Reality Curb Stomps David French’s Psycho Fantasies — Again
To listen to The New York Times’ David French about Cracker Barrel, free speech, Christians, or anything at all is to abuse your own mind.To listen to The New York Times’ David French about Cracker Barrel, free speech, Christians, or anything at all is to abuse your own mind.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.
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’s $700 million recipe for disaster
Cracker Barrel thought it could buy loyalty with $700 million and a new look. Instead, it bought itself a revolt.
The Tennessee-based chain wasn’t supposed to change. Not like this. The rocking chairs, the country kitsch, Uncle Herschel leaning on a barrel — all of it reassured customers that some part of America still felt the same.
Cracker Barrel had better pay attention. Like Bud Light, it now suffers from a grave, self-inflicted wound that could fester for years.
You always knew what you were getting at the place: coffee in a thick, white mug, biscuits on the table, a place that felt familiar no matter how far from home.
Now, the company is spending a fortune to chase “relevance” and “inclusivity,” and customers know it’s more than biscuits and gravy at stake.
Oh, come on. People are losing their minds over a chain restaurant, for Pete’s sake. Why?
Maybe because people don’t see Cracker Barrel that way. The brand was a promise, and that promise was continuity.
With its new minimalist logo and glossy interiors, the company has traded that sense of belonging for homogenized corporate drivel. In doing so, it may have destroyed what made it matter in the first place.
Innovating into oblivion
Julie Masino, who took over as CEO in 2023, has said bluntly: “We’re just not as relevant as we once were.”
She had reason to worry. Before the pandemic, Cracker Barrel had more than 660 locations and steady traffic. COVID closures, rampant inflation, an obvious decline in food quality, and a sluggish recovery left revenues flat by 2023. Margins tightened, expansion stalled, and a chain once synonymous with dependable growth suddenly looked like it was falling behind.
Masino’s $700 million bet was supposed to stop the slide. It may accelerate it. And the reason should be as obvious as the chunky, black hipster frames perched on Masino’s nose: Customers didn’t come to Cracker Barrel for “relevance” or “innovation” or any other trendy marketing buzzword.
They came for what didn’t change: a road-trip landmark where the food was predictable, the service unpretentious and unhurried, and the atmosphere soaked in nostalgia — as close to “authentic” as a multibillion-dollar corporation can get.
For millions of Americans, Cracker Barrel represented a world that seemed to endure while everything else raced ahead. It was so successful on that score that some people believe the chain is much older than it really is. (It was founded in 1969 by a Shell Oil executive looking to boost service station sales. It doesn’t even rank in the top 15 oldest restaurant chains in the country.)
Not another culture-war fight
Some on the left dismiss the reaction to Cracker Barrel as just more MAGA foot-stomping on social media — the latest culture-war kerfuffle by stuck-in-the-past conservatives. They’re wrong as usual.
Sure, “get woke, go broke,” and all that. It’s true your average Cracker Barrel diehard wasn’t a fan of the rainbow rocking chair post from a couple of Pride Months ago. And the 2022 introduction of Impossible™ breakfast sausage on the menu prompted instant online blowback. But the subsequent “boycott” — if you can call it that — flamed out, and Impossible meat remains on the menu today.
This rebrand is different. A $700 million transformation isn’t a menu experiment. It’s a wholesale attempt to rewrite the chain’s identity — the one thing about Cracker Barrel that didn’t need fixing.
No doubt Masino saw the old Cracker Barrel logo as outdated and hokey. Does she think the flyover hicks she condescends were so clueless they thought it was cutting edge?
Branding or ‘blanding’?
What Masino missed is that sometimes hokey and outdated is good. The rocking chairs out front, the general store kitsch, Uncle Herschel leaning on the barrel — all of these were emblems of comfort and familiarity.
More than that, they represented a promise: After all these years, we still know what’s important to you — and it isn’t the kind of overpriced, out-of-touch “market research” that has ruined so many other brands.
— (@)
On X last week, an AI parody of a “rebranded” Cracker Barrel made the rounds: a soulless glass-and-steel box with the logo hovering above like an afterthought. The joke worked because it could be real. We’ve seen Taco Bell and McDonald’s turn their restaurants into sleek mausoleums for fast food, all dark angles and no soul. Marketers call it “blanding.” Customers call it: I guess we’re eating in a bank lobby now.
Corporate America tells itself that relevance requires reinvention. In practice, it often means severing ties with the traditions that gave a company its identity. Corporate America treats continuity as dead weight, when in fact it’s ballast.
RELATED:Cracker Barrel’s long history of cozying up to left-leaning organizations exposed
Injury to insult
Corporate America made the same mistake with Bud Light. When Anheuser-Busch partnered with Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, critics scoffed, predicting conservatives would soon move on. Instead, Bud Light went from the best-selling light beer in America to a distant second. It has yet to recover.
The left will say this just goes to show how “transphobic” Bud Light drinkers are. And yes, Mulvaney’s bizarre charade of “girlhood” was deeply disturbing — and deeply irritating. But the more egregious sin of that campaign was its utter, insulting indifference to why consumers valued Bud Light.
Cracker Barrel had better pay attention. This is not another passing squall. Like Bud Light, it now suffers from a grave, self-inflicted wound that could fester for years.
Cracker Barrel has always been in the business of selling hospitality: an unpretentious, unfussy repast that is dependably consistent. It’s not that its customers didn’t know it wasn’t really a humble country store; it’s that those country store trappings promised an effort to make you feel truly welcome — a rarity in today’s data-driven, lowest-common-denominator world.
Strip it all away, and you’re left with the same cynical corporate propaganda — a fake smile that barely conceals a sneer of contempt.
Masino should have seen this coming. All she needed to avoid this disaster was to know her customers. For better or worse, she’s getting to know them now.
Hot girls and denim: American Eagle rediscovers a winning formula
Youth retailer American Eagle just launched a new ad campaign featuring “it girl” Sydney Sweeney from “Euphoria” — and her well-endowed fame is turning heads and shaping markets. The campaign launch, featuring the bombshell known for her curves, drove the stock up 15% in a single day.
Whatever American Eagle paid Sweeney, it was worth it. The company’s market cap jumped $400 million in one day following a 47% decline in its stock price last year. After years of hawking body positivity, it appears “hot girl summer” is once again the way to go.
American Eagle is back, reignited by the formula as old as advertising itself: Sexy sells.
The idea that hot girls leaning on muscle cars sell jeans — or anything else, for that matter — is nothing revolutionary in the ad world. Who could forget Pepsi’s 1992 ad featuring Cindy Crawford at the gas station in jeans and a white tank top? No Gen Xer on the planet could forget this ad. It was iconic — and effective.
Bringing sexy back
American Eagle’s newest campaign is a major about-face after more than a decade of jeans, car, and beer brands forcing wokeness down our gullets. Ultimately, sex sells. And pretty girls with sexy stares can sell everything from men’s deodorant to the WNBA — if only they had more Sophie Cunninghams!
Calvin Klein jeans made sexy their stock-in-trade over 40 years ago. In 1980, the premium jeans brand gave us Brooke Shields seductively whispering, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”
She was 15, and it was both sordid and problematic. But it ushered in decades of “hot girls in jeans” advertising. From Kate Moss naked from the waist up in Calvin Klein jeans to Anna Nicole Smith doing her best Marilyn Monroe impression for Guess, the formula worked.
Abercrombie & Fitch gave sexy a twist with preppy hot girls and guys — shirtless — in black-and-white Bruce Weber photography. CEO Mike Jeffries was so obsessed with sexy that the brand was sued for hiring only good-looking people as sales associates in their stores.
Man boobs don’t sell
Then wokeness tightened its grip on corporate America. Sexy was out. Dylan Mulvaney cosplaying as Audrey Hepburn drinking Bud Light and overweight, nonbinary, hairy-chested men in bras and Calvin Klein jeans were in.
But the public didn’t buy it. Literally.
Bud Light’s partnership with Mulvaney in 2023 sparked a historic backlash. The brand plummeted from America’s best-selling beer to number three. Its market share tanked, and sales have declined more than 20% annually since.
RELATED: Go woke, go MEGA broke — this luxury company’s sales just plummeted 97%
Walking back woke
But after years of brand-destroying body positivity, the remnants of normies at American Eagle took the wheel, and their sales and stock price soared. The brand is back, reignited by the formula as old as advertising itself: Sexy sells. Always has, always will.
Even Nike seems to be walking back its own woke phase. Just last week, the company ran a series of ads with U.S. Open winner Scottie Scheffler touting family values.
Another adage permeates advertising: Always include a cutaway shot of either a dog, a baby, or both. Cuteness, like hotness, sells. And nothing is cuter than golf champ Scheffler holding his baby.
Nike’s ad campaign with Scheffler comes on the heels of the company’s previous campaign with Dylan Mulvaney in a sports bra — without any boobs at all. Are we to believe that Nike has shed its wokeness? I think what’s more likely is that Nike was never woke to begin with.
Nike’s mantra is money. And execs will abandon Mulvaney as fast as you can say, “Just do it,” if it means reversing their sales decline and pleasing their shareholders.
Reigniting the normies
As Clay Travis famously put it, “The only two things I 100% believe in are the First Amendment and boobs.” We can gasp and pretend this is a controversial statement. But Travis only said what we all know to be true: Boobs are a reliable winner. Breast augmentation surgeries have experienced a compound annual growth rate of 13% per year since 2020 for a reason.
American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign is not remotely “body positive,” and that’s a good thing. It pays. And I predict other brands will take note.
Returning to normie marketing means brands can advertise normal ideas to normal people without feeling bad about it any more. And we can let it wash over us in all of its visual pleasantness.
Expect a wave of ad campaigns in which marketers quietly memory-hole the failed “body positivity” experiment and return to what actually works. The brands chasing social justice won’t say it out loud, but they’re breathing a collective sigh of relief.
The culture war isn’t a distraction — it’s the main front
Every June for the past decade, Americans have endured the same tedious ritual. Corporations, nonprofits, and federal agencies blanketed the country in rainbow iconography to mark the beginning of Pride Month. Logos were recolored. HR departments rolled out slide decks on inclusion. Public spaces were repurposed into temples of the new state religion.
But this year feels different. Pride Month opened with a whimper. Some of the most vocal corporate evangelists dropped the celebration entirely. The cause? Conservatives finally decided to fight. Culture war became something more than a talking point — and suddenly, a chorus of “respectable” voices began warning about the dangers of winning.
The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.
It’s our duty to ignore them.
The warning signs were obvious decades ago. In 1992, Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention that a culture war had already begun. If the right failed to take it seriously, he said, it would lose everything else. The GOP didn’t listen. Instead, the party obsessed over tax cuts and nation-building in the Middle East. The Moral Majority of the 1970s and ’80s was treated as a joke — something dated, embarrassing, and politically toxic. Better to focus on free markets and gun rights.
The culture war, we were told, belonged to church ladies and washed-up televangelists. The future of conservatism lay in fusing neocon economics with a libertarian live-and-let-live approach to social issues.
Pride filled the void
Nature abhors a vacuum. Turns out that if you withdraw all Christian influence from the public square, something else takes its place.
Republicans abandoned the culture war. Progressives never stopped fighting it. With almost no resistance, activist groups captured corporations, school boards, and even the military. Their “American Ramadan” took hold of the civic calendar. At first, they had to push. Over time, they no longer needed to. They’d filled these institutions with graduates trained in the new religion. Pride became doctrine.
Then they pushed too far.
The backlash didn’t start with GOP leadership or conservative media figures. Most of them ran for cover, as usual. It started with parents. LGBTQ+ activists had always targeted children, but usually with plausible deniability. Once transgender ideology reached the classroom and children began mutilating their bodies, the pretense collapsed.
Fathers watched daughters suffer concussions in girls’ sports. Mothers feared losing sons to state-mandated transitions. This wasn’t about marginal tax rates any more. This was a fight for their children’s bodies and souls — exactly the battle Buchanan predicted.
RELATED: Let’s build a statue honoring Pat Buchanan
Fighting the culture war worked
Eventually, even Republican politicians took notice. Boycotts emerged. Protests followed. For the first time in decades, conservative action had teeth. Corporate boardrooms and school boards felt the pressure.
Some politicians, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, broke from the usual GOP pattern of complaint without consequence. He used political power to defend voters — passing laws, signing executive orders, reshaping public institutions. Conservative pundits and establishment media scolded him for violating “small government principles.” Voters, however, rewarded him. Other governors followed.
Pride Month 2025 looked nothing like the version Americans had come to expect. Under the Trump administration, federal agencies and the military no longer served as public relations arms for the gender revolution. Major corporations — Target, Starbucks, Disney — sat out the ritual queering of their logos. Not every company pulled back. But the most aggressive push came from professional sports leagues, especially Major League Baseball. Ironically, the industries most reliant on red-state consumers seemed the most desperate to humiliate them.
Still, the contrast was undeniable. Conservatives, for once, applied sustained pressure — and it worked.
Much work to be done
No victory stays secure without follow-through.
Progressive ideology still saturates the commanding heights of American culture. The bureaucracy, the universities, the legal system — all remain firmly in enemy hands. Populist uprisings, however welcome, tend to burn hot and fast. They need structure to last. The moment belongs to the right, but momentum means little without organization.
Buchanan’s most famous lines weren’t just about warning — they were about action.
Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.
That vision threatens the GOP establishment more than any left-wing pressure campaign. Republican elites never liked Trump, and they certainly never liked what he unleashed. Populism made demands. It refused to obey. It reminded the base that political power should be used — not just harvested.
The saboteurs wasted no time. They labeled anyone who fights the culture war with actual authority “the woke right.” The term signals their intent: Neutralize real opposition by redefining it as leftist. Restore the old consensus. Return to safe topics and stale slogans.
But the old consensus is dying.
The base has learned that victory is possible. Cultural power can be challenged. Political power can be used. The enemy can be made to retreat.
Of course, this fight won’t end quickly. No amount of virtue-signaling from corporations can erase the damage already done. Children still face ideological capture. Bureaucrats still push gender ideology behind closed doors. Activists still hold positions of influence across major institutions.
But the wall has cracked.
This moment demands more than nostalgia or outrage. It demands strategy. It demands organization. And above all, it demands courage.
The right doesn’t need to beg for permission or apologize for fighting. It needs to press the advantage. Those who warned that the culture war would cost too much should reckon with how much surrender has already cost us.
We’ve seen what works. Now we need to keep doing it — block by block.
Facing down cancel culture: 4 courageous women who stand firm in their beliefs
When I was a child, I wanted to be so many things “when I grew up.” My choices ran the gamut of all the traditional options: police officer, professional football player, teacher, and doctor. News flash: I pursued none of those things.
Today, I now entertain the same conversations with my 10-year-old daughter. One day she wants to be a show director. Another day she wants to be a teacher. And another she wants to be a mom. Like my journey — and the journeys of most — the odds are that she will pursue a vocation yet to be mentioned (although I am rooting for the mom option somewhere along the way!).
Society provides some truly heroic women for our daughter to emulate.
Regardless, as her dad, I do not expend much effort worrying about what she chooses to do. Rather, I am most concerned with how she does it and whether she will exercise the values my wife and I are raising her to practice: courage, humility, hard work, honesty, generosity, empathy, selflessness, honor, and intellectual curiosity.
I often recycle the same advice my parents always gave me: Pick appropriate role models and emulate them. Unfortunately, the U.S. media is not interested in promoting women who exercise these values in the face of career consequences.
While her mom is the best example for her to follow, it is important to provide our daughter with examples from outside the home. Luckily, society provides some truly heroic women for her to emulate.
Michele Tafoya enjoyed as prestigious a career as anyone — male or female — in sports broadcasting. She holds a record four Emmys for sports reporting, and she was the only person nominated every year she was eligible. She worked five Super Bowls, and "Sunday Night Football" was the top-rated show during all 11 years of her tenure on it.
But in 2021, Tafoya used a guest-host appearance on “The View” to represent the beliefs of so many Americans who were silenced and canceled at that time. Amid her fellow hosts asking for talking points to be fed to their earpieces from their producer, Tafoya schooled them on critical race theory and race in America with the grace of a wide receiver and the power of a linebacker. At one point the crowd booed her, to which she responded, “Bring it on!”
Even before then, Tafoya knew she wanted to pursue something different. She had a lot to say, and she wanted a platform where she could share her conservative beliefs. So she told NBC the 2021 NFL season would be her last, and after 327 games from the sidelines, Super Bowl LVI would be her final big game.
For Tafoya, it had become less about the military veterans standing by her side for the national anthem and more about woke causes that did not align with her values. As she said at the time, “I couldn’t ignore that little voice any more after what we have all endured over the last four years.” Since then, she has been a champion of conservative causes across multiple networks and platforms, including her own podcast.
Thankfully, Tafoya has been a trailblazer for many women since. In 2022, Jennifer Sey, brand president for Levi’s and a 23-year veteran of the company, was ousted for her criticism of school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her own admirable move, the married mother of four and sole breadwinner in her household turned down a $1 million pay package so that she could share her story with public. “I walked out the door with an uncertain future but a clear sense of purpose,” Sey said. You can’t put a price on that.
Sey is now leading a movement of bravery with her clothing company, XX-XY Athletics, the first athletic brand that has stood up for women’s sports. What a novel idea! “This is who I am,” Sey said. “This is what I believe. Deal with it.” Let’s hope her efforts give young women the encouragement to live their values now, in the beginnings of their promising careers.
Every day the list of women gets longer. After being sidelined for sharing her opinion on ESPN’s COVID vaccination policy, Sage Steele left the network after 16 years to “exercise her First Amendment rights more freely.” Not long after, Disney-owned ESPN fired one of its other female rock stars, Samantha Ponder, for voicing an opinion that 70% of the country supports: Biological men should not compete in women’s sports.
Much is said about the glass ceiling. These courageous women not only broke through it but also laid a new foundation for the women who have followed them. There are countless other stories like theirs out there.
I still listen to every career my daughter dreams of and give her the encouragement that she can be anything she wants to be if she puts in the hard work. In a society where it is popular to “do as I say, not as I do,” when it comes to these women, I will tell my daughter to do both.
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