A/B testing your anti-woke meltdown

Hi there! We’re still officially off until next week, but we are dutifully keeping an eye on the internet. Keep reading after the ad for deep dive from Adam into the strange and confusing right-wing meltdown over Cracker Barrel.

And if you’re looking for some content to consume while we’re off, definitely go check out Panic World, which you can find on all major podcast platforms and, also, YouTube.

See you next week, everybody!

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

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Cracker Barrel Has Fallen (Again)

— by Adam Bumas

Cracker Barrel announced its new logo last Monday and has become the latest target for the right-wing outrage machine. 

When this happened with American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney a few weeks ago, we made a timeline of exactly how prominent X accounts turned an ad campaign into a culture war battlefield. And we’ve done the same here, but we have to go back a lot further — and talk about how social media marketers are even more powerful than angry online conservatives.

The new, simplified Cracker Barrel logo was ignored online, just like most corporate press releases, until last Wednesday, August 20th. That day, the new design was posted by a slew of PopCrave-style news aggregator accounts on X. It’s really something to see the range of accounts that posted about this, from general sources like CultureCrave to food-specific places like FatKidDeals to accounts that theoretically shouldn’t have any reason to repost the news, like ElectionWiz or Dom Lucre.

If that last one sounds out of place, it is. Dom Lucre (real name Dominick McGee) is a major QAnon supporter and pro-Trump influencer who received Elon Musk’s seal of approval for sharing child porn on X, and has received multiple invitations to the White House. In June, a profile by the New York Times showed how McGee has to operate like any other content creator, clipping short-form videos from podcasts and carefully wording posts for maximum engagement. Even deranged fascists are beholden to the content economy.

Which seems to be why he reposted the Cracker Barrel story in more or less the same way as all the less hateful aggregators, with his X post on Wednesday reading “🔥🚨DEVELOPING:: Cracker Barrel just updated their logo for the first time in 47 years.” 

It’s a much more neutral tone than you’d expect from someone whose display name is “Breaker of Narratives.” And many other vaguely or explicitly right-wing X accounts treated it the same way, up to and including racism impresario Christopher Rufo, who posted the next day that he didn’t care about the new logo.

But his tone changed almost immediately, and so did all the others. The more general news aggregators let the story pass, but the right-wing ones quickly coalesced around calling the new logo woke, insidious, and so on. You can track how quickly the change happened by looking at posts from McGee, who posted after less than two hours, “They need to add the Cracker and the Barrel back.” Meanwhile, the right-wing engagement farm account @ClownWorld_ made the switch even faster, going from “Thoughts?” to “woke agendas” in exactly half an hour.

What happened in the interim? Multiple X accounts with connections to the Trump administration, like @EndWokeness or “Trump’s podcast guru” Alex Bruesewitz, realized this was a conservative talking point that went back years, and a viral trend that went back months. The timestamps on their posts cleanly mark the point when the narrative switched. The fascist PopCrave knockoffs fell in line, and by the next day even Rufo was on board with saying, “On second thought: we must break the Barrel”.

It’s easy to follow the thinking of the people who actively decided to make this a culture war issue, and who marshaled the carefully controlled influencer apparatus to make it happen in the blink of an eye. Back in 2023, we did this whole song and dance for the first time, when conservatives called for a boycott of Cracker Barrel after they announced corporate initiatives supporting Pride month. This was when we got the immortal phrase “Cracker Barrel has fallen,” which many are now discovering for the first time in a way that just amplifies the outrage. And that’s another crucial piece of the puzzle here.

Cracker Barrel’s new logo is only the most recent move in a larger corporate rebranding that started over a year ago. This isn’t even the first time that new look has gotten viral attention. This past April, the company started remodeling their interiors, and customers quickly shot irate TikTok videos complaining about the change.

Ever since then, the new look has become part of the predictable TikTok discourse cycle, resurfacing like clockwork every four to six weeks as new people discover the older videos thinking they’re new and make their own to get in on the trend. Last month, one video captioned, “Don’t tell me Cracker Barrel is going modern too 😩🤢” even summoned the official account to the comment section to apologize. This was, clearly, part of why the Trump regime’s influencer arm thought — correctly — they could spin this into a discourse cycle. 

Complaining about corporate rebranding is a grand tradition online, and at the end of the day, these influencers are chasing engagement just like everyone else. The carefully neutral posts made by McGee and others were both standard engagement bait and tests of their audiences to see if there was enough interest to try to stir up outrage. If the numbers hadn’t been there, no one would have even tried to make a corporate logo into a referendum on wokeness.

In their current mask-off idiom, people like Rufo are openly admitting this. In his barrel breaking post, he also said, “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.’” This is all part of Rufo’s usual routine, just like how he openly brags about being able to set the agenda for mainstream institutions like the New York Times. But what he isn’t saying — and maybe doesn’t even realize — is that he’s not entirely in charge on this.

Because if you have to A/B test your anti-woke incitements to make sure the algorithm will support them, or scroll through TikTok looking for a trend to attach them to, then the algorithm is calling the shots, not you. And we’ve spent years tracking how that turns you, like it or not, into just another advertiser.

Last year, Ryan broke down how Stanley water bottles became the standard-bearer for this kind of campaign. Later, we ran the numbers to show how TikTok Shop was inaugurated by juicing the engagement numbers for any video that was directly selling you a product. Just last week, Ryan went on Search Engine to talk to PJ Vogt about how Chinese-style social shopping apps are taking over basically all our platforms. Political jeans, Dubai chocolate, Labubus, Benson Boone Crumbl — these aren’t traditional social and cultural trends, just specific products that have been successfully marketed online.

All the months of outrage over Cracker Barrel aren’t that different. Last spring, as part of their big rebrand, they hired an ad agency to provide “high-volume content to expand Cracker Barrel’s digital presence.” A month later, the angry TikTok videos about the redesign started taking off. Do we think this was a coincidence? Even this storm seems to have conclusively been weathered — according to Barron’s, the company’s stock has already recouped most of its losses — meaning all that’s left is a lot more people talking about Cracker Barrel than they were in the two days after they announced the new logo.

This is one of the many unintended side effects of blurring the line between shitposting and law. Now, twice in the span of one month, the same social media apparatus that’s spewing out pro-Trump messaging has had to take some time out to tell people about a hot new marketing campaign. I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a unified issue — remember when the White House lawn became a Tesla dealership? But it’s also very funny, and a useful reminder that all the power these people have exists because of systems that can be changed. The halls of power can be emptied and refilled. Just like remodeling a Cracker Barrel.

P.S. here’s some real good copyright infringement. (X post)

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***