3 Events Worthy of Outrage (Cracker Barrel Logo Isn't One of Them)
The Great Cracker Barrel Logo Freakout of 2025 may be the dumbest debate I've seen all year.
When Cracker Barrel first announced their new (already defunct) logo, there were some intelligent points of conversation to be had over topics like marketing, corporate management, and logo design. I'm sure marketing textbooks will include this episode as an example (of what not to do) for decades to come. The freakout I'm referencing includes none of that, but rather the right-wing conflict entrepreneurs who claimed the new logo represented the wokification of America.
Why did this happen? There is both a left-wing and right-wing media ecosystem that feeds outrage to its customers. It's always looking for something new to feed that diet, and just as the Sydney Sweeney "great jeans" controversy was starting to die down (did you already forget about that one?), the new Cracker Barrel logo was something for the right-wingers to munch on.
But talking about Cracker Barrel also meant one could avoid talking about news events that we should actually be outraged about. Here are three examples:
1. DOGE Misinfo Led to a Family Being Tortured
Mohammad Halimi is a refugee from Afghanistan who immigrated to the U.S. As someone who helped the U.S. government, his life would be in danger in his home country. He had previously served in the cabinet of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and helped the first Trump administration negotiate with the Taliban.
In March, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer falsely claimed that Halimi's contract with the United States Institute of Peace to oppose the Taliban was a payment to support the Taliban. This misinformation was spread by Elon Musk, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., and Fox News.
As a result, three of Halimi's family members in Afghanistan were imprisoned, beaten, and questioned by the Taliban.
2. Fed Governor 'Fired'
President Donald Trump claims to have fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, something the president does not have the authority to do.
Congress specifically designed the Federal Reserve as an independent agency precisely because it wanted monetary policy to be free from partisan pressures. Without that independence, presidents could use monetary policy to give themselves or their party and electoral advantage to the long term detriment of the value of the U.S. dollar.
Cook sued Trump on Thursday.
3. Kilmar Ábrego García May Get Sent to Uganda Prison
Kilmar Ábrego García was first sent to a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration then claimed they sent him by mistake but could not do bring him home because they had not authority over the prison. Then after much public pressure they brought him home anyway. And now, Ábrego García was rearrested during his scheduled immigration check-in. The administration says it plans to send Ábrego García, a man who has never been charged with a crime, much less convicted, to a prison in Uganda, a nation with which he has no connection.
Why do this? I think Moira Donegan nailed it in an op-ed for the Guardian:
The Trump administration has continued to pursue Ábrego, in spite of his obvious innocence, because they see the outcry over his accidental arrest and deportation as an unacceptably embarrassing stain on their anti-immigrant agenda. His arrest exposed the cruelty, randomness and essential malignant incompetence of Trump’s vast, unaccountable, reckless, violent and now extremely monied anti-immigrant armed corps: that they arrested an innocent man and deported him to potentially eternal exile and imprisonment in a country he had fled without notice, process, or legal authority left many Americans – and not only migrants – terrified of what might happen to their neighbors, their loved ones or themselves. The plain injustice of his case briefly served to unify anti-Trump forces, sway public sentiment against the crackdown and provoke an uncharacteristic degree of visible public action by elected Democrats. To the Trump administration, this could not stand. Now, they have set about punishing Ábrego for his role as proof of their own malignant idiocy.
Ábrego García is now seeking asylum to avoid that fate.
This is not a complete list. Here are some more news stories that are more important than a Cracker Barrel logo.
AP: “Top Florida official says 'Alligator Alcatraz' will likely be empty within days, email shows”
A top Florida official says the controversial state-run immigration detention facility in the Everglades will likely be empty in a matter of days, even as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration and the federal government fight a judge's order to shutter the facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by late October. That's according to an email exchange shared with The Associated Press.
NYT: “In Trump’s Second Term, Far-Right Agenda Enters the Mainstream”
But in the first seven months of Mr. Trump’s second term, there has been a conspicuous absence of far-right demonstrations. And that, some leaders of the movement say, is because the president has effectively adopted their agenda.
“Things we were doing and talking about in 2017 that were taboo, they’re no longer taboo — they’re mainstream now,” said Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, who took part in many of those early far-right rallies. “Honestly, what do we have to complain about these days?”
Whether it is dismantling diversity programs, complaining about anti-white bias in museums or simply promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism, Mr. Trump has embraced an array of far-right views and talking points in ways that have delighted many right-wing activists who have long supported those ideas.
The Atlantic: “America’s Next Top Racist: No matter how far Nick Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.”
This is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys. Popular MAGA figures rarely engage in Fuentes-grade bigotry. Consider Laura Loomer, the influencer and Donald Trump confidante: She has called Kamala Harris a “DEI Shaniqua” and described Indian immigrants as “third world invaders,” but even she stops short of the vile slurs and Hitler praise expressed by Fuentes.
His approach is working. Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.
Vice: “Swatting, Shootings, and Sextortion: The FBI Is Warning Parents About ‘The Com’”
In recent weeks, VICE has reported on the recruitment and radicalization of children as young as 12 by Satanic neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like 764, No Lives Matter, and Milikolosskrieg, which operate within a wider criminal network primarily through encrypted messaging platforms like Signal, Telegram, and Discord. While it might be tempting to dismiss this as little more than disaffected kids venting online, the influence of this network has been directly tied to numerous incidents of real-world violence—leading it to be identified as a threat in a series of public service announcements by the FBI, which refers to it as ‘The Com.’
At the end of last month, Minnesotan 20-year-old Logan Anthony Seitz was arrested for stabbing a woman “around 20 times” in a park. In a criminal complaint obtained by CBS, he told investigators he’d had the urge to randomly kill a person since he was ten years old and went out that day intending to find his victim. But coverage of the case missed a crucial detail: Seitz is a longtime member of SR1, a subgroup of a notorious The Com-adjacent sextortion network known as 764. His attack was not only acknowledged but celebrated on Telegram channels associated with these groups, where he is known by the alias ‘Corrupt.’
RNS: “At conference, pastors address racism in their churches as momentum fades”
“Our racial past is marred and scarred,” Clemons told Religion News Service at the event. “It’s steeped in racism and ethnocentrism and cultural divide. The church is often on the wrong side of that conversation. We believe that the church should show up credibly in these conversations.”
The Aug. 14 conference, themed “Change the story, redeeming race, reconciliation and the mission of the church,” invited faith leaders to engage in discussions on race, from a gospel-centric perspective.
Five years after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minnesota police officer, which shocked the country and prompted a racial reckoning in American society and the church, much of the conference’s discussions noted how the momentum spurred in 2020 has progressively faded.
AVC Board member Dr. Daniel Bennett wrote about some of the recent goings on at AVC for his substack. Check it out:
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