Cracker Barrel Crack-Up

Summary

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The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: Cracker Barrel Crack-Up
Date: August 25, 2025
Panel: John Podhoretz (Host), Abe Greenwald, Matthew Kyne Letty, Christine Rosen

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into a surprising culture war flashpoint: Cracker Barrel’s rebranding. The panel explores the meaning behind chain restaurant aesthetics, the reactions to “woke” corporate changes, and the broader implications for American identity and the culture wars. They also discuss the recent federal investigation into John Bolton, using it as a lens through which to examine the Trump era’s approach to lawfare and political retribution.

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Main Discussion Themes

1. Cracker Barrel's Rebranding: A Culture War Flashpoint

Cracker Barrel in American Culture

• The panel opens by observing how, during confusing international news cycles, Americans latch onto pop-culture stories (03:40). John Podhoretz jokes, “I don’t even know where Gaza is, but I know where Cracker Barrel is. … I’ve been to Cracker Barrel 500 times and let me tell you, I’m going to express my opinion of Cracker Barrel.”

Aesthetic Changes and Their Meta-Meanings

• Cracker Barrel’s redesigned logo and dining rooms spark conversation about how corporate branding choices become battlegrounds over nostalgia, rural identity, and perceived political agendas.
• Christine Rosen defends the dining room’s “industrialized quirkiness,” emphasizing its appeal to traveling families with small children (05:56):

“Cracker Barrel’s dining rooms are brilliant. If you’re there with young children, there is so much stuff … for them to just sit and look at.”

Is This About 'Wokeness'?

• Abe Greenwald challenges the claim that the logo change is "woke" (07:28):

“I don’t know. … What’s woke about the new logo? … We’re stretching the definition of woke here.”

• The dialogue acknowledges how both left and right jumped on the anti-rebrand bandwagon, with Matthew Kyne Letty noting, “there was a brief moment of consensus that this was a wrong-headed move. … Both sides can come together” (09:36).

Corporate Culture, Class, and Consumer Disconnect

• Christine Rosen says this debate isn’t inherently about wokeness but about how “all of these chain restaurants are facing [an] economic challenge—trying to draw in people who otherwise wouldn’t go there” (09:23).
• The panel discusses how decisions by new CEOs often reflect a disconnect between corporate culture and the preferences of actual customers—typically families with young children or people seeking comforting nostalgia (25:38).

Culture War Exhaustion

• Christine Rosen warns that “the new right … should start to choose their battles wisely, because I certainly find some of this stuff a little excessive. And people turn it off. They stop listening after all” (18:48).

Notable Quote

• Matthew Kyne Letty on the bigger trend:

“The difference between silly Somewheres and Anywheres. The old logo was somewhere. It was situated. The new logo … could be anywhere. It’s free of any kind of particularity.” (08:40)

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2. Beyond Cracker Barrel: The Broader Culture War

Who Owns American Institutions?

• John Podhoretz frames frustration on the right with “liberal culture” invading previously sacrosanct spaces: sports, Disney, Bud Light, and now Cracker Barrel (20:46):

“You can have Benetton, you can have Apple ... but you can’t have the NFL. You can’t have Disney World, and you can’t have Cracker Barrel. … You are invading our space."

Disney’s Gender Shift and Market Impacts

• Discussion broadens to Disney’s drift toward marketing for girls and LGBTQ themes, tying commercial strategy to cultural backlash and the rise of figures like Trump and Andrew Tate (21:23–24:45).

Children and Cultural Environments

• Christine Rosen and Matt Letty underline the importance of spaces for children, noting that decisions about restaurant design often don’t account for families — exacerbated by declining birth rates and executives disconnected from young families (25:38–26:50).
• Rosen further critiques the left’s abandonment of protecting childhood innocence:

“The feminist movement really failed here … they completely ceded that ground when the trans movement came in … now everybody has to be loud and proud about who they are, identity wise, and you must endorse that publicly." (27:53)

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3. Politics, Lawfare, and John Bolton

The Bolton Raids and Political Retribution

• After a break, the panel turns to the FBI raid on John Bolton’s home, parsing out whether it’s justified by legitimate national security concerns or is merely political payback (34:17).
• Christine Rosen:

“A couple of news outlets have reported that this isn’t actually about the book and the memoir, that it’s about new intelligence that the CIA discovered overseas … potentially we do not know.” (37:09)

• Matt Letty notes unusual silence around the case:

“We know so little … all we can surmise is that there’s some type of political retaliation. … This story is unusual to me in that very few people are talking.” (37:39)

Lawfare as Process and Penalty

• Referencing Andy McCarthy, the panel concludes that even opening an investigation is punitive, regardless of charges:

“With lawfare, the process is the penalty. So once an investigation starts … the subject of that investigation, even before any charges are made ... is already paying a price.” (44:53)

• The episode wraps this topic by reflecting on Trump’s tendency to pursue perceived enemies relentlessly, particularly those who never “bend the knee,” like Bolton (48:03).

Notable Quote

• Christine Rosen:

“Half of [Trump’s] retribution targets seem to be the people he feels unfairly used lawfare against him … the other half are the mistakes he felt he made in the first term, trusting the establishment…” (48:47)

• Matt Letty, quoting David Brooks:

“The thing about Trump is he’s never entirely wrong. … In the case of lawfare … some of the figures he’s going after may actually have done something wrong.” (49:10)

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4. Recommended Reading & Closing

• Matthew Kyne Letty recommends Donald Westlake’s “Dortmunder” novels, highlighting “Bank Shot” as a fun, comic caper about stealing a whole bank (51:39–52:22).

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Key Timestamps

[03:40] — Pop-culture stories as a relief from complex world news
[05:56] — Christine Rosen defends the old Cracker Barrel aesthetic for families
[07:28] — Is the logo change “woke”? Debate on stretching definitions
[09:36] — Broad consensus on Cracker Barrel: “Both sides can come together”
[13:18] — Corporate branding, new CEOs, and the compulsion to “refresh”
[18:48] — Exhaustion with endless culture war battles
[20:46] — “You are invading our space”: the right’s reaction to cultural shifts
[25:38–26:50] — Class disconnect and young families in corporate decisions
[27:53] — Discussion of protecting children in cultural spaces
[34:17] — Shifting to the John Bolton case: lawfare and its effects
[44:53] — “The process is the penalty” in lawfare
[48:03–48:47] — Trump’s motivations in political retribution
[51:39] — Book recommendation: “Bank Shot” by Donald E. Westlake

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Memorable Moments

• “The difference between silly Somewheres and Anywheres... The new logo is free of any kind of particularity.” — Matthew Kyne Letty (08:40)
• “We get no space in this culture. You are invading our space. … Give us our Cracker Barrel." — John Podhoretz (20:46)
• “The process is the penalty.” — Paraphrased, via Andy McCarthy, by Matthew Kyne Letty (44:53)
• “The thing about Trump is he’s never entirely wrong.” — David Brooks, quoted by Matt Letty (49:10)
• “There’s a kind of liberal white woman trigger that happens to people like Rufo whenever a CEO like her comes out and says, ‘We’re rebranding.’” — Christine Rosen (13:59)

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Tone & Style

The discussion is sharp, ironic, and self-aware, frequently punctuated by personal anecdotes and pop-cultural references. The Commentary crew blends political analysis with cultural observation, often highlighting the absurdity or unintended consequences of culture war skirmishes, while expressing nostalgia and skepticism about changing American institutions.

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Summary by Commentary Magazine Podcast Summarizer – capturing the spirit and arguments as they unfolded in the conversation.

Transcript

[Abe Greenwald]

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[John Podhoretz]

For the best, expect the worst. Some free champagne, some die of thirst. No way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, expect the waste of or the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, August 25, 2025. I'm John Pothoric, the editor of Commentary, back from a week off during which we did non newsy podcasts and we got emails all week about how where were you? I needed you to explain to me what's going on because everything is so confusing and I have to confess that I was actually pleased to be off last week because I was so confused about everything, particularly what was going on with Russia and Ukraine and the Europeans and the prime ministers and the meetings and the back and forth stories and the behavior of Sergey Lavrov and people wearing CCCP sweatshirts to summits and that I was happy not to have to do a daily analysis of what has turned out to be something pretty close to a big nothing burger. At least it seems at this moment that nothing has changed and that the Europeans recommitted themselves to an all for one, one for all stand on Ukraine. We don't quite know where we are, the Russians are clearly not going to play ball and the Ukrainians are queuing close to Russia. And so that's all we're going to say about this matter until we get some actual news. And by we, I mean Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi, John.

[John Podhoretz]

Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Kyne Letty. Hey, Matt. Hi, Matt. Hey, Matt. Hey. Hi.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Hey. Hey. Hey.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi.

[John Podhoretz]

And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi, John. I will say people should go read the interview the Wall Street Journal did over the weekend with the historian Stephen Kotkin about Russia, Ukraine. Fascinating. Good, good background to future discussion.

[John Podhoretz]

So I hope you all had a good week off and now we got to get back into it and talk about Cracker Barrel. Okay, now we don't. We'll talk about Cracker Barrel later. But it is a very interesting telling thing that you don't know how the news works. So we have, we've had like six, seven, eight months of very important news, right. Doge campus anti Semitism fights over, you know, the strike on Iran, all of that. When you get something that happens that seems to be something that everybody in America is perfectly legitimately entitled to, an opinion of where you don't need anything but your own five senses to express your view of. Like, is this a good new logo for Cracker Barrel? And what does it mean that they redesigned the logo for Cracker Barrel? And what does it mean that they redesigned the dining room of Cracker Barrel? You can feel the world shift in a weird way because people are like, well, I don't even know where Gaza is, but I know where Cracker Barrel is. It's right off 95 and every hour there's another Cracker Barrel. And I've been to cracker barrel 500 times and let me tell you, I'm going to express my opinion of Cracker Barrel. And then everybody in the Internet world of influencers and speakers and click mongers and clickbaiters and all of that instantly gets the memo that it's time to like jump on this because people are really interested in what Cracker Barrel looks like and what the meta meeting might be of a redesign of Cracker Barrel. So I would say that was actually the biggest news of last week in some really bizarre way, at least for news consumers.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

If similar to the Sydney Sweeney controversy of, of earlier in the summer. We've had a few of these stories.

[John Podhoretz]

But we always do. That's the point. Yeah, we want to talk about substantive matters, the world. We don't. We don't.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

I much rather talk about Cracker Barrel. First of all, I have not seen the new logo. In actuality, I drove by several Cracker barrels in the past 72 hours and the old man's still there with his barrel. So this woke revolution. Maybe there's a chance to prevent it.

[John Podhoretz]

I think that's entirely possible that this is a new Coke moment where, you know, what they'll do is they'll do a thing where they'll like have. In certain places we will have the new logo, but where people really seem to love the old logo, we'll just have the old logo and. But did you say one thing about Cracker Barrel?

[Christine Rosen]

No, no, I was just going to.

[John Podhoretz]

Say that's the dining room. The dining rooms of Cracker Barrels are very grubby looking. I don't care. I love Cracker Barrel and I love the store and I love stopping there on. On 95 to go. And I like the succotash. And, you know, my dad loved the pancakes. Put disgusting, like, cherry and strawberry cookies compote on top of the pancakes. And I'm very fond of Cracker Barrel, but I will. The dining rooms needed something like, they did look like.

[Christine Rosen]

Like, okay, I'm gonna go on. I'm gonna defend the dining room. And this is why. Because cracker. I've spent many hours in Cracker Barrels because I would drive up to Maine every summer with very young children, beginning when they were a year old. And Cracker Barrels dining rooms are brilliant. If you're there with young children, there is so much stuff for them to just sit and look at while you take a breather, enjoy a breakfast. You know, they love it. And then the other half of the Cracker Barrel is a weird shop with, of course, tons of candy, gigantic lollipops, all kinds of tchotchkes. And so in that sense, it's the perfect place if you're. If you just need a break. You don't want to go to a fast food restaurant. And this is where the esthetic revolution that this new CEO is trying to impose on Cracker Barrel is so wrongheaded. She's trying to make them all look like very bureaucratic. The new McDonald's, for example, which just looks like a corporate office. It's so dull and so tedious. And yes, the schlocky McDonald's with the play space of my youth was kind of hideous in a way, but it was also very real. It just felt like a real place, and there was some quirk to it. And so even though Cracker Barrel is sort of industrialized quirkiness, at least it tried to be quirky. And I found it very useful for. As a place to stop on a long trip with kids because they were fascinated by all that. All the crap on the walls.

[John Podhoretz]

Did it say that they were getting rid of the pegboard game on the table? I didn't see that. They said they were getting rid of the pegboard game.

[Christine Rosen]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

I don't know if they'll get rid.

[Christine Rosen]

Of the pegboard, but I'm just talking about the stuff that's all over the walls, all the old tools and the cooking implements and just all that stuff that.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

The flare.

[Christine Rosen]

Yes, the flare. Thank you.

[Abe Greenwald]

You know, I have a question, because I don't know. By the way, I've never been to a Cracker Barrel.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Hey, never been.

[Abe Greenwald]

But it's not a policy. I go. I just have to. What's woke about the new logo. This is what I don't understand. I've read a few.

[John Podhoretz]

The old white man.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Rural. It's a rural old white man.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

And the image of the Cracker Barrel is a small town. The Cracker barrel was something that existed outside a general store where they would literally put dry goods like crackers in the barrel to keep them from going stale. And then you would go into the Cracker Barrel in some general store in some small town with a bag and you would take crackers and put them in the bag and then bring crackers home with you. It was a. And so this evokes. This evokes small town white America. So if you remove the old guy with next to the cracker barrel, you remove are saying this is no longer the image of America that we are trying to evoke in you. That would make you say, oh, I really want to stop there because it's like home to me.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

The difference between silly somewheres and anywheres. The old logo was somewhere. It was situated. The new logo is. Could be anywhere. It's. It's free of any kind of particularity.

[Abe Greenwald]

See, I think this is a sort of. We're stretching the definition of woke here.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

You think?

[Abe Greenwald]

I really do. Is that the consent? I don't know.

[Christine Rosen]

This is an important point because this is how the cultural discussion now always falls into is it woke or is it anti woke? When in this case this isn't actually about wokeness at all.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

I don't think it is about wokeness. I think it's being. That is being overlaid onto what is a broader esthetic challenge that all of these chain restaurants are facing in an economy where they're trying to draw in people who otherwise wouldn't go there.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

There were plenty of liberal critics of the logo change as well, weren't there? I think Laura Coates of CNN actually led her show with an anti cracker Barrel monologue. She's definitely not on the right. So if anything, there was a brief moment of consensus that this was a wrong headed move. And that's why the national implications of the story, as John pointed out, are so riveting, because everyone has an opinion and both sides can come together.

[John Podhoretz]

I would defend very slightly the wokeness criticism. And this is to say that there was a. There was a bit of a kerfuffle on social media between Chris Ruffo and Jonah Goldberg in which Stone Girl would make fun of the cracker barrel fight and Chris Ruffo's like, no, no, no, no, no. Or Chris Ruffle did this first. He said, I've looked into this and the PR department of Cracker Barrel has over the last couple of years put out some wokey statements about welcoming diversity and you know, like with a, with a, with a pride flag in some ad on Pride day and that sort of thing. And so he's saying this is a necessary component or the completion of corporate wokeness, which is imposed internally without. With morons like a CEO who doesn't know where things are, let's say, or doesn't understand what's being sort of like propagandized to him, not understanding that the thing that impelled the idea of the change was this is old fashioned. And then trans translate old fashioned into American patriotic. You know, it's the place you go where you can buy a bingo board that has American flags on it or stuff like that. And we're trying to freshen it up to remove the stain of small town Americana which now has a terrible valence. That was sort of Rufo's meta point. Jonas, man, a point like all of ours now is like, oh, for God's sake, can we just have five minutes in which everything is not the culture war, but, but everything isn't necessarily the culture war, as Laura Coates, Laura Coates's sort of innate hostility to this proves also proves an innate conservatism in the American soul which is like, don't change things just to change things. What's the matter with you? That was actually what happened with old Coke and New Coke 40 years ago that was so fascinating when it happened. Coke said, we did a million taste tests and we did, we had a million focus groups and people like this Coke better and we're changing it because they like it better and therefore we will sell more Coke. And then everybody said, no.

[Christine Rosen]

Ironically, Mexican Coke is the best Coke. So I just throwing that out there.

[John Podhoretz]

It'S like, we like old Coke. Don't give us, I don't care what your marketing said. You don't change, you know, like America's, what would you call it, secular sacramental wine recipe. But.

[Abe Greenwald]

So many brands and chains simplify their logo or their name over time. I mean, they sort of streamline it, right? Like Dunkin Donuts, Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC and whatever. I mean, this, this, they're all stupid.

[John Podhoretz]

This is ultimately the point though, which is they think, and I think it's also, it's a new CEO. So the new CEO wants to, you know, put his Mark on. The new CEO wants to make his mark. CEOs want to change things. This is what's been going on in Hollywood for 10, you know, like the. The world's worst mergers at and T and Warner Brothers and then Discovery and Paramount. All, all that stuff is about, I'm going to come in and you're going to make all these changes because that's why I'm here. I bought it, I want to change it. And it's like, why are you changing it? What's the matter with you? If it's not broke, don't fix it. And people like what they have.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, there's another. The CEO of Cracker Barrel is a woman. And there's a sort of. There's a branding, I think, to get back to the RUFO everything is woke argument, which I'm on Jonah's side of that one. I have to admit. She also kind of looks, she walks and talks like, you know, the CEO of npr. You know, there's a kind of liberal white woman trigger that happens to people like rufo. Whenever a CEO like her comes out and says, we're rebranding, it's instant, you know, and it's not always incorrect that they're not driven by, you know, kind of crazy identity politics. But I do think, I think conservatives and the right in general should really be cautious about mission creeping too much with the culture war. We've made a lot of gains recently, and those should be celebrated. But there are true institutional battles to be had. I'm not sure, you know, boycotting Cracker Barrel, which, by the way, when you go into a Cracker Barrel, at least along the east coast, anywhere on the east coast, it is an incredibly diverse group of people sitting down to eat. It just is. You're not going to find it's not all white by any stretch of the imagination.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

I think, you know, RUFO will look at it differently, which is that Mission creep is a good thing so that you pick, you fight. It's not. This is not the Trans Dylan, was it Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney, the. The Bud Light Trans Bud Light spokesman. Right. So this is. Instead, they're just dropping the white guy and they're redesigning the dining room to make it less again, like I say, less Americani. It seemed much more commercialized and homogenized in the pictures I saw. Well, this is. This means that actually the Dylan Mulvaney fight was pocketed. We won for. So let's fight over this and see if you can stop them from removing the barrel from the logo. And if you can win that fight, well, great. Then there's something else. I listened. I'm halfway through this because I do this for research purposes. Extremely long podcast that ISI put out with four thinkers of the new right. Patrick Deneen, Christopher Caldwell, Curtis Yarvin, who's something else, and Chris Ruffo. And in fact, Rufo makes the version of the point that I just made in regard to DeSantis and Florida and about how, you know, everyone thought that when DeSantis took on Disney, oh my God, this is going too far. What you're going up against this extremely powerful, beloved corporation. And not only did DeSantis continue with the fight, well, he actually, he won the fight. And so the, the way that they people on the new right think about these things is keep going, keep keep going and see. And so if you can get Cracker Barrel to back down off of this, great. Let's move on ahead.

[Abe Greenwald]

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[Christine Rosen]

Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back.

[John Podhoretz]

So I thought it would be fun.

[Christine Rosen]

If we made $15 bills, but it.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Turns out that's very illegal.

[John Podhoretz]

So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

[Christine Rosen]

Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Taxes and fees extra.

[Christine Rosen]

See mint mobile.com this is the one error of the new right, though, is that they forget that even people who are sympathetic to their arguments don't want to fight over every single thing. And there's an exhaustion that comes from having everything become a pitched battle in which you must choose sides. Like, now I have to boycott Cracker Barrel because they're woke.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

So.

[Christine Rosen]

So there's. I mean, it's a tension. It's always been a tension with a more radical push to change the culture. But I would caution them that they should start to choose their battles wisely, because I certainly find some of this stuff a little excessive. And people turn it off. They stop listening. After all.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, so to. So to play devil's advocate here. What is interesting is when the culture, the liberal culture, we could call it the woke culture if you wanted, but comes for institutions with which conservatives, broadly speaking, identify and there is great upset. In other words, you can have Benetton, you can have Apple if you want Apple, you can have Silicon Valley. Like, okay, that you. This is who you are. But you can't have the NFL. You can't have Disney World, and you can't have Cracker Barrel. These are. These are institutions that we like that we think evoke a kind of American fantasy that we want our kids to enjoy as well, right? Main street, usa, Disney, Cracker Barrels. Image of the small town with the rocking chairs in the front of the, you know, that you can buy and bring home in your car and all the fun stuff and all the toys in the store that evoke Trump voting. And then the NFL. I think it was the real going at the NFL. Black Lives Matter in the NFL. Sort of letting Colin Kaepernick win after losing all of that stuff. It was like, we. You are. We get no space in this culture. You are. You are.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

You.

[John Podhoretz]

You are invading our space. We have already ceded Hollywood to you. Leave us. Give us our Cracker Barrel. We didn't. We didn't come at you and say, you know, and Bud Light. Another very. Like, what is the Budweiser corporations advertising? What has it been for the last 50 years? It's pure Americana. Horses, Liposhon or, you know, like horses riding in the American Midwest. It's beer, you know, it's. It's, you know, early morning on the farm, that stuff.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

That.

[John Podhoretz]

That is the image that Budweiser has promulgated or kept going for my entire lifetime. And then they turn around. Oh, and sports play, right? Bud Light was made by ads featuring like drunken, crazy sports figures. You know, Billy Martin and people like that having temper tantrums on screen and Rodney Dangerfield and all this. This is not, you know, a trans guy drinking a beer. And it's like, we get our beer, we get Fundweiser, we get Disney, we get, why are you doing this to us? And interestingly speaking of Disney, there was a story last week, I think, in Variety about how Disney now recognizes that it has a huge problem with boys and that boys are no longer interested in having anything to do with Disney. And they need to do something to attract boys because they have spent 20 years focusing on girls. Now why did they focus on girls to begin with? Because they discovered they had this goal, this, this consumer gold in the princesses, whom they had not marketed as a thing until the like late 1990s. And suddenly every Disney story that centered on a girl, that girl was a princess and she had a dress, she had a different color. There was this. And the princesses became a new, you know, major thing to market. And then all the movies centered on girls. Almost. Almost all. And then when they started making romantic interests, very important, right? Sisters, not princes. Right? It's all about sisterhood and other girls. And then came the fact that they started making movies about teenage boys who were gay. Two of them specifically, Strange World, which was a cart, which is a cartoon made by Disney, and Eliot, which was made by Pixar. And the intent in Elio, which they then pulled back from, was to make Elio an 11 year old gay kid. Strange World was a huge flop in which it was clear apparently that the central character was, was. Had homosexual tendencies and Elio. Now what do we know? We know that 3% of Americans now, according to all the polling, identify as gay. So they are, they are basically saying, if we're going to portray boys, we're going to portray them as gay. Or these movies and TV shows are going to be about girls. All the Marvel shows on Disney plus were about girls. It was amazing comic books, right? She, Hulk, Hawkeye, with the Girl, Hawkeye, Ironheart, Echo. These are comic book shows. Whose. Do girls read comic books? They may read graphic novels. They don't read Marvel comics. So Disney had taken this crazy turn into kind of. They sort of redefined wokeness in a weird way or defined cultural wokeness by turning their back on half the population.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

And that's how you get Trump. I mean, you get this huge backlash and you get the Bro Pod podcasters and you get, in the most extreme form, you get Andrew, Andrew Tate. And so the field of the culture war. And I agree with. I'm not sure whether the move to redesign the Cracker Barrel logo and restaurant was a culture war movement explicitly or whether it was just a bullheaded capitalist move kind of, you know, in the way that, well, let's just update things, which for no reason, give it a refresh.

[John Podhoretz]

Weird way, that's what people say. We need to give our logo a refresh. And then you get this logo. It doesn't matter where you are. It's always like, what do you do? Why does everything look like a sun now? But, you know, everything has, like, little.

[Christine Rosen]

But it's also about class, because there's a huge disconnect between the corporate culture that makes those let's refresh things decisions and the people who actually go to Cracker Barrel.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

That's a great point. And I also think it's related to your point earlier about kids. I think so many of the people making these decisions either don't have kids or their kids are grown and they haven't had young kids for a long time. And, and so the idea that, oh, you need to create an environment where small children will have plenty of distractions, that's just foreign to many of the people who make these sort of bureaucratic or corporate level decisions. And so it's, yeah, it's not only class, it's about young families. And it's becoming, I think it's going to become a lot a bigger problem as we have fewer children in the United States. It could be having an environment that is made for little children. One is wonderful on its own, but two also, I think, makes people more comfortable with the idea of having children. And this kind of feeds back on itself in a negative loop.

[John Podhoretz]

And a culture that is limiting, like self limiting, so that there's all sorts of things in the public square that if you were focused on children, at least you had some focus on children, it would be universally understood that you don't want these things in the public square, not even because you oppose them or you get, but because they're too little to understand or they're too little to have to, you know, have this shoved in their faces. And you want them to be well behaved and you want them to function in society and have rule. And a society in which, you know, a libertine society in which there are no rules is also a society in which little children run Amok and annoy people as they're running amok. Right. I mean, they sort of. Everybody gets to be. Have full personal expression, including if you're three years old. And then everybody else is like, I want a restaurant where they don't let children in because I can't hear screaming and they're crying.

[Christine Rosen]

The feminist movement really failed here too, in the, in an earlier culture war when they had a, I think a thoughtful, a little extreme at times, but a thoughtful critique of the hyper sexualization of childhood and some of the things that were being marketed to children that were inappropriate, all in the name of sort of more individual liberation. But they completely ceded that ground when the trans movement came in and was like, everybody has to be loud and proud about who they are, identity wise, and you must endorse that publicly. They just stopped talking about all of that. And that's, I think, why Drag Queen story hour and all these other little, little blips in the culture war became a big deal and shocked a lot of people when they did. Because you had a lot of parents over several generations saying, you know, we do want to protect our kids from stuff that we can't explain to them yet because their brains literally aren't developed well enough emotionally or, or intellectually to understand what we might want to explain to them later. And that force feeding, that inability to avoid those sorts of things is a part of the culture war that I think remains very salient among liberals, because I still, I still see these things surface where it's like, what are you afraid to tell your kids all about this? What do you mean? Why would you want to ban kids from porn sites? Well, you must just want to deny them free speech. I mean, it's. You can see this continuing to be a through line. And I think that's something that conservatives should keep their eye on religiously because it isn't about suppressing speech and it isn't about being crude. It's about protecting childhood, which remains the goal of any good parent.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

I think this is so important. Just to put a underscore it. In Virginia right now, we are having a gubernatorial race and Winsome Sears, our lieutenant governor, former Marine, black woman, a pretty incredible character. She's running behind Abigail Spamberger, congresswoman, former CIA employee, kind of a perfect representative of the educated class, national security adjacent. Not even adjacent in her case. She was part of the national security community then entering politics in order to defeat Trump. Right. So you have this Spamberger, Earl Sears, and Winsome Sears is behind. She's Running behind. But in Loudoun county, which is the epicenter, it seems, of Virginia cultural fights, there's yet another cause celeb about boys feeling uncomfortable with a trans student in the locker room. And the boys were suspended because they were voicing their complaints about this. And Winsome Sears has seized on this, as the media might say, to make a point about, again, kind of protecting biological spaces. Biological sexual spaces, male, female, policing that distinction in public schools. And she's had a good run, I have to say, for a candidate that the political community is undervaluing right now. She's had a good run. Spanberger is doing a basement campaign, she's tweeting out things. And then of course, we had this incident last week where a Karen, some white liberal woman, was protesting in defense of the trans student and against Earl Sears and said, winsome Sears, if you, if you're not going to respect trans rights, then you can go back to having the black only water fountain. And this is, this atrocious statement symbolizes, I think, the mentality of the white liberals who have driven America insane.

[John Podhoretz]

And it speaks to the Rufo strategy, which is, it's the Sears campaign with political, politically opportunistic impulses saw this and said, this is gold for us. This is making the point that we need to make, that we need to whipsaw the race back in the other direction. And just as Rufo says, yeah, as you say, it's like this is a feature, not a bug, that they've redesigned the Cracker Barrel logo because we're, we're having these high flown conversations about what is the academy and how should we function on campuses and where, what is the line between free speech and bigotry? And how do you, how does Title 6, how does enforcement of Title VI? Can we do that without coming at research grants and all that? And these are important and complicated issues and Cracker Barrel is not, it's neither important or you could say it's not complicated, but it's maybe culturally important because it is a way into people's populist consciousnesses. They're not going to understand the fight over Title six, but they can understand that they're coming after your Cracker Barrel. And I'm sorry, like, I don't like it, but I sort of, I understand it. And just like I was allergic to Trumpism in 2015 and 2016 because it's not my cultural valence doesn't mean it wasn't effective and doesn't mean it's not effective now. But now we can Move to Trumpism in another realm and talk about what exactly is going on. So Trump had a good run in the last month on certain matters. I would say, particularly again, opportunistically, the D.C. the move on the D.C. crime problem is going to pay off very serious political dividends and may already be paying off serious. You know, crime rate is down. I mean, it makes perfect sense. Like you, you start doing more enforcement, you put more law enforcement agents on the street, you put them very publicly so they're visible, and you publicize it, crime's gonna go down. So he's like, well, here we are. I'm gonna get credit for it. I did it. Maybe we should go do it in Chicago. I don't know how he's gonna do it in Chicago. D.C. has very special constitutional standing that the President has authority over, and he has no authority over local cities that are incorporated and part of states and all that. But is that a good run?

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Well, he can deploy the National Guard. That's what he's thinking of doing.

[John Podhoretz]

Okay, Right. Okay. Then he. Then Friday morning, the FBI raids the home of my old friend. Your old friend. Our old friend, Commentary contributor, great guy, Very fond of him personally. John Bolton raids his home and his office. He's been saying that Bolton was an idiot for five years. He's an idiot. He's terrible. And even here, the first. When I heard it, my blood, like, my blood ran cold. Then as I read more about it, and I'd forgotten that there was this controversy over whether or not in the publication of his book in 2020, which was rushed into print in order to take advantage of the fact that Trump was running in 2020, and Bolton was going to write this negative memoir of his experience working for Trump and his life, the Room where it happens that there were real questions raised about whether or not his account necessarily compromised national security, because he knew things and had things in his. Not only in his head, but on paper that were. That were classified or worse or higher level of classification. And that two things about that. One, I, Judge Royce Lambeth, a controversial figure in D.C. judging, but said A. Well, look, 200,000 copies of the book have already been published. So following on the lines of the Pentagon Papers case, when a judge refused to sort of enjoin the publication of the Pentagon because they'd already been published, that Washington was, you know, the New York Times had already run the Pentagon Papers. It was like, I can't do anything about it now. And lambis said, well, 200,000 copies. The book have been Sold. But he said, you may have done damage to national security. He said Bolton may have done damage to national security. And then this case was dropped by the Biden administration. Trump loses case dropped by the Biden administration about the pursuit of, you know, failure to protect classified information. So the story is more complicated, or is it. Do we actually think that Trump cares about the release of national security? Or. Or is this just Cash Patel looking to make trouble for an enemy of Trump's?

[Christine Rosen]

A couple of news outlets have reported that this isn't actually about the book and the memoir, that it's about new intelligence that was the CIA discovered overseas that then they could, they were linking back to some sort of leak or documents that only Bolton could have had. So there seems to be a lot more to this story, potentially we do not know. But. But sounds like the Trump administration is trying to make it clear that it isn't about the memoir, it's about something else. Whatever. What that is, we're not sure.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah. What I find so striking about this case is that unlike a lot of controversies, we know so little. We know most Trump controversies. The Trump administration does something its opponents reject. The thesis you have a huge amount of reporting and then everybody kind of goes to town and we all take our different sides and have a loud argument until the next controversy. This story is unusual to me in that very few people are talking. Bolton is not talking. Bolton's lawyer is not talking. The Justice Department has mainly communicated through leaks, background leaks that Christine mentioned that suggest that there's something else going on here that is not completely in the book. The most high profile comment has been Vice President Vance in an interview with Meet the Press where he rejected political retaliation as one might expect him to do. Though he also used the plural we in opening an investigation into John Bolton, which is definitely not how one ought to talk about Justice Department investigations. So I'm kind of sitting here wondering what exactly is going on. And it may have to do with the fact that the book case was closed by the Biden administration and then may have resurfaced now with the Trump administration. If, if there is some type of new intelligence, I would just, I would like to see. I'd like to see the warrant, I'd like to see the probable cause. I'd like to have more disclosure because until now, at this moment, all we, all we can surmise is that there's some type of political retaliation, as there's retaliation on a whole host of other people who may, maybe also may have done something wrong. And these are all the mortgage cases that have surfaced, whether it's Tish James, Adam Schiff, and now Lisa Cook, the governor on the Federal Reserve, who's Trump's latest target.

[John Podhoretz]

Your burger is served. And this is our finest Pepsi Zero Sugar. Its sweet profile perfectly balances the savory.

[Abe Greenwald]

Notes of your burger.

[Christine Rosen]

That is one perfect combination.

[Abe Greenwald]

Burgers deserve Pepsi.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Hey, guys, have you heard of Gold Belly?

[Christine Rosen]

It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere, nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food.

[John Podhoretz]

Gold Belly ship Chicago deep dish pizza.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and.

[Christine Rosen]

Even Ina Garten's famous cakes.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life.

[Christine Rosen]

Head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Your first order with promo code GIFT. That's goldbelly.com, promo code GIFT.

[Abe Greenwald]

When I first heard the Bolton news, I had the same sort of immediate reaction that you have, John. I was like, I was outraged. But I have learned in the course.

[John Podhoretz]

Of.

[Abe Greenwald]

Trump's public life to sort of check my. My reflexive outrage at anything he does, because sometimes the story is more complicated and more legitimate than one first thinks. Now, I have to say, I don't think there's much to it, and I do think that this is about making Bolton's life difficult. The book was. Was vetted by. By White White House officials before it. Before it was published, wasn't it?

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Well, there were apparently, McCarthy. Yeah. As Andy McCarthy explains, one official who I think was outside the White House, I think at DOD May signaled to Bolton, it's clear, but that was not the official clearance. And then a White House official later said it wasn't clear. And so it's very complicated. The White House people were probably disinclined to approve it anyway because they knew that it was going to be used to attack Trump in the middle of an election. And just briefly, there were many people who were allies of Bolton who thought that him rushing the book to hit the height of a presidential cycle definitely was in itself a violation of the norms concerning presidential employees. For example, Bob Gates waited until after Obama was still president, when Bob Gates released his memoir critical of Obama, but he waited until after he had been out of the election.

[John Podhoretz]

I read the book, and if you remember, it's a very good book, by the way. It's a very important and original effort to explain what it's like to work in the White House and what it means to be in A senior position, which is what good books about Washington are like. And I commend it to people in that regard. And it did not have. It was not a flurry of revelations. It wasn't, you know, Cy Hirsch making stuff up or it wasn't. That wasn't the intent or mood of it. It's just a question of whether or not the idea is that the book is informed by so much classified information that he had at his fingertips and that he knew and that he had been exposed to, that it would have been impossible for him to write the book as he wrote it without that material. Now, that's a almost Talmudic interpretation problem. It's like he saw things that other people don't get to see. He wrote a book informed by them that didn't reveal those things, but the numbers and emanations from them come out in the pages of the book. And maybe somebody at a foreign intelligence agency can piece together bits and pieces that we don't even know are there to put together a portrait of something if it's the book and if it's not, this other question of whether or not other material has been gathered. I find that, I mean, the idea that John would somehow disseminate or release information to a foreign intelligence service is so absolutely beyond the bounds of psychosis that I, you know, I can't even take that even minimally seriously. I can see how they might have discovered or uncovered the idea that some. That intelligence agencies went through these books, went through his book with, you know, a, you know, micro, you know, something to look at things at the molecular level in order to see if they could piece stuff together that would help explain.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah.

[John Podhoretz]

Certain types of American foreign policy or.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

That information was improperly handled. Right. And, you know, and of course, a lot of the stories have mentioned private email accounts and sending notes back and forth. This is. This is speculative. I'm not saying that it's been even alleged. But that, of course, recalls the Hillary Clinton email server from a decade ago. I think the important point here is it goes in line with what Abe said, as Andy McCarthy likes to say, that, you know, with lawfare, the process is the penalty. So once an investigation starts or is resumed, the subject of that investigation, even before any charges are made, as in the case of Bolton, is already paying a price because of the searches, because of having to lawyer up. And remember, Bolton has had his personal. His security that was provided by the government that was stripped away. He may have also had his security clearance stripped away, as Trump has done with many other people. So it's hard to. It's just hard to view this as a completely objective case. You know, it's making it more difficult to say that this is just a, you know, objective investigation into the handling of classified material was Trump's truth post. Yesterday, after watching Chris Christie on ABC News, Trump said, I'm not going to read the whole post, but can. I'm quoting. Can anyone believe anything that sloppy Chris says? Do you remember the way he lied about the dangerous and deadly closure of the George Washington Bridge in order to stay out of prison at the same time sacrificing people who work for him, including a young mother who spent years trying to fight off the vicious charges against her? Chris refused to take responsibility for these criminal acts for the sake of justice. All caps. Perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again. No one is above the law. So this was. This post was directly in response to criticism made by Governor Christie against Trump. And it's a implication of perhaps resurrecting a case that's a decade old in which Christie did avoid any legal penalty or repercussions. And most of the investigations surrounded his aides, who it seems were. Were mostly responsible for the, basically the closure, partial closure of the George Washington Bridge to retaliate against a township that was not pro Christie at the time. For those of you who've forgotten Bridgegate, so this kind of climate of Lawfare squared is becoming more and more apparent over this summer.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. I just want to say for listeners and viewers, we lost John. He dropped out owing to technical reasons. I do think that Trump has a special animus toward John Bolton because Bolton has never come anywhere near to bending the knee, to, you know, playing the game that even that Christie has played. There are people who sort of come in and out of the Trump camp. They criticize, and then they come in and they come out. And Bolton has argued from his principles the entire time, which is something that I think horrifies Trump.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

That he can't handle that repeated frustration you see, with the retribution targets in this second Trump term. Half of them seem to be the people who he feel unfairly used lawfare against him, obviously. But the other half are the mistakes he felt he made in the first term, trusting the establishment to suggest to him people like Bolton. And there's a. There's a. There's a more personal animus behind a lot of those choices, I think.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Yeah. And all of them, you know, as we were talking about what might be the underlying matter in the Bolton investigation or in the cases of the various Democrats who the Trump administration is saying violated basically, well, tax law, I guess, by having different primary residences, you know, there could be an underlying offense. Over our break, I listened to a long interview between Tyler Cowen and New York Times columnist David Brooks. And Dave Brooks made the point that the thing about Trump is he's never entirely wrong. And this, this is very true on a, on a lot of levels. In the case of lawfare, it makes it much more difficult to stand up for the, the objective application of the, of, of the rule of law when some of the figures he's, he's going after may actually have done something wrong.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Christine Rosen]

Where the hat, the Trump every. What was the hat? It says everything Trump said was Trump.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Is right about everything.

[Abe Greenwald]

That was the greatest moment of his presidency so far.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

The new hat is he's never entirely wrong.

[Christine Rosen]

That's right. That one would bother me less, I think.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

Well, should I make a recommendation? Yeah, why don't you go for John? Okay, great. Well, as people know, we were off last week, so it gave me plenty of time to catch up on reading. And I'll recommend one of the books I read over over the break. Among my favorite authors is Donald D. Westlake, the mystery and crime writer. And I made the pledge a while back to read his Dortmunder books in order. Dortmunder is a kind of small time crook. He has the gang, they meet at the OJ Bar and Grill. And these are comic caper novels. And the most, perhaps the most famous is the first one, the Hot Rock, which was turned into a movie in the 70s starring Robert Redford, who does not quite look like Dortmunder as he's described in Westlake. But the second novel called Bank Shot, is the one that I read over the last week. Took me a couple days. It's a short, fun novel, the bank caper, that is that in order to steal the safe, the criminals actually have to steal the entire bank. And the bank is in a mobile trailer. And so it's just a delightful novel. It's comic. Westlake had two major characters. One was Dortmunder. He was the comic character. And then the other novels were Parker novels, which he wrote under a pseudonym, Richard Stark. Those are the noir novels. And so it's, I like to alternate between Parker and Dortmunder. And so I had my Dortmunder. And now I'll be turning to the next in the Parker series, Bank Shot by Donald, Donald E. Westlake.

[Abe Greenwald]

All right, sounds good. If John were here, he would discuss his experience with, with these novels. But, well, he would.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

What he would do is he said, well, Matt, that's what you like. And instead, I like Ed McDain and the 87th Precinct novels. And then he would go on and talk about them for five, three or four minutes.

[Abe Greenwald]

There you go. Well, that does it for Matt. Christine and the Vanished John.

[Matthew Kyne Letty]

The Disappeared John. Fuck words.

[Abe Greenwald]

This is Abe saying, keep the candle bur.