{"id":90680,"date":"2025-08-23T19:35:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T19:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/90680\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T19:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T19:35:08","slug":"jussie-smollett-sticks-to-his-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/90680\/","title":{"rendered":"Jussie Smollett Sticks to His Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning, one and all. Did I mention that this column now has its very own newsletter? If you\u2019re liking what you read, sign up here<\/a>, and it\u2019ll keep landing in your inbox every week. Otherwise, I\u2019ll stop popping up in your emails soon enough.<\/p>\n

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When the news is slow, like in the dog days of summer, deranged denizens online can be relied upon to fixate on random decisions made in random corporate boardrooms, and to lose their minds over how it shows that their enemy in the culture war is winning. A few weeks ago, it was Sydney Sweeney\u2019s jeans, which were somehow a symbol of white supremacy<\/a>. Two years ago, there were convulsions on the right over how Bud Light had abandoned its macho roots and gone trans when it sent a personalized can of beer to Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer. And now, Cracker Barrel has gone woke, too!<\/p>\n

Basically, the chain restaurant has abandoned as its logo the drawing of an old man sitting on a wooden chair and leaning against a barrel, which all Americans will recognize from the massive signs on the highway. Cracker Barrel has opted instead for a pared-down black and yellow stamp with fewer flourishes. Compare:<\/p>\n

\"Suzy<\/a>Suzy Weiss writes about the new Cracker Barrel logo, \u201cThe rebranding is sterile, like so many corporate rebrands that came before it.\u201d (Image grab via youtube.com)<\/p>\n

This may look like a misguided attempt to fit in with the hyperclean simple look that\u2019s been adopted by brands like Burger King and Jaguar, to more or less indignation. But with Cracker Barrel, it went further. People claimed that the new logo was a disappointment to \u201cthe entire country<\/a>,\u201d and that the company\u2019s CEO, Julie Felss Masino, \u201cradiates out-of-touch liberal elitism<\/a>.\u201d A Florida congressman who said he worked for Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee during college blasted the new logo<\/a> as a \u201cwoke rebrand\u201d and added that he \u201cgave his life to Christ in their parking lot.\u201d Even Steak \u2018n Shake piled on, writing on X<\/a>, \u201cWe will never market ourselves away from our past in a cheap effort to gain the approval of trend seekers.\u201d That\u2019s some big talk for a milkshake joint.<\/p>\n

In 2021, a rumor spread online that the flourish extending from the \u201ck\u201d in Cracker was actually a slave whip, and that the barrel itself was used to store whips.<\/p>\n

Critics pointed to the fact that stripping away \u201cOld-Timer\u201d\u2014the guy leaning on the barrel\u2014amounted to Southern erasure. The new restaurants have fewer rocking chairs\u2014it was less quaint, more \u201cgentrified<\/a>.\u201d For its part, the chain said that the new logo<\/a> is \u201cnow rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning, one and all. Did I mention that this column now has its very own newsletter? If…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-90680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}