Christopher F. Rufo

The uproar over the restaurant chain’s rebrand might appear trivial, but it carries a deeper significance.

Last week, another viral culture war story captured the headlines. The old-timey restaurant chain Cracker Barrel had rebranded, removing the old man and the barrel from its logo, and replacing it with a simple, modernistic, typography-only design.

At first, I dismissed the story as trivial. I have never set foot in a Cracker Barrel and, as such, have little stake in what is emblazoned above its doorways. But after speaking with conservative activist Robby Starbuck, I learned there was something beyond the logo that deserved our attention. According to Starbuck, Cracker Barrel, 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.

The logo change might have caught the public’s initial attention, but the underlying political story had real stakes. If companies that depend on conservatives adopt radical left-wing policies, they must face the consequences.

And, thanks to the work of Starbuck and others, the social media uproar seems to have made a difference. As the story circulated through the media, the company’s stock price plummeted by as much as 17 percent. Cracker Barrel has quickly walked back its changes.

All this is salutary. Beginning with the revolt against Bud Light, the Right learned how to flex its muscles in the marketplace. Rather than defer to corporations as they did in the past, conservatives have realized that corporations have a culture and must be constantly reminded that, if they deviate from core American values, the consequences will be felt in their bottom line. Starbuck has had enormous success on this point, leading boycott campaigns that have changed policies at Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply, John Deere, and other major brands.

A number of lessons can be drawn from this experience. First, conservatives can win these culture fights. Second, corporations follow the narrative in the media. Third, behavior changes through reward and punishment.

This last point is especially important. Some might dismiss the Cracker Barrel campaign as minor, or even embarrassing, given that the company is a decidedly down-class brand. But there is enormous value in making an example of the company and cementing a fear that conservatives can spontaneously lash out at any institution that crosses the line. Today, it’s Cracker Barrel; tomorrow it might be Pepsi, Target, or Procter & Gamble. As we have seen in recent years, corporate CEOs are highly sensitive to shifts in public opinion—and marginal changes in revenues—and will drop left-wing policies as soon as they become a liability.

The question is how to gain leverage. We are all tempted to be polite in public. But the fight over corporate culture can’t be won without securing real, tangible victories—which means real, tangible losses for institutions on the other side. Even if we don’t care about Cracker Barrel in particular, we should all care about the ideological capture of American institutions and use whatever power we have to reverse it.

And for that to occur, the Barrel must be broken.

Christopher F. Rufo

The underlying theory is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader on the cusp of becoming king.

I spent Father’s Day weekend in Hood River, Oregon, and stumbled upon the local “No Kings” anti-Trump protest. The crowd was populated mostly by Baby Boomers, who appeared to be living out a political fantasy, in which they could “stop fascism” by reenacting the protest movements of their youth. One sign, typical of the genre, derided Trump as a “felon, rapist, con man”; another riffed on Mary Poppins, reading “super callous, fragile, racist, sexist, Nazi POTUS.”

The underlying theory of this protest, which reportedly drew upward of 5 million demonstrators nationwide, is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader on the cusp of becoming king. The only way to stop him is to flood the streets and persuade the American people that Trump is a rotten character with despotic ambitions.

The theory, of course, is nonsense. Trump is a duly elected president. He is working with Congress on the budget. His deportation policy, which lent momentum to the weekend’s demonstrations, is predicated on enforcing existing law. Though President Trump contested the results of his first reelection campaign, he ultimately relented and peacefully transferred power to President Joe Biden—hardly the behavior of a tyrant.

Yet the protests are not without utility for the Left. They are not intended to grapple with the reality of the Trump presidency but to submerge reality in fantasy. The first step in entrenching the Left’s fictions in the public mind is to cultivate a sense of hysteria. In the president’s first term, crowds wore vagina-shaped hats and marched in the bitter cold. The tone of the “No Kings” protest was no less absurd, with women in Handmaid’s Tale costumes warning that Trump would reduce them to sex slaves.

The next step is to turn public energy into a threat. As seen in Los Angeles earlier this month, the Left’s more aggressive factions can operate alongside “mostly peaceful protests,” aiming to provoke law enforcement into overreacting. During Trump’s first term, leftist activists often played a double game—promoting “nonviolent” demonstrations for women’s rights or racial justice while allowing more confrontational elements to intimidate Trump supporters.

This time, immigration is the flash point. Trump has tied his presidency to mass deportations. The Left believes it can stop him by carefully shaping public opinion. That means highlighting emotional—if sometimes misleading—stories of deportation victims and sympathetic portrayals of protesters clashing with National Guard troops. These narratives are designed to paint Trump as an authoritarian and the Left as the resistance, with the aim of driving his approval ratings low enough to weaken his presidency.

The irony is that Trump does not have the power of a king—or, arguably, even the full power of the presidency, as established in Article II of the Constitution. District courts have blocked many of his policies down to the most minute detail, sometimes within hours of their adoption. A federal judge even prohibited the administration from removing gender-related content from government websites.

At the Hood River protest, I noticed a generational divide. The Baby Boomers were the most gullible, engaging in 1960s protest nostalgia and genuinely believing that America was under threat of incipient fascism. The younger generation, which came to political consciousness during the Trump era, seemed more skeptical. At the edge of the protest, I saw a group of teenage boys holding signs that read “Ban Onions” and “Ban Scratchy Blankets.” They seemed to see through the fiction of “No Kings,” viewing left-wing Baby Boomers, rather than Trump, as the rightful targets of satire and rebellion.

I hope that this attitude prevails. For 60 years, the Boomers have held a grip on the American political narrative; it has not been a story that conduced to national well-being. America elected Trump, in part, to demolish the remaining fantasies of the 1968 generation. Yes, no kings—and no more lies.