Board member behind Cracker Barrel DEI rebranding disaster resigns after pressure — including from Glenn Beck



Cracker Barrel has lost one of its board members responsible for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

After a marketing disaster involving a change to its iconic logo and unique in-store designs, the company quickly apologized and reverted back to its original look. It has since looked to regain consumer trust and is finally making moves in its boardroom.

'Gilbert helped oversee the formation of our strategic plan.'

Now, an independent director and board member who shouldered at least some of the blame for the rebrand is stepping down.

Cracker Barrel announced Gilbert Dávila's resignation on Thursday morning, following a shareholder vote on the company's board of directors. Shareholders elected nine of the company's 10 recommended director nominees, including CEO Julie Masino, who has taken the brunt of the public bashing for the marketing failure.

Cracker Barrel thanked Dávila for being a valued member of the board during his five years.

The company added, "Over that time, Gilbert helped oversee the formation of our strategic plan and led our Compensation Committee with skill and dedication. We are grateful for his many contributions."

RELATED: Cracker Barrel desperately rewrites 'inclusion' and DEI web page after backlash

Just a couple weeks earlier, two of Cracker Barrel's largest proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, were reportedly pressuring shareholders to drop Dávila over his role in the marketing fiasco that tarnished the company's public image.

"Dávila is highlighted in board materials as one of two marketing specialists among the independent directors. He is also a member of a standing board committee whose purview is to assess social and political risks to the company's business,” ISS said, the New York Post reported.

At the same time, the group reportedly said that while removing CEO Masino would create too much chaos, her responsibility for the botched logo "is no less than Dávila's."

Both ISS and Glass Lewis agreed, however, that change was sorely needed at the company, adding that Dávila's marketing expertise was "faulty."

In a recent interview, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck pressed Masino and company senior vice president of store operations Doug Hisel about DEI and other woke marketing strategies, demanding to know: "Had the company embraced DEI as a culture?"

"Don't preach to me on that," he added, speaking for many consumers tired of political messaging from major corporations.

"I'm here to eat your meal. Can we just not have that thrown in our face?"

RELATED: Exclusive interview TOMORROW: Cracker Barrel CEO answers Glenn Beck’s brutal question — 'Why weren’t you fired?'

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Under Dávila's watch, Cracker Barrel's diversity-laden marketing initiatives had spiraled out of control, with the company webpage dedicated to values frequently changing.

In fact, Cracker Barrel's "culture and belonging" page has shifted gears so many times that internet archivists saved dozens of changes over the last two years alone.

The page had previously been labeled "culture and inclusion" and mentioned terms like "unconscious bias," a form of inadvertent, subliminal racism allegedly exhibited by all.

Back in 2024, the page was called "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging" at Cracker Barrel. It celebrated "Diversity in Our Decor," "Diversity in Our Leadership & Development," and even spoke of achievements on the Human Rights Campaign "equality index."

It additionally included mention of company programs like "Be Bold," a mission to develop "black leaders"; the "LGBTQ+ Alliance," which had the purpose of "strengthening Cracker Barrel's relationship to the LGBTQ+ community"; and "HOLA," a program to "promote Hispanic and Latino culture through hiring, developing, and retaining talent within Cracker Barrel."

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Exclusive interview TOMORROW: Cracker Barrel CEO answers Glenn Beck’s brutal question — 'Why weren’t you fired?'



Last weekend, Glenn Beck sat down with Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino to talk about the company’s infamous and disastrous attempt to modernize its brand. It was the first interview Masino has given since her widely criticized August 19 appearance on "Good Morning America," where she defended the rebranding and new minimalist logo that triggered a massive customer revolt.

The company quietly began rolling out its shiny new vision in the summer of 2025, but it was the "GMA" segment that turned simmering discontent into a full-blown national firestorm, with CB regulars condemning the rebrand as "soulless" and vowing boycotts.

Even though Cracker Barrel swiftly caved to the pressure — ditching its glossy revamp, returning to kitschy, antique-filled walls, and reinstating the Old Timer in the logo — people are still angry about the whole going-woke betrayal.

People still want answers.

And that is exactly what Glenn got: “the real answer” behind Cracker Barrel’s decision to fix what clearly wasn’t broke.

This “all-telling” answer, says Glenn, came from his most brazen question to Masino: “Are you surprised you haven’t been fired yet?”

“Just wait until you hear her answer. ... It was so powerful and so honest,” he says.

This Wednesday and Thursday at 6 p.m. ET on BlazeTV and YouTube, tune in for Glenn’s two-part exclusive interview with Julie Masino and Cracker Barrel’s new senior vice president of store operations, Doug Hisel, who told Glenn what really brought the country store chain to its knees.

Cracker Barrel nation — and everyone fed up with woke corporations — has waited long enough. Tomorrow: answers. We’ll see you there.

For a taste of what’s coming, check out the teaser below.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Woke CEOs mocked conservatives. Now the joke’s on them.



Corporate America is bending to conservatives’ market influence. Not out of sudden ideological sympathy, but because conservatives have more economic power than the left — and they’ve stopped pretending not to notice.

For years, corporations ignored conservative concerns. Worse, they often went out of their way to antagonize them, stripping away team mascots like the Redskins and Indians, embracing diversity quotas, and saturating entertainment with left-wing tropes. The squeaky wheel got the grease, and the left made all the noise.

Free markets punish bad bets more effectively than Washington ever could. Let them.

Conservatives, meanwhile, were taken for granted. Corporate leaders assumed they would keep buying no matter how many insults were thrown their way. For a long time, they were right.

That ended when conservatives started fighting back. Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney stunt turned into a disaster. Victoria’s Secret collapsed under its “new image” campaign. Cracker Barrel’s woke makeover backfired so badly its chairs stopped rocking. And when employees mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination, corporations finally began to realize that “the customer is always right” still applies.

Numbers don’t lie

Corporations aren’t embracing conservatives because they’ve had a change of heart. They’re doing it because they need to survive.

The 2024 election was a wake-up call: Conservative voters outnumbered liberals 35% to 23%. Add moderates, and non-liberals outnumbered liberals more than three to one.

Conservatives overwhelmingly vote Republican. Ninety percent cast ballots for Trump. Pew data shows a majority of middle- and upper-middle-income Americans lean Republican — and 51% of Americans identify as middle class. That’s a lot of disposable income.

Family size makes the math even stronger. The Institute for Family Studies reports that counties where Trump won big also have higher birth rates: 1.76 compared to the national average of 1.63. Harris counties, by contrast, averaged just 1.37. Republicans also want bigger families: half want three or more kids, compared to only 31% of Democrats.

Bigger families and higher incomes mean bigger market clout. And the left’s most extreme advocates — the loudest drivers of corporate wokeness — are a small minority inside an already shrinking ideological bloc.

Why the shift happened

So why did corporations bow to the left for so long? Two reasons.

First, executives themselves lean left. Pew Research found upper-income Americans tilt Democrat, and CEOs have marched steadily leftward over the last two decades. Second, conservatives tolerated it. They didn’t punish woke messaging, making it appear costless for companies to indulge their leadership’s politics.

That illusion is gone. Conservative consumers are awake. And companies are finally capitulating to reality.

RELATED: The right message: Justice. The wrong messenger: Pam Bondi.

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Don’t let government ruin it

This is why Republicans should resist the urge to meddle. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made a mistake threatening ABC over Jimmy Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way”? Let’s not.

That kind of government action obscures the real shift — a market correction, not a political one.

Markets speak louder than regulators. If conservatives let economics do the work, corporations will continue adjusting out of necessity. But if government steps in, companies will chalk the change up to political coercion, not consumer demand, and drift back toward the left as soon as administrations change.

Already the left is trying to spin it that way, casting Jimmy Kimmel as a martyr for “free expression” instead of what he is: a bad business decision. The left wants companies to believe government, not consumers, forced the pivot.

Conservatives know better. Free markets punish bad bets more effectively than Washington. Let them.

Cracker Barrel folds again, tells customers they 'don't need to worry'



Cracker Barrel is walking back its country store revamps by removing the modern decor.

Cracker Barrel's infamous rebrand blunder in August changed its classic store model and even removed the Old-Timer character and the barrel itself from the restaurant logo. This caused massive consumer backlash and even drew criticism from one of the company's top investors.

'We hope that today's step reinforces that we hear you.'

The brand has gone through a long journey of reversing course in hopes of getting customers back, and as of Monday, that included completely abandoning the new, modern rebrand.

The company posted a video from Smyrna, Tennessee, showing a rebranded Cracker Barrel having its new logo and design completely disassembled. The letters of the new sign were removed from the storefront and replaced with the "Old Country Store" sign.

A display that had 20 tin cans on it was shown being taken out of the store along with a series of cutting boards that were also hung up on the wall inside the restaurant.

"Like any good relationship, sometimes you just need a little tune-up," the company wrote on X. "We're going back to the things that made us all fall in love in the first place."

Cracker Barrel then sent a message to customers that they need not be worried.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel saves its old-timey decor — but will we settle for a Potemkin past?

Cracker Barrel announced that it was "suspending" its remodels, according to Fox News, telling the outlet, "If your restaurant hasn't been remodeled, you don't need to worry; it won't be."

The spokesperson continued, "With our recent announcement that our 'Old-Timer' logo will remain, along with our bigger focus in the kitchen and on your plate, we hope that today's step reinforces that we hear you."

This was not the only big change the company made regarding its rebrand; it seemingly abandoned its diversity and overall woke initiatives, at least on paper.

RELATED: The decline of customer service — and why it matters

Photo by Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Over the past year, Cracker Barrel has consistently made changes to its once-robust "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging" page.

The page was eventually changed to "culture and inclusion," but still included bizarre initiatives about "empowering" women and "strengthening Cracker Barrel's relationship to the LGBTQ+ community."

There was also a program called "Be Bold," which had a mission to develop "Black Leaders" through "allyship, mentorship, and education."

At the time of this writing, no diversity messages or initiatives appear on the company "Culture & Belonging" page. This was replaced with "The Herschel Way," honoring the Old-Timer with messages of "warmth," serving "with a story," and "going above and beyond" for guests.

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Cracker Barrel saves its old-timey decor — but will we settle for a Potemkin past?



The Old Timer lives to rock his chair another day. In the latest of Cracker Barrel’s many reversals, the company assured customers the old interiors were here to stay. The physical has triumphed over the digital, the "realer" country store representation retained over gray-washed abstraction, and America is quite pleased. The country has managed to hold onto a facsimile of its tangible past, and this is not nothing.

Or is it?

We are nostalgic for being able to engage in the present sufficiently that we create memories.

The controversy over the Cracker Barrel logo reflects a new mood of victory on the resurgent New Right. A sense of humiliation felt over a decade of brands going woke has been replaced by a feeling of power that this pattern is being reversed. But what is the real meaning of this kind of social media activism? Is it really a victory, or rather a victory lap?

Pessimistically, one might say concern over corporate iconography testifies to a form of nostalgia shading into what writer Mark Fisher called Disneyfication. Analyzing Philip K. Dick’s novel "Time Out of Joint," Fisher quotes Fredric Jameson’s "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism": "the peculiar ache of nostalgia that 'Time Out Of Joint' engenders, a nostalgia for the present, which Dick achieves by constellating stereotypical images of the decade he was writing at the end of: 'President Eisenhower's stroke; Main Street, U.S.A.; Marilyn Monroe; a world of neighbors and PTAs; small retail stores (the produce trucked in from outside); favorite television programs; mild flirtations with the housewife next door; game shows and contests; sputniks directly revolving overhead, mere blinking lights in the firmament, hard to distinguish from airliners or flying saucers.'"

Cracker Barrel, though presenting itself as a portal to some bygone poultry farmer’s smoking lounge, now actually offers "a nostalgia for the present." It offers this via immediacy, personal memory, and normalcy.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel caves even further to anti-rebrand outrage

Photo by Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty Images

The optimistic perspective on this Disneyfication? Digitality is defined in a sense by its lack of presentness. Time-stamped posts position the viewer in an exact relationship to the past, old thoughts bombarded constantly by new ones. One is constantly aware that they have missed something and always reminded they are about to miss even more (or encounter and quickly forget). Cracker Barrel, as a restaurant primarily reserved for family gatherings and social affairs, necessitates that one wipe his blue-light bleary eyes and look up. This immediacy separates it from the YouTube-fare of many other chains and accordingly sees us clinging to it all the more.

Presentness is a requirement to actually engage with the past. Our digital moments seldom become memories, and even more infrequently, memories we bother revisiting. By virtue of Cracker Barrel being an accessible space with an architecture of interaction (wall-items to discuss, games to play, widely palatable food, et cetera), it enables fond family-memory formation. We are nostalgic for being able to engage in the present sufficiently that we create memories.

America is now packed to the gills with all forms of unfamiliar tongues, peoples, and pastimes. Cracker Barrel stands out as a shelter with which the present can be fully enjoyed, removing the diner from recriminations over a Main Street now unrecognizable and inuring us against the tornadic spasms of culture outside its thick double doors. It is a bubble, which, in its wobbly fragility, serves as a funhouse mirror, reflecting a present that could be simple, light, and normal. Inside this sudsy salon is a miniature Target clad in kitsch, a menu that does not embarrass you to order from, and an encampment wherein deleterious social change seems to vanish. It answers a prayer that the country, right now, could be so clean-cut and corralled.

The New Right’s push to retain spaces like Cracker Barrel may blossom into a proper creative drive. Perhaps this is not actually required — it may just need to keep clutching the rocking chair tightly. As many feel their professional and personal lives slipping into the virtual, culturally designated "real world" oases will abound. But the simulacra of these spaces will proliferate, too. Perhaps the restaurant is a welcome reprieve from screen-world. In fact, it may be the definitive escape from the digital world. Or maybe it is just the digital world at an earlier stage of development, repackaged as a comforting and familiar experience.

Cracker Barrel’s Retreat Proves The Right Has Cultural Power If They’re Willing To Use It

Conservatives hold more cultural power than they may realize. The question is: Will they continue to use it? Weeks after abandoning its plans to ax the infamous Uncle Herschel from its iconic logo, the southern restaurant chain Cracker Barrel announced Tuesday that it is not moving forward with the sterile redesign of its dining rooms […]

Cracker Barrel's logo lives — but like every digital-age public space, it now looks dead inside



Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino attempted, and failed, to erase Highway America’s beloved country store. Masino’s doomed endeavor is just the latest example of refinement culture’s steamrolling homogeneity, but this felt different, somehow much worse, than previous flattenings of consumer couture. Cracker Barrel’s eccentricities and nostalgia kitsch turned a remodel into a reckoning.

Of course, the woke Millennialification is cringe-inducing. However, this is not the first overhaul of an established chain with pop culture power. Previous iterations of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut also invoke nostalgia, with images from the 1990s and early aughts making the rounds online once a season or so. Cracker Barrel, clearly, had a different pull. In practical terms, it has always been a sit-down-first experience, but the backlash runs deeper than that.

The logo may have been salvaged, but if interior remodels continue apace, your roadside retreat will become a hospice grab-and-go.

Founded in 1969 as a purposefully nostalgic endeavor, the Cracker Barrel project set out from the get-go to tug on your heartstrings. It evoked a bucolic America already gone by, the decor a launching point for older relatives to spin yarns about the good old days. Pizza Hut nostalgia is down simply to a decade of construction and the passage of time.

Cracker Barrel’s true uniqueness is its emphasis on an ambience that says "stay," inviting customers to settle in and reminisce. Whether you were playing the peg game over butter and biscuits or rifling through the wooden toy and Weasel Ball aisle, Cracker Barrel never motioned toward the door. Cozy and familiar, Cracker Barrel invited you into the tangible world of things: clutter, knickknacks, antiques, wood, gas lamps, and farm equipment. The walls were heavy. Stone hearths anchored every dining room. The Barrel presented itself as a destination, as the American grandparent par excellence, a barn-den of earthly delights.

Contrast this with the new interior. The tyranny of gray, of symmetry and 90-degree angles, becomes omnipresent. It is profoundly soulless: rolling pins arranged in perfect squares and sequence, kettles in fluorescent color affixed exactly upright in rows on bland canvas displays. In essence, Cracker Barrel’s simulacrum of a country home is abstracted even farther into its most literal parts and parcels, calling to mind cooking blog thumbnails and pallid pop art. It points toward the digital, to the representative over the real, and even worse, it pushes the consumer toward the exit. It seems to say “get in and get out.”

RELATED: Why Cracker Barrel’s disastrous rebrand was inevitable

Photo by Joe Raedle / Contributor via Getty Images

The digital is fundamentally temporary, the way in which we interact with essays, short-form video content, tweets, and the rest. The sign of this is the gray, the sleek, nostalgic props rendered in perfect lines like typeface, all blaring with the same refrain: EXIT. They’re razing the physical and replacing it with a digital reconstruction.

Everything is an airport. Everyone, everywhere, wants you out as soon as you walk in. The restful, the physical are stripped away in order to sap the hearth of its heat so you never get comfortable enough to stay. There is nowhere to stop and wait for a while. You have to keep moving, racing through a world of commodities blurring together into one long strand of gruel.

The last redoubt of color and clutter, Cracker Barrel is now just another franchise, flattened and homogenized. The logo may have been salvaged, but if interior remodels continue apace, your roadside retreat will become a hospice grab-and-go.

We still crave slivers of the real, of invitation and warmth, of the physical world. We desire escape from our escapes, entry into the real and exit from the digital. Cracker Barrel’s rebrand discarded the pleasant lie of highway stopover as home away from home. Venues will increasingly resemble the virtual as comfort food becomes uncomfortable.

David French Will Say Anything For A Paycheck

David French's schtick is too obvious now to pretend he’s doing anything but a 'real conservative' minstrel show for pay.

CNN analyst voices growing concerns over Democrat chances in 2026 midterms: 'As good ... as the Cracker Barrel rebrand'



The floundering of the Democratic Party is becoming impossible to ignore while Republicans continue to make positive gains in swing states. At least one mainstream media outlet is now admitting that Democrats are in trouble ahead of the 2026 midterms, and the numbers appear to prove it.

CNN data analyst Harry Enten broke down the major gains in voter registration in key swing states for Republicans.

'The Democratic brand is in about as good a position as the Cracker Barrel rebrand.'

Looking at the data from Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Enten said, "The Republican Party is in their best position at this point in the cycle since at least 2005, in all four of these key battleground states."

Enten showed that Arizona had a three-point gain in Republican voter registration; Nevada had a six-point gain. Strikingly, North Carolina and Pennsylvania both had an eight-point gain in Republican voter registration.

RELATED: Trump DOJ targets North Carolina for shaky voter registration

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Are there any bright spots for Democrats? Have they picked up any ground since January 1 in terms of party registration? I'm not seeing it in these key swing states, these four key swing states. That's what we're talking about: party registration margin gain since January 1, 2025."

"The Democratic brand is in about as good a position as the Cracker Barrel rebrand," he added.

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