Cracker Barrel reverses course on new logo, brings back ‘Old Timer’ after fan backlash: ‘We said we would listen’ by 6ixStringJack

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Cracker Barrel reverses course on new logo, brings back ‘Old Timer’ after fan backlash: ‘We said we would listen’

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, August 29, 2025 13:42
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Wednesday, August 27, 2025 4:11 AM

https://nypost.com/2025/08/26/business/cracker-barrel-reverses-course-
on-new-logo-brings-back-old-timer-after-fan-backlash/

Did anybody really care? I've been to Cracker Barrel twice in my life. Mid food that cost too much, and was glad I wasn't the one who was paying for it both times.

Was this like a Morbius thing?

IT'S MORBIN TIME!

How Morbius Fans Pulled the Ultimate Troll on Sony

https://www.cbr.com/morbius-its-morbin-time-memes-fans-troll-sony-marv
el/

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Thursday, August 28, 2025 7:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Friend vs Enemy way of thinking

By David Frum | August 27, 2025, 11:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/08/the-david-frum-sh
ow-mary-beard-roman-empire/684022/

Ernest Hemingway wrote, in one of his novels about the Spanish Civil War, “There are many fascists in my country; they just don’t know it yet. But they will when the time comes.” Well, the time has come, and we are seeing the rise of fascist movements all over the developed world. They often call themselves nationalists, but they’re not nationalists. They’re actually more international than any liberal movement. They have formed a kind of network, and the internet is their binding form.

But the most important quality of fascism, I think the thing that is the test of whether it’s there or not, is what makes it go. Socialism is inspired by the ideal of equality. Liberalism is inspired by the ideal of liberty or freedom. Fascism is inspired by the search for enemies of the group. And whenever you see people with a strong “friend-versus-enemy” way of thinking—allies versus adversaries, insiders versus outsiders—what you’re seeing is the emotional juice on which fascism feeds.

That’s why I’m going to take seriously for a moment this recent absurd outburst—it’s recent on the day I recorded it; there may be a little lag before you see it—about the changing of the branding of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. Now, Cracker Barrel, as those of you who have driven America’s highways know, is a popular restaurant in many of America’s rural places. Unfortunately for the shareholders and employees of Cracker Barrel, it’s decreasingly popular. It’s lost a lot of market share over the past decade. Cracker Barrel’s stock and trade is nostalgia. And the nostalgia that it has been offering is nostalgia that people don’t remember anymore. It’s not nostalgia for your childhood; it’s nostalgia for your grandfather’s childhood. And people who feel nostalgia want the product that reminds them of their own childhood. So Cracker Barrel has, in an effort to hold on to or reverse its declining market share, rebranded itself. Good decision, bad decision? I don’t know. Don’t have an opinion.

This has become a culture-war flashpoint of a kind that we’ve seen so often, and it seems of all the ones we have seen, maybe the most crazy, the most absurd. But it’s not absurd because what it is—it’s a part of the process of the endless hunt to identify enemies. And the issue over which you identify your enemies—it doesn’t have to be important because the test isn’t the issue. The test is the search for enemies and the in-gathering of allies to create a friend-foe distinction as Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher, wrote. You may not have heard of Carl Schmitt, I don’t recommend him to you, but he is the central text of many in the new modern fascist movement. He’s been read and admired by many who are very close to the Trump White House, and you can hear echoes of his language and above all his idea that the power to govern is the power to identify people as enemies of the state. Whether they’re foreigners or insiders, fellow citizens, the enemy can be identified by the state, and the tools of the state can be used against them. And that’s what’s going on with this Cracker Barrel story. It’s just a way to flush out who the enemies are and to identify who the friends are.

Now, Cracker Barrel also offers a glimpse of what our hope is. I mean, the way you beat fascism, in the long run—the strategy, the ideals—are upholding the ideas of liberty and equality and human dignity. And because liberty and equality go more naturally together than the fascist ideas, there is a reason why social democrats have often been a resource for liberals in the fight against fascism. Because liberals and socialists are not animated by the same thing, but they can recognize there is a kind of more cousinly kinship between the ideals of equality and liberty than there is between either of those and the endless hunt for internal and external enemies to persecute and punish. But we can stand for those ideals and we can uphold the institutions of law, the institutions of legality, the institutions of democracy.

But in the short run, the best tool against fascism is humor. You know, fascism always teeters on the edge of the ridiculous. One of the first people to understand this was one of the greatest of early comedians, Charlie Chaplin, who made a film about the Nazi movement called The Great Dictator, in which he relentlessly mocked the buffoonery and absurdity. He ended with an uplifting message of universal brotherhood. But all along the way through the movie The Great Dictator, he relies on humor.

And as you confront people trying to find group enemies and group allies by complaining about the rebranding of Cracker Barrel, you realize they’re teetering on the precipice of absurdity, and comedy is the push that can topple them over and discredit them, not with horror—although that is certainly deserved—but with laughter.

Everything comes back, it seems, even the discredited ideas of 90 years ago—and they’re back. And the fact that they’ve changed their form and their manner and their technology doesn’t mean they’ve changed their substance. We thought it was gone. It’s back. And studying both the past and the present is part of the intellectual armament to stand up against it, and that’s why I’m so grateful today, Mary Beard—we’re going to talk about very different things, of a very different historical era, but understanding the passage of time and the way we are connected to what came before and what we are connected to, what will come next, is our way to belong to a greater human community that insists on the universality of the best ideals and the antagonism of universal ideals to the brutal particularism that is what fascism is all about.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, August 28, 2025 6:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Nobody wanted David Frum's opinion on anything.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Friday, August 29, 2025 1:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I guess they brought the logo back, huh?

Still have zero interest in ever eating there again. The last time I was there was almost 20 years ago.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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