Right-wingers have collectively lost their minds over Cracker Barrel’s new logo, and now they think they have pinpointed the cause: it’s the gays’ fault.

Earlier this week, the country-themed restaurant chain announced that it would be updating its logo as part of a “brand refresh.” The logo would lose the picture of an old man and a barrel and instead take on a vague barrel shape with a much simpler design, imitating how many large corporations have simplified their logos in the past several years.

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But Cracker Barrel following this trend has led to outrage, with many on the right promising to boycott the restaurant and others threatening to “riot.”

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Now the right has found a way to blame LGBTQ+ people for the logo change that has nothing to do with LGBTQ+ people. The theory, recounted by the conservative Upward News, is that this all started in 1991 when Cracker Barrel openly stated that it wouldn’t hire gay people and fired at least 11 employees for being gay. Several months after the purge, the company’s shareholders voted to end the discrimination and add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy.

In the years since, the company has tried to rehabilitate its image, celebrating Pride Month and allowing an LGBTQ+ employee group to form. The corporation currently has a score of 30 out of 100 on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI), showing perhaps some limited progress in the last three decades.

In 2005, Cracker Barrel hired Steve Smotherman, who stayed with the company until 2020, to work on management training and development. In 2019, he also volunteered on HRC’s Business Advisory Council, meaning that for about a year, he held roles with both Cracker Barrel and HRC. Upward News points to this as “linking the chain directly to the group’s agenda,” despite the fact that Cracker Barrel still has a pretty bad score on HRC’s CEI.

“The latest rebrand — removing Americana décor and the white man from its logo to make the chain ‘more welcoming’ — is not a fresh marketing pivot,” Upward News claimed. “It’s the culmination of a decades-long effort to bring Cracker Barrel into the good graces of the progressive establishment.”

“And it’s certainly not what everyday Americans expect from the chain. Instead, it reflects what corporate leaders — fully bought into the ‘woke’ ideology of recent years — want to impose.”

Upward News did not explain how the new Cracker Barrel logo reflects “woke ideology” or how one employee volunteering with HRC for about a year six years ago proves that the LGBTQ+ organization had undue influence on Cracker Barrel’s logo design, but it was all that rightwing activist Charlie Kirk needed to read to declare the new logo a part of HRC’s “woke reforms.”

“And the truth comes out about Cracker Barrel’s disastrous logo change!” Kirk declared on X, quoting Upward News‘ post. “The key woke reformer in the company was also part of the advisory board at the Human Rights Campaign, which promotes LGBTQ propaganda and scores companies on ‘progressive’ values.”

HRC rates workplaces based on their LGBTQ+ employee policies – like whether they give same-sex partners the same benefits as opposite-sex partners. It does not rate them on adherence to general “progressive values.”

“The CEO of Cracker Barrel even admitted the logo change is about being ‘a place for everyone’ as if having a white man on the original logo was somehow bad,” Kirk wrote, even though Cracker Barrel’s CEO never said that the point of the new logo was to specifically get rid of the old man in their logo because he’s white. “Another corporate America cautionary tale. Sad!!”

Many on the right have been comparing Cracker Barrel’s logo redesign to Bud Light’s one-off 2023 social media collab with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which drew intense anti-trans backlash and calls for a conservative boycott of parent company Anheuser-Busch.

Despite the right losing its mind online, Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino told Good Morning America earlier this week that “people like what we’re doing.”

“Cracker Barrel needs to feel like the Cracker Barrel for today and for tomorrow – the things that you love are still there,” she said. “We need people to choose us, and we want people to choose us.”

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