The Right Is So Desperate to Prove 'Go Woke, Go Broke' That They're Inventing 'Woke' Controversies Out of Thin Air
From Cracker Barrel to Sydney Sweeney's jeans: How right-wing influencers manufacture controversies, then cite them as proof that "wokeness" destroys companies.
Cracker Barrel changed their logo and conservatives are acting like someone burned down a church.
The restaurant chain dropped the little cartoon guy who's been leaning against a barrel since 1977, went with just text in a vaguely barrel-shaped yellow blob, and suddenly it's the downfall of American civilization. Donald Trump Jr. posted “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” like they'd just announced they were replacing biscuits with kale chips. Rep. Byron Donalds went even further, tweeting that he found Jesus in a Cracker Barrel parking lot during college and that “no one asked for this woke rebrand.”
Found Jesus. In a Cracker Barrel parking lot. And now the logo change is apparently a personal affront to his salvation.
But wait, there's more. Conservative activist and all-around slimeball Robby Starbuck released a 15-minute video claiming the company is “infested with left-wing activists who are more interested in safe spaces, pronouns and virtue signaling than they are in their customers.” The evidence? Well, they removed Uncle Herschel from the logo. Also, one board member used to work at Disney. In the diversity department. Over a decade ago.
Christopher Rufo declared “we must break the Barrel.” YouTuber Benny Johnson said, “White people are about to riot” because they “[erased] the white guy” from the logo. The stock dropped nearly $100 million in value.
You know what this is? It's the same minimalist corporate rebrand virtually every company has done in the past decade. Dunkin’ dropped “Donuts.” Mastercard simplified their overlapping circles. Even KFC has been messing with the Colonel for years. Companies hire expensive consultants who tell them their logos need to work on apps and that nobody under 40 knows what a barrel is anyway, and boom, here's your new simplified design. That'll be $3 million, thanks.
But sure, it's probably about pronouns.
How to manufacture a controversy in 30 minutes or less
Here's where this gets genuinely stupid. The outrage wasn't even organic. These influencers literally A/B tested whether to be mad about it.
According to Adam Bumas at Garbage Day, the logo change was announced on a Monday and completely ignored until Wednesday, when a bunch of aggregator accounts all posted about it at once. Including Dom Lucre, the QAnon guy who's been to the White House multiple times. His initial post? Totally neutral: “🔥🚨DEVELOPING:: Cracker Barrel just updated their logo for the first time in 47 years.”
Two hours later, after checking his engagement numbers, he pivoted to “They need to add the Cracker and the Barrel back.”
Two hours.
The account @ClownWorld_ was even faster. They went from asking “Thoughts?” to screaming about “woke agendas” in exactly 30 minutes. Half an hour to decide whether this was worth being furious about. These people are running opinion focus groups on themselves.
And then there's Christopher Rufo, the guy who brags about manufacturing the CRT panic. Wednesday: “I don't care about the new logo.” Thursday: “We must break the Barrel.” But here's the beautiful part. He actually admitted what he was doing. In his barrel-breaking post, he wrote: “It's not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’”
He literally said "who cares" about Cracker Barrel while demanding we destroy Cracker Barrel.
The timing on all this is surgical. You can track the exact moment when accounts like @EndWokeness and Alex Bruesewitz (described as "Trump's podcast guru," which sounds like a job you'd make up at a party) realized this could be a thing. They remembered conservatives tried to boycott Cracker Barrel in 2023 for supporting Pride month. They saw some TikToks from earlier this year complaining about restaurant remodels. They did the math on potential engagement.
And then they all just... decided to be mad. Together. At the same time. About a logo.
Into this completely manufactured shitstorm walks Charles Gasparino, Fox Business correspondent and New York Post columnist, with what might be the dumbest take yet: This proves investors need to add “woke risk” to their financial models.
Gasparino wrote a whole book called “Go Woke, Go Broke.” He's been pushing this theory for years. And now he thinks he's found his smoking gun: Cracker Barrel’s stock dropped after they changed their logo, therefore wokeness is a quantifiable investment risk “as important as the direction of interest rates and inflation.”
His evidence? Two examples. First, Cracker Barrel. Second, American Eagle's stock going up 20% after the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad that supposedly triggered liberals.
About that Sydney Sweeney thing. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. The “massive liberal backlash”? It was maybe a few dozen TikToks. But those dozen comments got screenshot and shared and quote-tweeted until suddenly JD Vance was on podcasts talking about how Democrats hate beautiful women. Ted Cruz was defending a jeans commercial. Someone made a fake apology from American Eagle joking about not realizing “how big her boobs would be” and people shared it like it was real.
The whole controversy was faker than a three-dollar bill, but Gasparino cites it as proof that “anti-woke messaging sells.”
She made a dad joke about genes and jeans. That's it. That's the anti-woke messaging that supposedly drove the stock up 20%. Not the fact that they got massive free publicity from a manufactured controversy. Not the fact that Sydney Sweeney is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood right now. Nope, must be the brave stand against wokeness of... putting a hot woman in a denim ad. Truly groundbreaking stuff, guys!
Gasparino's got a buddy, Bob Sloan from S3 Partners, who apparently noticed Cracker Barrel was a “battleground stock” with evenly split investor sentiment. Any news could've moved it. They announced they were bringing back the McRib? Stock movement. CEO caught jaywalking? Stock movement. But because the catalyst happened to be a logo change that angry conservatives decided to call woke, suddenly it's evidence of a new risk factor Wall Street needs to price in.
The guy actually wrote in his column that making woke an investing risk factor “seems so obvious that I hesitated to write this column.”
No you didn't, Charlie. You saw Twitter freaking out about a restaurant logo and thought “this is it, this proves my entire worldview.” That's not analysis. That's just confirmation bias with a stock ticker.
The perfect circle of bullshit
So here's the grift in all its glory: Create a fake controversy, point to the fake controversy as evidence of a real problem, then sell yourself as the expert who can solve the problem you just invented.
Gasparino wants Wall Street to start pricing in “woke risk.” He wants analysts asking companies on earnings calls about their DEI policies. He wants shareholders demanding that companies “extricate wokeness from corporate decision-making.” He's trying to create a whole new consulting category where guys like him can charge Fortune 500 companies to evaluate their “woke exposure.”
Think about how crazy this is. Right-wing influencers openly admit they don't actually care about Cracker Barrel. They decide whether to be outraged based on engagement metrics. A right-wing financial columnist then uses their manufactured outrage as market analysis. And that analysis gets used to justify a new investment framework that just happens to require his expertise.
And Gasparino keeps saying stuff like “shareholders must demand” and “Wall Street must now consider” like he's some kind of markets prophet. My guy, you're citing TikTok drama. You're treating Dom Lucre's engagement bait like it's a Bloomberg terminal readout.
He even claims in his column that “some savvy Wall Street types” are already adding woke risk to their models, “just not using that exact terminology.” Oh really? They're not calling it that? Maybe because they know how ridiculous it sounds to tell your investors you're making decisions based on whether a restaurant logo has a cartoon character on it.
The whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gasparino and his buddies manufacture outrage about “woke” companies. The outrage causes temporary stock volatility. They point to that volatility as proof that woke is a risk factor. Then they offer their services to help identify future “woke risks.” It's genius if you have absolutely no shame.
But Gasparino can't see this. He's too invested in his narrative. He wrote a whole book about companies going broke from wokeness. He can't admit that maybe, just maybe, Cracker Barrel is struggling because their food is mediocre and their core demographic is literally dying off. Nope, has to be the missing cartoon hillbilly.
Reality check at the old country store
You want to know Cracker Barrel's actual problem? Their CEO Julie Felss Masino literally told investors last year that the company is “not as relevant as we once were.” That's not some interpretation. Those are her actual words.
They're a highway restaurant chain that serves comfort food to travelers and retirees. Their whole vibe is “remember when things were simpler?” except things were never actually simpler, you were just nine years old. And now their core customers are aging out of road trips or, you know, dying.
The company has been trying to modernize for over a year. New menu items. Remodeled restaurants. Updated pricing strategies. They're desperate to attract anyone under 60 who isn't just stopping there because their bladder's about to explode on I-80.
But according to Gasparino and the anti-woke brigade, the real issue is that they simplified their logo. As if millennials were just waiting for Uncle Herschel to disappear before they'd start eating chicken-fried steak at 10:30 AM.
This is the same logic that says Bud Light's problems were about Dylan Mulvaney rather than, oh I don't know, people drinking less beer in general and craft breweries eating their market share for two decades. The same logic that says Disney's struggles are about “going woke” and not about spending $200 billion on streaming while Netflix was already winning that war.
Gasparino actually compared this to the Bud Light situation in his column, writing that companies keep going woke because “corporate managers, it turns out, are a politically and socially tone-deaf bunch.” You know what's actually tone-deaf? Thinking that a struggling restaurant chain's problems can be solved by keeping their 1970s-era logo. Thinking that financial markets move based on whether a drawing of an old man appears on corporate letterhead.
The grift that keeps on grifting
These people have built a perpetual motion machine of fake outrage, and now they're trying to sell it as financial analysis.
The saddest part isn't even that they're doing it. It's that serious media outlets are playing along. The New York Post gave Gasparino column inches to argue that a logo change proves we need a new investment paradigm. Fox Business treats this stuff like it's market-moving news. CNBC hosts have to keep straight faces while discussing whether removing Uncle Herschel constitutes a material risk to shareholders.
We've reached a point where a QAnon influencer's two-hour decision to get mad about a restaurant logo becomes part of the financial discourse. Where a handful of TikToks about Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad gets analyzed like it's the Consumer Price Index. Where Christopher Rufo can openly admit he doesn't care about the actual issue but wants to create “massive pressure” on companies, and somehow that's treated as a legitimate political position rather than what it actually is: extortion.
Gasparino ends his column with this advice: “My advice to Wall Street, stock analysts and investors is to keep a Post-it note on your computer with this simple message: ‘Go Woke, Go Broke.’”
Here's my advice: Maybe worry less about cartoon hillbillies and more about actual business fundamentals. Revenue. Costs. Market position. Customer demographics. You know, the boring stuff that actually determines whether a company succeeds or fails.
Because if you're making investment decisions based on logo changes and manufactured Twitter controversies, if you're treating Dom Lucre's engagement farming like it's Warren Buffett's annual letter, if you think the presence or absence of Uncle Herschel is what stands between Cracker Barrel and bankruptcy, then maybe you shouldn't be giving financial advice at all.
The real risk factor investors should worry about isn't “wokeness.” It's listening to people who can't tell the difference between a corporate rebrand and the collapse of Western civilization. People who see a minimalist logo and think “this is how society ends.” People who've turned being mad online into a business model and are now trying to turn that business model into an investment strategy.
Cracker Barrel didn't go broke because they went woke. There’s nothing “woke” about a minimalist logo, but that’s an argument for another day. They're struggling because they're Cracker Barrel. And no amount of manufactured controversy is going to change that.
Now, for a message from my good friend Ana Marie Cox about her writing workshop:
“Hi, Parker fans! I lead a writing workshop called Third Story. It’s for people who want to tell the full story about their lives—especially the parts that don’t fit into a tidy narrative. You don’t have to be a writer. You just have to show up. Fall session starts Sept 2. Use code TSW10-PARKER for 10% off: anamariecox.com/workshop”
I preach that nothing is a “distraction,” that whatever gets people to realize what conservatives are doing to this country and to see them for what they are is worth thinking about, writing about, getting mad about.
Cracker Barrel and Sydney Sweeney are distractions. You can tell because conservatives are talking about them. That’s the definition.
"their food is mediocre and their core demographic is literally dying off" Given that many Cracker Barrel entre items are loaded with sodium and saturated fat, I suspect the statement is less about quality of the former and more about causality of the latter.