How Cracker Barrel Went Woke: Hijacked by the Hardcore Left

Cracker Barrel took the country gentleman off their logo and no longer refer to themselves as the Old Country Store with southern hospitality and cooking. They have gone woke.

The movement to the hard left began in the 90s. Their capitulation to woke began after being accused of being anti-gay.

Restaurants should not be political, but this one is. The problem isn’t gay people, but there is a serious problem with the hardcore left LGBTQ+++ and their biggest organization.

The Story

According to Upward News, Cracker Barrel had allegedly discriminated against both gay customers and workers. Hardcore leftists saw the restaurant as a symbol of the South.  They began a full-on assault.

The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the United States, entered the picture and did the most harm.

Its Corporate Equality Index rates companies on how friendly their policies and practices are for workplace inclusion. Investment firms like BlackRock work with the HRC to judge companies, and those who fall out of favor with the HRC often find themselves facing pressure from BlackRock to raise them.

This includes Cracker Barrel. BlackRock owns 3.23 million shares of the restaurant, adding up to 14.52 percent of Cracker Barrel’s outstanding shares.

HRC forces companies to become leftists. If they get a bad score, they become a target for boycotts and bad press.

HRC is a far-left bully operation.

Then, In Came Smotherman

Cracker Barrel failed and in 2005, they brought in Steve Smotherman, a corporate leader who launched internal LGBTQ reforms. The scores went up, especially after he sat on their advisory council.

Cracker Barrel spent the past two decades becoming one with the leftist LGBTQ+ ideological radicals. They are helping to infuse our culture with Marxism.

Over the next two decades, Cracker Barrel reshaped itself — changing internal policies, pulling “controversial” items from stores, blocking certain figures from dining events, funding Pride parades, and chasing higher woke scores.

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. 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.

We now know thanks to Upward News.

This is the story of how Cracker Barrel went woke.

It isn’t about a bad design firm botching a rebrand, or a struggling restaurant trying to win over Gen Z.

Keep reading to find out what really happened.

It started in the early 1990s, when Cracker Barrel was caught in a… pic.twitter.com/cxxnXf71ti

— Upward News (@UpwardNewsHQ) August 21, 2025

Robby Starbuck explains how bad it is:

• Cracker Barrel has funded “all ages” Pride events for many years like Nashville Pride and Third River City Pride.
• Cracker Barrel worked with the far left HRC organization and reportedly sponsored HRC events for 10 years. They even brought an HRC representative to their Tennessee HQ to do a pronoun and transgenderism training. We’ve included photos of this in the video. As a reminder, the HRC supports child sex changes and men in women’s bathrooms. They work to normalize/legalize both things and they work to force transgenderism in the workplace.
• Cracker Barrel worked with a group called Conexión Américas as part of their DEI efforts. This group helps illegal immigrants, providing them lawyers and the executive director opposes President Trump’s deportations.
• Cracker Barrel sponsored the Out & Equal LGBTQ Workplace Advocate Conference and presented a workshop on how Cracker Barrel has made progress supporting LGBTQ+ causes. This group works to push sexual topics and pronouns into the workplace.
• Cracker Barrel was awarded Out & Equal’s 2018 top LGBT ERG group award and they won the Nashville LGBT Chamber of Commerce “Corporate Diversity” award.
• CB created a special “diverse” suppliers program focused on increasing “diversity” among suppliers. To most people this just reads as: less white people.
• Had Coming out day pamphlets passed out at their TN headquarters as well as pamphlets about supporting “LGBTQ YOUTH” and creating “Safe Zones” at work, free from “heterosexist or cwordgendered comments and actions” (X will downrank my post if I spell that word out). If you said anything activists would describe as “heterosexist” then you were told that you’d be “educated” by their LGBT office group.
• CB has had multiple DEI focused employees and had CB employees attend DEI roundtables. • CB had pride flags at their corporate office.
• CB promoted the Stonewall riot to employees and on their website despite the fact that the Stonewall Inn was reportedly owned by the mafia, rife with drug dealing and also the site of teen “prostitution” for older men.
• Had a Cracker Barrel employee on the HRC’s business advisory council.
• Has ERG groups in the office that are divided by race and sexual preferences.
• A total commitment to DEI policies.
• • CB has had MANY activist employees driving this far left policy agenda, including a head of training + management, top execs and a board of directors member who owns a DEI consulting firm. To put it mildly, Cracker Barrel has forgotten who their core customers are. It’s time for us to remind them. They depend on YOU to keep their business afloat so now YOU have to ask yourself: Do you want to fund people or companies that hate your values?

It’s time to remind them who their customers are. If you think their values don’t align with yours and you’re a customer, you can write to them here.

Reporters can also call their reporter hotline at: 615-235-4135 or email them: me*************@***********el.com Remember to ALWAYS BE KIND. Many in customer service agree with you.

We have to take our power back as consumers. Every company needs to get the message that THIS ENDS NOW.

Watch:

Cracker Barrel has been one of the most loved brands in America for decades… That changed this week with a logo redesign that infuriated the public but… the problem goes MUCH deeper than a logo.@CrackerBarrel has gone fully woke and now it’s time to expose everything.

Here’s… pic.twitter.com/lgkFd0wc2V

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 23, 2025