issuing an unctuous statement admitting that it "could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be," and adding, with maximum condescension: "If the last few days have shown us anything, it’s how deeply people care about Cracker Barrel. We’re truly grateful for your heartfelt voices. You’ve also shown us that we could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be."
Yeah, sure. The company should just get off its high horse and listen to Trump. Or if it doesn’t want to go that far, it could at least bow to the public’s obvious dislike of its makeover and reverse course. The era of the left’s cultural, political, and aesthetic proclivities being forced upon the rest of us as if they were as natural as breathing is over, and Cracker Barrel is decidedly late to the party. It should simply realize that it chose the wrong party to go to altogether, and make for the exits before it’s too late, and its patriotic clientele simply decides en masse to go elsewhere.
