While much of the entire “controversy” over the decision by Cracker Barrel to change and then restore its old logo seemed to me to be a tempest in a teapot, the fact that the firestorm itself quickly forced Cracker Barrel to back down tells us something far more important: The alternative press (mostly conservative) is no longer confined to the fringes of culture, but now has real reach throughout society.

This cultural change can’t be underlined enough. For most of my long life, conservative news and cultural outlets had little impact on the general culture. They would make their points, often cogently and based on facts, and find themselves generally ignored. Only a decade ago, when conservatives complained about the leftward drift by major corporations or universities into racial quotas, bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism, few noticed and more significantly, the companies or universities shrugged off the criticisms nonchalantly, as if the complaints were nothing more than a tiny gnat flying about in the air.

I speak from experience, because a decade ago I was posting regularly about this drift in both universities and corporations, was getting my posts picked up by many conservative news aggregates, and yet those posts had no impact at all. Nothing changed. If anything, the corporations and universities cited actually accelerated their racial quotas and their emphasis on bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism.

No more. In the past four years the general culture and how it gets its information has fundamentally changed. That culture now listens to the right, and the result is fast and immediate change.

The Cracker Barrel kerfuffle proves this. Cracker Barrel proudly announced its logo change on August 19, 2025. In less than 24 hours numerous conservatives across the entire internet were lambasting the company about it, accusing the company of abandoning its past and going woke. This comment was quite typical:

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.

In reading these outbursts of outrage over the changed logo, the whole thing seemed to me to utterly absurd. On its face, the management had apparently decided to simplify the logo in order to make it easier to spot on those interstate standardized “exit food signs”, since the bulk of Cracker Barrel’s business comes from this interstate travel. There was no obvious element of “woke” in the new design, other than illustrating that Cracker Barrel’s management had the typical lack of imagination of most corporate executives.

Thus, the controversy seemed silly and petty, which made it even more surprising how quickly Cracker Barrel backed down. In less than a week the company’s management felt the need to do damage control, issuing a statement of apology about the removal of the old guy from the logo.

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. What has not changed, and what will never change, are the values this company was built on when Cracker Barrel first opened in 1969: hard work, family, and scratch-cooked food made with care. A place where everyone feels at home, no matter where you’re from or where you’re headed.

…We love seeing how much you care about our ‘old timer.’ We love him too. Uncle Herschel will still be on our menu (welcome back Uncle Herschel’s Favorite Breakfast Platter), on our road signs, and featured in our country store. He’s not going anywhere—he’s family.

This pandering statement however wasn’t enough however to cool things down, especially because the company was still determined to stick with the simplified logo. The protests continued, and thus only two days later the company announced it was abandoning the logo change entirely.

“We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain,” the company said in a statement.

The First Amendment, reborn

It should be noted that many of those on the right who protested weren’t merely triggered by the logo change. There had been ample evidence in the past two years that the corporate heads at Cracker Barrel were going woke, buying into the queer agenda in ways that without doubt very offensive to the customer base.

Nonetheless, the big take-away from this story is how it proves the alternative/conservative press is no longer an outlier in our culture. It has now has wide reach, the public reads it, and no longer dismisses its reports as unimportant.

The result is that in less than two weeks, a simple logo change became a public relations nightmare for a major corporation, forcing it to respond to quell the controversy.

The consequences of this change are immeasurable. No longer will this country’s cultural debate be dominated by the left. A truly marketplace of ideas has been reborn, and the fruits of that debate in the coming years can only be positive.