Woke is on the run.

The cultural scourge has stifled free thought, promoted hard Left extremism and corrupted the arts. Now, the pendulum is finally starting to swing in the opposite direction.

As Justine Bateman eloquently put it, it’s like we can all breathe again.

Woke may have been destined to crash and burn on its own. It’s antithetical to the American spirit and goes against basic biology. Plus, it’s often meted out in a cruel, hypocritical two-tier fashion.

Hunter Biden repeatedly texts  the “n-word” — zero punishment. Morgan Wallen calls a white friend the “n-word” in a private moment caught on tape – his career implodes overnight.

Yet, over the past decade we’ve witnessed a number of brave souls stand up to the woke onslaught. While there are many on team sanity who deserve a shout out — including the voices at The Daily Wire — here are seven culture warriors who hastened woke’s demise and deserve a curtain call.

Robby Starbuck

Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The filmmaker/activist became the one person woke companies fear more than anyone else. Starbuck’s crusade to expose corporate shenanigans, like excessive DEI policies, proved shockingly effective in recent years.

Just ask Walmart, Target, John Deere, Harley Davidson and more.

A single social media post from Starbuck could send company executives into damage control mode. Sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

Starbuck brings the receipts, too. His recent exposé on Cracker Barrel, coming on the heels of the brand’s calamitous logo “update,” proved he isn’t done spotlighting woke on steroids.

Jennifer Sey

Courtesy of Jennifer Sey

The former gymnast defied her woke overlords at Levi’s and lost, if only on the surface. Sey left her job as Global Brand President after speaking out against pandemic school closures. The woke company demanded she toe the line and not share her opinion publicly. She refused.

She could have licked her wounds or stayed silent. Not Sey. The Colorado resident rolled up her sleeves and kept fighting. She assembled a team to create a documentary detailing just how punishing lockdowns proved for millions of kids, even as we weren’t always allowed to admit it aloud. That upcoming documentary, “Generation-Covid,” is just part of her anti-woke agenda.

She also created XX-XY Athletics, a clothing brand designed for women, not biological men living as women. Her company speaks out against trans women in women’s sports, helping strike a blow against a movement that often shames citizens into silence.

Now, the tide is turning on the subject, with more Americans allowed to speak their minds. Sey helped make that happen.

Elon Musk

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He may be “frenemies” with a certain world leader these days, but Musk struck a mighty blow against woke by buying Twitter. Partly inspired by the platform’s attack on The Babylon Bee and other free speech punishments, Musk took over and restored many censored accounts. His new, streamlined X let free speech reign anew. Suddenly, users didn’t have to self-censor for fear their unwoke opinions could cost them their digital voice.

The platform is far from perfect, but under Musk’s control, it’s a vastly superior product and a woke-free zone.

Christopher Rufo

Photo by Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Starbuck may be corporate America’s worst nightmare, but Rufo offers a similar service for academics gone wild. Rufo’s relentless pressure campaigns, and fact-based measures, proved highly effective in recent years.

Rufo helped expose former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism scandal, but that’s just a fraction of his recent activism. Here, he describes why he focuses his attention on Ivy League institutions.

“They’re promoting from their central administrations racial discrimination, scapegoating and even segregation.”

In some cases, they “were” promoting all of the above. Rufo gets results.

J.K. Rowling

Samir Hussein/WireImage via Getty Images

Many celebrities, even the biggest stars in the galaxy, stand down under intense woke pressure. Remember how Scarlett Johansson buckled rather than accept a role playing a trans character?

Not Rowling. The “Harry Potter” author, an old-school progressive, began questioning elements of the trans agenda in 2020. That put her squarely in the Left’s cross-hairs, and she’s remained there ever since.

Death threats. Endless cultural cancelations. Serial attacks from the same Legacy Media outlets that once praised her ability to inspire young readers.

And Rowling refused to back down. That posture, combined with the work Sey has done on trans matters, allowed others to speak out against biological men in women’s sports.

Joe Rogan

Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube.com

Rogan’s relentless curiosity, eagerness to let so many voices share his platform, and his dedication to an open, long-form conversation has given free speech a major boost. 

Even more important, Rogan had a change of heart regarding one potential guest. Two years ago, Rogan seemed disinterested in chatting up former President Donald Trump.

Then, as he watched the Democratic Party stifle speech across the culture, he realized his platform could give Trump a boost in the 2024 presidential campaign. It’s likely why other rebel comics did the same with the Trump-Vance ticket, from Andrew Schulz to Tim Dillon.

President Donald Trump

Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Everything woke turns to s***,” The 45th and 47th president once said, slicing through the noise to make perfect sense. He’s right, of course, and he helped make woke retreat to its current, cornered state.

The president’s frank talk, blustery persona and eagerness to speak sans filter did more than burnish his brand. He gave us permission to do the same, to shoot straight and take the consequences.

Plus, he used his executive orders to protect female athletes against biological male competitors and doubled down on Rufo’s efforts to rein in woke colleges. His anti-DEI initiatives will be part of his legacy, no doubt.

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Woke is far from gone, despite the work of these culture warriors. Some companies and schools are using sleight-of-hand techniques to keep on discriminating on the basis of race and gender.

The disgraced Gay is still teaching students at Harvard.

Hollywood will keep making movies about five-foot-nothing women beating up men double their size. Gender and race-swapped stories won’t fade to black like 3D movies and found footage shockers.

Still, woke has taken body blow after body blow. And these powerful figures threw some of the heaviest punches.

* * *

Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Cracker Barrel, founded in 1969 by the late Dan Evins, came to symbolize American heritage. The original logo of an elderly gentleman sitting on a chair while leaning against a barrel epitomized that heritage. By removing the nostalgic imagery, the company seemingly put the final nail in the coffin of a treasured piece of Americana.

When current CEO Julie Felss Masino — who previously served as president of Mattel and Taco Bell — announced the logo change, she explained that her goal was to get Cracker Barrel out of people’s “rearview mirror” and to “make sure that it was something that really resonates with everybody of today and for tomorrow.” On paper, that may seem like a good idea, especially as the company is facing declining sales and trying to appeal to a younger demographic. In practice, it’s been an absolute disaster that has cost the company $200 million in market value. 

It would be too easy to chalk up Cracker Barrel’s mistake as just another company gone woke. But the truth seems to be more complicated than that. As Andrew Beck, founding partner of brand consultancy Beck & Stone, said during an email interview with The Daily Wire, Masino’s flub was likely the result of heeding bad advice. 

“She clearly values the brand and the customer’s feelings about it,” he said. “I do not think her insights are wrong—but I highly suspect the ‘outside help’ she describes as being brought in advised her team to turn left to ‘modern’ instead of right to ‘nostalgia’ at the fork in the road that every company must: what do we keep, what do we kick?”

Beck added, “It takes deep cultural understanding and tactical skill to actualize such an insight, and when I see who was tasked with the redesign—the firm ‘Prophet’—who tattoos their progressive cultural values on their sleeve, I just can’t see them sharing the Cracker Barrel cultural context enough to execute Julie’s vision skillfully.”

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That disconnect is not unique to Cracker Barrel. In fact, it fits a growing pattern. Companies chasing sleek, modern branding often leave their loyal customer bases behind. It’s enough to inspire eye rolls whenever a company strips its logo of personality to introduce a slick, minimalist iteration that’s easily lost amongst a sea of similar corporate logos.

“It is a byproduct of a general decline of the customer experience in the Western world for these middle market service companies,” Beck explained. “These rebrands are meant to signal a positive change, but because of the lack of imagination and ingenuity on the part of their consultants who are supposed to be ‘experts’ on these matters, the sanitized, sterile aesthetics of their environments and communications become reminders to the customer that the company’s better days are behind it.”

This is especially true for a brand like Cracker Barrel, whose entire identity is built on nostalgia and authenticity. Strip those away, and what remains? 

“As I tell our corporate with legacy American brands. ‘Be who you are. If you are American, be American.’ Problems arise when those being relied on to advise the company do not value their client’s heritage,” Beck said. “Often these are folks who come in and want to impose their own vision on a brand, rather than taking up the company’s historic values as their own. It is difficult to not see ideological influence in these decisions,” the strategist said.

For longtime employees, the decline has been obvious. Erik Russell worked for nearly a decade at Cracker Barrel. He says he did every job in the restaurant and even met his wife there. To him, it was more than just a place to work, and he said the customers felt the same way. 

“Cracker Barrel was more than a restaurant to them, it was home. A place where they felt they still belonged, even as the world changed around them,” Russell told media personality Benny Johnson in an interview.

EXCLUSIVE: Cracker Barrel Insider Breaks Silence on the Woke Destruction of an American Institution

Erik Russell spent nearly 10 years working at Cracker Barrel. He’s done every job in the restaurant. Erik even met his wife there. To Erik, Cracker Barrel was a place where… pic.twitter.com/YDolLTs3dW

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 21, 2025

But Russell says the business he once loved unraveled after leadership changes. He described how small changes added up to something big, like when brown menus were replaced, uniforms got more relaxed, and alcohol was introduced despite the founders’ conviction that staying dry preserved the family atmosphere. 

“The logo and store redesign is simply the last step in total brand destruction by corporate vandals who seemed to despise the Cracker Barrel core culture,” Erik said.

He said the antiques on the wall were once curated from estate sales to reflect real Americana, but the remodeled stores are using generic reproductions instead. 

“I felt like I was part of something truly American, full of nostalgia and tradition. Now all of that’s being torn down and replaced with just another bland, soulless corporate chain,” he said.

That sense of loss goes beyond new décor. It’s about what Cracker Barrel symbolized for countless Americans. “Cracker Barrel built up decades of goodwill across the country,” Russell continued. “We often referred to ourselves as ‘America’s front porch’ after the iconic long storefront filled with rocking chairs and checkerboards where guests would wait to be seated. Each store I worked in felt slightly different, a reflection of their communities.”

For Beck, the lesson here is for businesses not to confuse modernity with progress. “All management is change management. A business must deal with change constantly. What is valuable and what is not? Misidentifying those value propositions, often because of a cultural blindspot on the part of brand ‘experts’ is often at the heart of the failure to manage change,” he said.

When asked if he thinks Cracker Barrel is having a “Bud Light moment,” Beck disagreed, saying the better comparison is Jaguar. 

The legacy car brand recently rebranded with an ultra-modern, futuristic aesthetic and was mocked mercilessly for it. 

“Bud Light became a meme based on a single can,” he said. “The larger business itself was strong and remains so. Jaguar was a disaster from a business POV. A struggling company with a storied brand but neglected product going through big changes jumping the shark, sealing a fate that was not inevitable, rather than changing it.”

“I fear this is another Jaguar unless there is a course correction on the aesthetics and communications across the board,” Beck said. “Right now it is only confirming what the customer base already feared was happening, not exciting them at the prospect of a revived product. I have high hopes that Julie Masino, who has a good relationship with her board, sees this and will do what needs to be done.”

For now, the “America’s front porch” that Erik loved looks more like just another franchise trying to appease consultants instead of remaining a place where families gather to make memories. The food is different, the atmosphere sterile, and the iconic logo is gone. 

What made Cracker Barrel special is slipping away, and the backlash from customers is proof. The irony is that in desperately trying to get out of America’s “rearview mirror,” Cracker Barrel may have veered straight into a ditch.