As someone who grew up going to Cracker Barrel on road trips, I, along with millions of Americans, heaved a sigh of relief when I heard the old logo would remain. But while we won’t have to endure the Soviet-style brutalist-inspired logo redesign, the new minimalist décor and proposed architectural plans for new stores are still on the menu. If you aren’t familiar, these architectural plans look suspiciously like those at new Taco Bells (where the current Cracker Barrel CEO was before) — and they’re indistinguishable from those of a small industrial warehouse. This is yet another example of the push for a Woke Generica from those trying to erase familiar symbols of American art and architecture. But their movement targets more than just symbols — it’s a movement against the entire pioneering and entrepreneurial spirit that defined and built America. American history is filled with people seeking to fill in the blank edges of the map and build the impossible. For centuries, we’ve been a nation that stood out for our accomplishments. Now, though, we have a corporate culture that overwhelmingly views blending into the crowd as an accomplishment. One of our greatest entrepreneurs, Henry Ford, warned of this kind of latent unimaginative culture when he said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” There’s a reason it’s cliché to say that innovators and entrepreneurs expand our horizons. The most groundbreaking and quality-of-life-uplifting innovations — whether an invention such as the computer, or a business model such as Amazon’s logistical empire — almost always stem from the kind of pioneering risk-taking that is so core to the American identity. But the new Cracker Barrel redesign is a case study in a futile attempt to simply make a faster horse. And while blandly blending into the background can feel safe, it’s a clear road to stagnation. In part, what we are seeing is a business world losing perspective with what they actually sell. Only part of a product is its material, functional, form. Whether you call it the vibe, style, or aesthetic, part of the service that people want is what inspires the mind and the soul. One of the many failings of Eastern European communist societies was their focus on the tangible practicality of things. It was an overtly Marxist pursuit, but it was also — inadvertently — a movement focused on draining artistry out of the ordinary experiences of life and on assaulting our sense of rootedness and belonging. The man they tried so casually to take off the Cracker Barrel logo isn’t just a generic old man. He’s Uncle Herschel — the real-life uncle of Cracker Barrel founder Dan Evins. He’s also a kind and friendly face, welcoming you into not just the eatery, but the environment that is a Cracker Barrel “Old Country Store.” That environment conjures the spirit of the pioneering West and the ideal of a rural farming community’s gathering place and grocery supplier — featuring a favorite of mine, a wall of a dozen or so unique types of root beer. But more importantly, that environment reminds us of a crucial and unique piece of our shared national spirit and identity. Steve Jobs gave warnings about just this sort of thing — about the danger of a business replacing the people who created the product with people focused simply on marketing it without a deep respect for the richness of the product or brand. Sadly, Cracker Barrel is only the latest in what is now a long line of businesses that have abandoned their purpose and history. The most stunning example is, perhaps, the Greek tragedy that Disney has turned into — an existence that, over the last 10 years, has cost them the respect of most of their long-time fanbase and 20% of their inflation-adjusted market cap. The Disney story presents a set of roadmaps that would be useful for Cracker Barrel and, indeed, the broader corporate world today to study. After the sudden death of Walt Disney in 1966, the company largely lost its sense of soul and purpose and languished for 18 years. When Michael Eisner came in as CEO in 1984, though, he oversaw the next 15 years of what is now called the Disney Renaissance, featuring “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” cruise lines, overseas theme-park expansions and many of the things that we now think of as the height of Disney art and culture. Disney’s stock soared more than twenty-fold in inflation-adjusted terms during this period. But this is more than a simple business success story. On day one, Eisner went to visit the Disney Imagineers — the people who knew Walt and still embodied the spirit of his vision. Eisner ignored pressure to pursue what was seen as standard and safe — the pressure to radically depart Disney from its heritage. Instead, he sought to re-embrace that heritage and to rebuild the company in its truly unique style. That made all the difference. Today, Disney’s current woke stagnation is the product of the last generation or so of abandoning those principles and following the same crowd that brought Cracker Barrel to take the barrel, and Uncle Herschel, off the logo. Will we sheepishly go down the road of the brutalist logo and woke live action remakes? Or will we go the way of the Disney Renaissance — and reclaim the way of the rugged American pioneer and entrepreneurial innovator? For now, the market has spoken and saved Cracker Barrel’s logo. But the question remains — and the nation as a whole must answer. * * * Richard Stern is Acting Director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation and Director of its Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Only 43% of LAUSD students are proficient in reading

'Immortal'

'Preventable child deaths'

What a dark time to be an Alabama fan

OPERATION DEPORTATION

'She is not a Great American and is, in my opinion, incapable of being so!'

Books Backlist Bonanza Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Books Set in an Alternate 20th Century Sentient robots, grumpy ghosts, and a magical Great Depression… By Alex Brown | Published on September 4, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Last month in this column I looked at alternate history set in the 19th century, so let’s jump forward a bit and explore the 20th century that could have been but never was. For you I’ve got sentient robots, sentient elephants, sentient dragons, grumpy ghosts, and a magical Great Depression. The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis (The Alchemy Wars #1 — Orbit, 2015) In the 17th century, the Dutch figured out how to use alchemy to remake the world. 300 years later, the Brasswork Throne dominates the world with their clakkers, mechanical men powered by alchemical mechanisms—save the French, who are holed up in what they call Marseilles-in-the-West but to us is Montreal. Clakkers are bound by spellwork to be subservient. One of those clakkers, Jax, belongs to the Schoonraad family. On the way to New Amsterdam, an accident frees Jax from enslavement. Once he gets to the new world, he meets Bernice, an exiled French spy who plans to use Jax to break Dutch rule, but Jax has plans his own. Tregillis excels at alternate history (also check out his Milkweed Triptych for an interesting take on World War II), and by blending robots, alchemy, and Dutch colonialism, he puts a new spin on history. The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander (Tordotcom, 2018) How much do you know about the radium girls? What about Topsy the elephant? It’s fine if you go in knowing nothing about either, but if you do have some historical knowledge, Bolander’s novella is like a knife to the heart. This gorgeous, poetic alt history blends these two tragic stories together with a sheen of fantasy. Regan, a factory girl dying of radiation poisoning, trains a thoughtful circus elephant, Topsy. Both are victims of exploitive labor; the human woman’s future is stripped from her by a capitalist who encouraged his female workers ingest toxic radium to speed up productivity, while the elephant mourns for her home on the other side of the world as she is forced to perform tricks for greedy humans. When Topsy is set to be executed as part of a stunt to promote electricity, Regan is pulled into the fight. A love song to labor rights. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark (Dead Djinn Universe #0.3 — Tordotcom, 2019) It’s 1912 and, with the help of djinn, angels, mystics, and magicians, Egypt has thrived in the decades since repelling British colonizers. Hamed Nasr and Onsi Youssef, agents from the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, are sent to investigate a haunted tram car. In classic detective fiction style, Hamed is a seasoned veteran who has seen too much to not be a little jaded and Onsi is a fresh recruit, wide-eyed and open-minded. The mystery takes them into backrooms and fantastical spaces, to suffragettes and conservatives, and to the enigmatic Agent el-Sha’arawi, she of the fashionable western suits. This is a fun, light mystery that delights as much as it gets you thinking.  Burn by Patrick Ness (Quill Tree Books, 2020) There’s not a lot of young adult fiction that is also alternate history, not a lot of YA historical fantasy set in the mid-20th century, and also not a lot of YA fiction about dragons. All that makes this book is a bit of a unicorn. Sarah, a biracial Black teen living with her white widowed father in 1957 rural Washington, is friends with Jason, a boy whose family is still dealing with the trauma of being incarcerated in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Sarah’s father hires a dragon, Kazimir, to help out on their farm, but things get tense when a cult of dragon-worshippers come to town. Turns out the dragon is at the center of a prophecy, and the cultists will not take no for an answer. Readers who are unfamiliar with Ness may think this is going to be a chaotic story, but true to form he digs into deep, painful truths and cracks open the myths and lies we tell ourselves. And he does it in a way that is as thrilling as it is disorienting. You’ve never read anything quite like this book, trust me. Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland (Balzer + Bray, 2022) It’s 1937, the middle of the Great Depression, but instead of everything collapsing due to greedy capitalists and environmental devastation, in Ireland’s novel it’s magic. The Blight is a toxic wasteland, the consequence of magic gone bad after a catastrophic event called the Great Rust. The newest recruit of the Colored Auxiliary of the Bureau of the Arcane’s Conservation Corps, Laura Ann Langston, is sent with a team to deal with the Ohio Blight that is consuming towns faster than anyone can stop it. Laura is a Floramancer, but she can’t afford the training or license to practice, not until she lucks into her new gig. Ireland is very good at using fantasy as a platform for exploring race and racism (not to mention colorism and queerness), and in particular seeing how those issues play out when real history is tweaked with magic. This Great Depression may be caused by magic, but not even magic can kill Jim Crow.  [end-mark] The post Backlist Bonanza: 5 Underrated Books Set in an Alternate 20th Century appeared first on Reactor.

The attorney general for the nation’s capital is suing President Donald Trump for deploying National Guard to clean up the crime in Washington, D.C. The lawsuits says that Trump has “run roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.” Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, said that deploying the National Guard for law enforcement purposes was “unnecessary and unwanted,” and “dangerous and harmful” to district residents. “No American city should have the U.S. military—particularly out-of-state military who are not accountable to the residents and untrained in local law enforcement—policing its streets,” Schwalb said. “It’s D.C. today but could be any other city tomorrow. We’ve filed this action to put an end to this illegal federal overreach.” The White House slammed the lawsuit as a political attempt to undermine the president. “President Trump is well within his lawful authority to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C. to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement with specific tasks,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Daily Signal in a statement. “This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt—at the detriment of D.C. residents and visitors—to undermine the president’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in D.C.” Last month, Trump invoked the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 to declare an emergency in the district, authorizing him to federalize Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department until Sept. 10. This follows Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is also a Democrat, agreeing to partner with the Trump administration to fight crime in the nation’s capital. Bowser issued an order saying that the Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center will continue to manage the city’s response to the presidential declaration of emergency and the Safe and Beautiful Task Force, which Trump created by executive order in March. Bowser has thanked the Trump administration for the surge of law enforcement to the city. “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what [the Metropolitan Police Department] has been able to do in this city,” she said in a Wednesday news conference. Trump has talked about sending troops to other crime-ridden big cities like Chicago, New Orleans, and Baltimore. The post BREAKING: DC Sues Trump Administration for Crime Crackdown appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Two major bills moving through California’s legislature are drawing strong backlash over what many see as a growing pattern of state interference in digital life. One bill would force social media platforms to display recurring warning labels, while another threatens to usher in surveillance of private AI chatbot conversations under the guise of public health. Assembly Bill 56 has passed a second reading in the state Senate. If enacted, it would require platforms to show users a black-box style warning about the “harms” of prolonged social media use. These alerts would appear when a user first opens an app, again after three hours of activity, and once an hour after that. Supporters claim the measure addresses concerns around mental health and digital addiction. “Shows that California remains committed to leading on the issues that matter most to our families,” said Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, who introduced the bill. But technology trade groups such as TechNet, whose members include Meta and Snap, argue that these pop-ups would interfere with user experience and may set a precedent for expanding state control over online platforms. Also advancing is Assembly Bill 243. This bill targets so-called “companion chatbots,” requiring companies that operate them to monitor conversations for mentions of suicide or self-harm. The companies would have to track and report statistics about these interactions to the state’s Office of Suicide Prevention every year. The only way to comply with the bill would be for companies to monitor user conversations continuously. That reality has raised fears that the state is on the verge of endorsing widespread surveillance of digital interactions under the label of safety. The bill has cleared its second reading in the Assembly and now heads for a floor vote. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post California Advances Bills Requiring Social Media Warning Labels and AI Chatbot Conversation Monitoring appeared first on Reclaim The Net.