‘Progressive snowflake era’ over as Hollywood studios abandon woke programming
Hollywood’s “progressive snowflake era” is over, with studios turning away from DEI and socially conscious programming, a New York Times column argued on Saturday.
“Hollywood is rapidly shifting away from the socially conscious framework that for more than a decade has driven its narratives, casting and green lights,” editor-in-chief for The Wrap, Sharon Waxman, wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times.
Waxman pointed to the recent sale of an “anti-woke” reboot of the 1992 Paul Veerhoven film “Basic Instinct” as an example of how Hollywood is pivoting away not just from diversity, equality and inclusion in its business practices, but from a social justice-oriented outlook at the box office as well.
She cited the Netflix show “The Hunting Wives” as evidence that Hollywood is no longer woke — proclaiming that everyone on the series is “hot, horny and white.”
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Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad is further evidence of Hollywood’s anti-woke shift, Waxman claimed. Upon the launch of the advertisement, both Sweeney and American Eagle received backlash, with critics claiming the ad was hinting at eugenics.
However, according to Waxman, it failed to penetrate the Hollywood power centers in Burbank or Beverly Hills, and Sweeney was left unscathed from the controversy.
“It’s had no echo in Burbank or Beverly Hills, where not so long ago, Ms. Sweeney might have had to apologize for her insensitivity and make a donation to the A.C.L.U,” she wrote.
Waxman claimed that after a string of controversies that beset Hollywood — including the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and criticism of a lack of diversity among creators — the industry set out to course-correct by emphasizing diversity in its hiring practices and storytelling. Yet, the efforts to hire additional non-White directors, screenwriters and showrunners left many creatives in Hollywood feeling like they’d been pushed aside.
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“The new rules resulted in a strict if unspoken set of boundaries that tacitly put certain topics and categories outside the accepted circles of casting and green lights. It isn’t only that conservative groups gripe that “their” stories… don’t get produced,” Waxman said. “But I also can’t count the number of times I’ve heard quiet frustration from a reasonably accomplished white male screenwriter who felt cast out by the top talent agencies. In the process of “recentering” Hollywood, some people suddenly felt shunted to the side.”
Waxman said Hollywood’s shift had been a long time coming, predating President Donald Trump’s return to office. However, with the president’s return to the White House, the trend has accelerated. His administration’s fight against DEI has contributed to Hollywood studios abandoning the controversial policies.
“At the talent agencies where Hollywood’s hustlers are out selling scripts and projects, no longer are queer writers of color, for example, so much in demand. No longer are preferred pronouns expected on your email signature,” Waxman said.
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Illinois Gov Pritzker pressed on billionaire status by NBC’s Kristen Welker
Gov. JB Pritzker, D-Ill., was pressed by NBC’s Kristen Welker on his billionaire status as other members of the Democratic Party, including New York City mayor candidate Zohran Mamdani, continue to rail against billionaires.
“Some in your party are openly questioning whether billionaires such as yourself should exist at all, governor,” Welker said before she played a clip of Mamdani saying the United States shouldn’t have billionaires.
Welker asked the Democratic governor if the party should be embracing an anti-billionaire message.
“Look, how much money you have doesn’t determine what your values are, and I’m a Democrat because I believe that everyone deserves health care. I’m a Democrat because I believe we’ve got to fund education and have a free public education available to every kid in this country. I’m a Democrat because I believe that we’ve got to stand up for our democracy and against the MAGA Republicans who are literally trying to take away people’s rights around this country. It does not matter what your income level is, what matters is what your values are and that’s what makes me a Democrat,” Pritzker responded.
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Other liberals, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have also been vocal in criticizing billionaires. Sanders has been touring the country on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour since President Donald Trump took office.
Sanders started the tour to “take on the Oligarchs and corporate interests who have so much power and influence in this country.”
Other Democrats, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have spoken out in favor of increasing taxes on billionaires.
Warren fiercely defended Mamdani’s plan to increase taxes on billionaires should he be elected mayor during an interview on CNBC earlier this week.
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Welker also pressed Pritzker on the Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and whether Democrats were being hypocritical.
“I do want to look at the map of Illinois. Let’s take a look at this. Despite President Trump winning 44% of the statewide vote in 2024, Republicans hold only three of Illinois’s 17 districts. These districts seem to be to maximize Democratic advantage. What do you say to those who argue it’s hypocritical for you to criticize Texas for partisanship when your state also drew maps to boost your party’s standing?” Welker asked.
“Well, remember that what Texas is trying to do is, again, violate the Voting Rights Act. We didn’t. We held public hearings, legislative hearings. People attended them. They spoke out. There was a map that was put out. There were actually changes made to the map and a map was passed, and it was done at the end of the census, the decennial census, so that’s how it’s done in this country,” Pritzker responded.
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Welker said that groups who grade the fairness of congressional maps have given Illinois an F. She pointed to one government watchdog who said Illinois’ map “represents a nearly perfect model for everything that can go wrong with redistricting.”
“You talk about preserving democracy, how do you preserve democracy, if you’re using the same tactics that you’ve criticized Texas Republicans for?” Welker asked.
Pritzker said again that the Texas Republicans were attempting to violate the Voting Rights Act.
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“Democracy is at stake and these Texas Democrats are standing up to what the GOP is attempting to do which is to, to steal seats because they know what they’ve done is wrong. They know that they’ve made an enormous mistake,” he said.
Trump weighs major marijuana policy move that would reclassify the plant
President Donald Trump is weighing whether to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, according to a report.
Trump told attendees at a $1 million-a-plate fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club earlier this month he was interested in making a change to the plant’s classification, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
This comes after cannabis companies have committed millions of dollars to the president’s political groups, according to the report.
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The guests at Trump’s fundraiser included Kim Rivers, chief executive of Trulieve, one of the largest marijuana companies. Rivers urged the president to make the change and expand medical marijuana research, the newspaper noted.
The potential move to remove marijuana from the list of Schedule I controlled substances and make it a Schedule III drug would make it significantly easier to buy and sell cannabis and make the industry more profitable.
The Biden administration had begun pursuing the reclassification of marijuana but did not enact the change before leaving office.
There have also been several bills introduced in Congress by Democrats and Republicans to either lower the classification of marijuana to a Schedule III drug or remove it from the list of controlled substances altogether. Federal lawmakers have also sought to decriminalize the plant.
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But these measures have not been signed into law.
At least 40 states have legalized medical marijuana, while 24 states and Washington, D.C., have also legalized recreational marijuana.
Massive space object could be alien probe on ‘reconnaissance mission,’ expert warns
Astronomers recently discovered a rare interstellar object passing through our solar system, and a Harvard physicist is sounding the alarm that its strange characteristics might indicate it’s more than just a typical comet.
“Maybe the trajectory was designed,” Dr. Avi Loeb, science professor at Harvard University, told Fox News Digital. “If it had an objective to sort of to be on a reconnaissance mission, to either send mini probes to those planets or monitor them… It seems quite anomalous.”
The object — dubbed 3I/ATLAS — was first detected in early July by an Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, telescope located in Chile. The discovery marked only the third time an interstellar object has been observed entering our solar system, according to NASA.
Although NASA has classified the object as a comet, Loeb noted that an image of the cosmic visitor indicated an unexpected glow appearing in front of the object, rather than trailing behind it — something he described as “quite surprising.”
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“Usually with comets you have a tail, a cometary tail, where dust and gas are shining, reflecting sunlight, and that’s the signature of a comet,” Loeb told Fox News Digital. “Here, you see a glow in front of it, not behind it.”
Measuring about 20 kilometers across, making it larger than Manhattan, 3I/ATLAS is also unusually bright for its distance. However, according to Loeb, its most unusual characteristic is its trajectory.
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“If you imagine objects entering the solar system from random directions, just one in 500 of them would be aligned so well with the orbits of the planets,” he said.
The interstellar object, which comes fromthe center of the Milky Way galaxy, is also expected to pass near to Mars, Venus and Jupiter — something that is also highly improbable to happen at random, according to Loeb.
“It also comes close to each of them, with a probability of one in 20,000,” he said.
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The 3I/ATLAS object will reach its closest point to our sun — about 130 million miles away — on October 30, according to NASA.
“If it turns out to be technological, it would obviously have a big impact on the future of humanity,” Loeb said. “We have to decide how to respond to that.”
In January, seven years after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit, astronomers from the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts confused it with an asteroid.
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A spokesperson for NASA did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Florida women discover they’re flying solo after Southwest ‘forgot about’ them
Two blind women from Florida recently discovered they were the only passengers aboard their Southwest Airlines flight from New Orleans to Orlando, saying the company needs to improve how it communicates with passengers who have disabilities.
Sherri Brun and Camille Tate were traveling together on Southwest Flight 2637, scheduled to depart New Orleans on July 14. Following a nearly five-hour delay, the two friends finally boarded their flight, only to discover they were the only two people on the plane, FOX 35 reported.
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“You’re the only two people on this flight because they forgot about you,” Brun said the two women were told.
Brun and Tate said they had waited by their assigned gate, checking Southwest’s app for updates. However, unbeknownst to them, nearly all the other passengers had been rebooked on a separate Southwest flight to Orlando that departed earlier from a nearby gate, FOX 35 reported.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, airlines must provide prompt and effective communication for passengers with visual impairments, especially during delays or rebookings and boarding changes a federal law under the Air Carrier Access Act.
Brun and Tate said that requirement was far from met. “Nobody said a word to us about another flight,” Brun said. “We were just waiting at the gate, checking the app, like everyone else.”
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“There needs to be some improvement in how they communicate with their passengers, especially those that have disabilities,” Tate said.
“We have seen inaccurate accounts that suggest we ‘forgot’ the two customers, or that we sent a plane back to get them,” a Southwest spokesperson told Fox News Digital in an email. “Neither of these is the case. … The Customers were scheduled on Flight 2637. Although it ran almost five hours late that day, it remained their same flight number throughout.”
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Southwest said it offered each of the women a $100 travel voucher as compensation for the delay.
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“We apologize for the inconvenience,” Southwest told Fox News Digital. “Southwest is always looking for ways to improve our customers’ travel experiences, and we’re active in the airline industry in sharing best practices about how to best accommodate Passengers with disabilities.”
SNY crew forced to ‘swim to hotel’ as Milwaukee flooding disrupts Brewers-Mets series
A retractable roof and a string of good luck during some unfortunate weather at American Family Field led the Milwaukee Brewers to complete a three-game sweep of the New York Mets, keeping their momentum intact no matter the conditions outside.
Had the stadium been open-air, there would likely have been a couple of rainouts. Saturday’s downpour became so intense at times that water seeped through the roof, creating a slick spot around second base.
The city of Milwaukee has been inundated with historic flooding throughout this weekend, and members of the SportsNet New York (SNY) crew were among those trapped in cars.
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Areas outside the ballpark were filled with flooded roads and submerged cars due to the torrential rain, leaving Milwaukee and surrounding areas in distress.
As many as 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain had fallen in some areas by Sunday, according to the National Weather Service, which also noted river flooding in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties.
During Sunday’s game, Mets broadcaster Steve Gelbs and the SNY employees were among those affected.
According to Mets broadcaster Gelbs, the SNY team was forced to abandon their car just a quarter-mile from their hotel and swim to safety.
“So they drove back last night from Green Bay, got caught a quarter-mile from their hotel, had to abandon their car and swim to the hotel,” Gelbs said.
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Nearly 47,000 customers of We Energies lost power in southeast Wisconsin. In the suburban village of Wauwatosa, an overflowing and fast-moving Menomonee River submerged a popular playground.
Firefighters responded to over 600 calls, including for gas leaks, flooded basements, electrical outages and water rescues, according to the Milwaukee Fire Department. Meanwhile, city crews worked overnight to clear surface water.
City officials warned residents to avoid driving or walking in the standing water.
“It remains dangerous,” the City of Milwaukee Department of Public Works said in a statement.
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But that didn’t stop 33,700 people from getting to the game on Sunday – and it was well worth the trip. The Brewers came back from down 5-0 to earn a walk-off victory to extend their winning streak to nine games.
First female teammate of trans athlete speaks out on being ‘mortified’ by experience
EXCLUSIVE: Caroline Hill turned down multiple Division I women’s track and field scholarships to compete for Division III Rochester Institute of Technology.
Her talents allowed her to break the program record in the 200-meter and 300-meter early in her collegiate career. But then she had to watch both records fall to transgender teammate Sadie Schreiner, all while feeling “uncomfortable” sharing a locker room with her trans teammate for the next two years.
Then, even after Schreiner was ruled ineligible to compete when the NCAA changed its transgender policy on Feb. 6, Hill alleges Schreiner continued to use the women’s locker room and train with the team for another month. RIT has declined to comment on Hill’s allegations.
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Now, Hill is the first of Schreiner’s former RIT teammates to speak out about the experience. Hill previously joined Riley Gaines’ lawsuit vs. the NCAA in early 2024 – Schreiner’s first official year on her team (the 2023-24 season) – as an anonymous plaintiff. But now, Hill has come forward to put her name down publicly.
Hill claims she and her teammates were introduced to Schreiner as their future teammate in 2022. Schreiner did not officially begin to compete until 2023.
“He was practicing with us a little bit during the preseason,” Hill said of the situation in 2022. Fox News Digital was unable to verify why Schreiner did not officially compete for RIT in 2022.
When Schreiner began competing the following year, Hill claims the two of them were paired up as “workout buddies” by their coaches.
“We were sort of expected to be training buddies because we’re both ‘women’ on the women’s team running the same events,” Hill said.
“Personally, I saw it as ‘This is not fair. This is definitively unfair’… the expectation was that we are equals, being perceived as equals by the coach. That was what I had a harder time with.”
Hill even made it a point to protest the situation to her coach and administrators, but to no avail. Hill even alleges that Jacqueline Nicholson, RIT executive director of intercollegiate athletics, told her and the other women on the team that Schreiner had “less testosterone” than some of them.
“I had a couple conversations with her. She was very firm in that ‘This is what the NCAA is enforcing. We’re supporting it,'” Hill said. “We even had a meeting with the women on the team where she addressed us and said, ‘We support this athlete competing on the team. Some of you women have more testosterone than he does,’ making it seem like it was totally fair and just as if we had a problem with it, that was not OK. It was very, very harsh.”
Hill said her conversation with her sprint coach was futile as well.
“I was very vulnerable expressing my feelings about the male athlete competing and training with us. And he was not very empathetic,” Hill said. “He sort of tried to diminish my thoughts, and it was a lot of deflection. It’s like, ‘Well, we shouldn’t be focusing on that.'”
Hill also claims that other women on the team were supportive of competing with Schreiner.
“A lot of my teammates, um, were very supportive of this athlete competing and training with us,” Hill said.
In Schreiner’s second year on the team in 2024, the trans athlete broke Hill’s program record in the 300-meter, clearing Hill’s previous record, which she set her sophomore year in 2022, by 1.42 seconds.
In early 2025, Schreiner broke the program record in the 200-meter with a 24.46, besting Hill’s best time of 25.82, which she set that same year. She ranks just behind Schreiner for second-best in program history.
While Hill had to watch Schreiner break her collegiate records on the track, an even more personal dilemma awaited her in the locker room.
“I remember one day, I think I was changing, and all of a sudden this athlete is just in the locker room, and being very just shocked and kind of mortified obviously because it’s uncomfortable to have a male in the locker room. And so actually his locker was right next to mine,” Hill said. “It’s kind of a social area, but he really didn’t talk to anyone.”
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Hill also said Schreiner never changed in the women’s locker room. Still, Hill said she actively tried to avoid changing in front of Schreiner, but that wasn’t always an option.
“If he was like standing there doing something or whatever, I would kind of wait for him to be somewhere else before I changed,” Hill said. “Or there were times where I did, but I would just change as quickly as I could and, you know, I was able to just like suck it up, I guess. Not that I should have had to do that.”
Hill spent the two years of her collegiate career sharing those spaces and competitions with Schreiner. After President Donald Trump signed the “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order on Feb. 5, which aimed to put an end to situations like the one at RIT, the NCAA complied the next day, changing its policy to only allow biological females to compete as women.
Hill said the coaches never officially informed the female athletes that Schreiner wouldn’t be competing with them anymore.
RIT provided a statement to Fox News Digital on Feb. 12 that read, “We continue to follow the NCAA participation policy for transgender student-athletes following the Trump administration’s executive order. Sadie is not participating in the next meet.”
However, Hill alleged that this didn’t mean the end of seeing Schreiner in the locker room or at practice.
“He was still changing with us and all that. I was sort of confused,” Hill said. “Utilizing our coaches, our facilities, our resources during a practice times even though the rules had been changed. So it didn’t end with the rule change. He kept training with us. Not that we were training buddies, but he was always there at the same time as I was… I would say a month after [the rule change].”
Schreiner’s attorney, Susie Cirilli of Cirilli LLC, told Fox News Digital, “We are not responding at this time,” in response to a request for comment on Hill’s statements.
Eventually, Schreiner made an effort to compete in non-NCAA sanctioned events.
Schreiner competed at the USA Track & Field Open Masters Championships on March 1 in New York.
There, Schreiner took first place in the women’s 400-meter dash and 200-meter dash.
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Weeks after that, Schreiner posted an Instagram video claiming to have likely competed in Schreiner’s last organized track meet in the U.S. after a USATF event in Maine.
“I very likely just ran what will be my last meet in the United States,” Schreiner said, later adding, “I will find a way to keep competing, but I doubt that will be in the United States.”
Schreiner said USATF changed its policy on transgender eligibility from the one used by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which allows biological males to compete in the women’s category, to the one used by World Athletics, which bans any athlete who has undergone male puberty from competing as a woman. The USATF’s official transgender eligibility policy does now reference the World Athletics guidelines on its official webpage. It previously referenced the IOC’s policy, as seen in an archive via Wayback Machine.
Then in July, Schreiner filed a lawsuit against Princeton University after the school allegedly excluded the athlete from a May 3 women’s race.
Schreiner’s lawsuit claimed the athlete attempted to participate in the women’s 200-meter sprint at the Larry Ellis Invitational as one of the 141 participants unattached to a university or club. The suit alleges officials told Schreiner the athlete could not participate 15 minutes before the race began.
“The actions of the two Princeton officials were in blatant and willful disregard of Sadie’s rights based on Sadie’s rights as a transgender woman under controlling New Jersey law, thereby causing Sadie Schreiner to foreseeable emotional and physical harm,” the lawsuit argued.
Cirilli provided an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital about Schreiner’s lawsuit against Princeton.
“The action of the two Princeton officials were in blatant and willful disregard of Sadie’s rights as a transgender woman under controlling New Jersey Law,” the statement read. “The actions of the defendants were utterly intolerable in a civilized community and go beyond the possible bounds of decency.”
Meanwhile, Hill, having graduated from RIT with a degree in graphic design, is pressing ahead as a now-public member of the Gaines vs. NCAA lawsuit.
Hill said fear of retaliation from fellow students at the school and elsewhere prevented her from speaking out against the situation earlier. But now, as the culture in America has shifted, Hill is proudly putting her name out there as an advocate to protect women’s sports.
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“I was definitely a little worried being on campus, being on my team, um, with administration that felt strongly, I get that they were against the lawsuit… I was a little worried about my own safety and that things might escalate in a way that I couldn’t foresee,” Hill said.
“I feel like it’s worthwhile to come forward [now] just because I have the ability to use what has happened to me as a way to show that harm is being done to women, to female athletes… it is scary to put yourself out there because I’m sure there’s a lot of girls out there that feel like they can’t and don’t have a voice.
“The NCAA has definitely made it so that they, a lot of women and girls don’t feel like they can speak out, so I want to do it.”
Hill is calling for RIT to apologize to her and reinstate her as the program record-holder for the 200- and 300-meter.
Actor with colorectal cancer shares simple sign that he ignored: ‘I had no idea’
James van der Beek has revealed the first warning sign of his colon cancer — and it’s one that did not seem alarming at the time.
The “Dawson’s Creek” actor, 48, who announced his colorectal cancer diagnosis in November 2024, recently told Healthline that “there wasn’t any red flag or something glaring.”
“I was healthy. I was doing the cold plunge,” he said. “I was in amazing cardiovascular shape, and I had stage 3 cancer, and I had no idea.”
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The one symptom that he did experience was a change in bowel movements, which the actor chalked up to an effect of his coffee consumption.
“Before my diagnosis, I didn’t know much about colorectal cancer,” van der Beek said. “I didn’t even realize the screening age [had] dropped to 45; I thought it was still 50.”
He ultimately underwent a colonoscopy, which revealed that the actor had stage 3 colon cancer.
Professor Eitan Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., an oncologist and founder of The Suzanne Levy-Gertner Oncogenetics Unit at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel, confirmed that changes in bowel habits is the primary red flag that should raise the suspicion of colorectal cancer.
Others include fatigue as a result of anemia, blood in stool, weight loss, loss of appetite and abdominal discomfort, Friedman, who has not treated van der Beek, told Fox News Digital.
“I was in amazing cardiovascular shape, and I had stage 3 cancer, and I had no idea.”
Dr. Erica Barnell, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-scientist at Washington University School of Medicine — and co-founder and chief medical officer at Geneoscopy — noted that van der Beek’s experience of having no “glaring” signs is common.
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“Many colorectal cancers develop silently, without obvious symptoms,” Barnell, who also did not treat the actor, told Fox News Digital. “By the time symptoms appear, the disease may already be advanced.”
Symptoms are “especially worrisome” for those 45 and older who have at least one first-degree relative with colon cancer or other GI malignancies, and those with active inflammatory bowel disease, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, added Friedman, who is also an advisory board member at SpotitEarly, a startup that offers an at-home breath test to detect early-stage cancer signals.
Early detection is key
The overall chance of an average-risk person getting colorectal cancer over a lifetime is 4% to 5%, according to Friedman.
“Colonoscopy at age 45 onwards, at five- to 10-year intervals, has been shown to lead to early detection of polyps that have the potential to become malignant, and to allow for their removal as an effective means of minimizing the risk of malignant transformation,” he said.
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Unfortunately, Barnell noted, “screening compliance in the U.S. remains below national targets, and gaps are widest in rural, low-income and minority communities.”
To help close those gaps, she called for greater access to “accurate, noninvasive screening technologies,” along with efforts to increase public awareness.
“Most people don’t like talking about bowel habits, but paying attention to changes can save your life,” Barnell said. “Screening gives us the chance to find problems early — often before you feel sick — and that can make all the difference.”
Fox News Digital reached out to van der Beek’s representative for comment.
Loyal fans revolt as Cracker Barrel’s new look draws millions of angry views
As Cracker Barrel Old Country Store restaurants continue to undergo a physical transformation, more customers are noticing – and they’re not embracing the changes.
Cracker Barrel chief marketing officer Sarah Moore told Fox News Digital earlier this year that the Tennessee restaurant chain has been testing “various levels of remodels.”
“We’ve been very transparent about our goal of making our stores feel brighter and even more welcoming than they already are, while maintaining that country hospitality and charm that we’re known for,” Moore said. (See the video at the top of this article.)
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But some Cracker Barrel lovers on social media have expressed their displeasure with the changes.
A recent Instagram video shared by Cracker Barrel includes a caption that reads, “Nothin’ a little Cracker Barrel can’t fix.”
It elicited several negative responses to the alterations.
“The remodel is 🤮,” one person wrote.
“Now this place looks like every other chain restaurant. Bland and boring,” wrote another person.
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“WHAT are you thinking with that interior?!” someone else said.
Moore told Fox News Digital that the “physical guest experience” is “rooted in our brand DNA” and that the changes being made are based on “guest feedback.”
She continued, “Items like our rocking chairs, our biscuits, our peg games, antiquities on the wall, none of that is going away. We’re just looking at ways to freshen up the experience so that we can open our door a bit wider for more guests.”
Rachel Love, a content creator living in Tennessee, caught the restaurant chain’s attention with her social media video showing off the new interior.
The video has been viewed over 2 million times and has fetched nearly 4,000 comments since May.
Another eight-second video posted by @thecoachduggs earlier this month shows the interior of a remodeled Cracker Barrel. The caption reads, “At a remodeled Cracker Barrel. I hate it.”
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The viral video has been viewed more than 6 million times since Aug. 2.
It led to a follow-up post directed at Cracker Barrel.
“The people have spoken. Stop it,” @thecoachduggs wrote.
“HATE IT,” one person commented in the post.
“What a disaster!!” another person commented.
Moore reiterated that Cracker Barrel welcomes the feedback.
“We love feedback,” she said. “We take feedback from all channels very seriously. So, throughout this past year, when we talk about testing and all the development we’ve been doing, we have constantly pulsed various guest segments along the way.”
She said that includes loyal customers, lapsed guests and prospective diners.
“We truly want to understand how they feel about all the elements, whether it’s about the remodels or the menu or the full brand transformation framework,” she said.
“This includes understanding … the social media narrative and really digging deep into what our fan base is saying about us.”
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But, she added, “The things you love about us will stay.”
“The things that make us truly who we are — that’s not changing.”