Greetings and welcome into this breezy, lightweight 51st edition of the Carnival of Fools! We’re feeling featherlight, footloose, and fancy-free over here at the Carnival, and not merely because I unburdened myself of this episode’s lead act once it got too big for its britches. It’s just as well, because this is going to be an installment dedicated to quick hits on all the noodle-armed wimps, moral cowards, and simpering betas of the world. Tom Petty knew the truth: Even the losers get lucky sometimes — heck, sometimes they get to star in this column, become mayor of New York City, or both.
Zohran Mamdani, Failed Powerlifter
If I know anything about my readership, then I’m guessing that nearly every one of you has already seen the circulating clip of New York City Democratic mayoral candidate (and overwhelming front-runner) Zohran Mamdani engaging in a “Men’s Day” weightlifting challenge on the streets of Brooklyn, and failing it in the most hilarious way possible: His attempt at a bench press left him pressed into the bench. He plated a mere 135 pounds and could not complete even a single repetition without the help of a spotter, all of it caught agonizingly on camera.
It was truly a Great Moment in Democratic Masculinity, to rank up there with the work of Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates during the 2024 election; Zohran would have felt right at home next to the guy who eats carburetors for breakfast. (One shudders to imagine what Hasan Piker must have thought at that moment.) Maybe it was in fact actually a brilliantly humanizing move for “frightening radical” Zohran Mamdani to subtly reveal to voters that 60 percent of them — that accounts for 100 percent of males and some percentage of females too — could effortlessly beat the snot out of him if it ever came to that. But I suspect not: I think the truth is that a man’s got to know his limitations, and Zohran Mamdani didn’t understand his.
It won’t cost Mamdani the election in November; New York City has well and truly chosen its fate at this point. But I must salute Mayor-to-Be Mamdani for so perfectly embodying both the feeble masculinity of modern-day progressivism and its fecklessness as well. May you govern with all the form and strength you bring to the weight rack, Zohran.
California Blunders into a Bear Trap
Readers in the mood for long, sprawling, “Spaghetti Western”–style tales of disaster — I’m thinking of the climax of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly here — should set aside a moment to read Politico’s lengthy, well-reported, and fascinating piece on how Democrats bluffed themselves into what I’ve taken to calling the “Gerrymandërrung” for lack of a more felicitous coinage. Wouldn’t you know it? Things just kind of got out of hand.
The piece focuses primarily on the perspective of California’s Democratic state legislators, who were taken by surprise by both Texas’s move to redistrict in their own state as well as Gavin Newsom’s sudden push to answer back in California. None of what you will read in the piece is revelatory; the value is in the confirmation of the details behind what many of us long ago knew to be an inevitable tit-for-tat escalatory dynamic.
But I think it would do us well in this moment to remember the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is best remembered as the author of Democracy in America but also participated in France’s abortive 1848 revolution: “One has to have spent long years in the whirlwind of party politics to understand the extent to which men drive one another off their intended courses, so that the direction in which the world moves is often quite different from what its movers intend, just as the movement of a kite is determined by the opposing tugs of wind and string.”
You and I may have seen this coming, but we do not live in the tunnel-vision world that our legislators do. Anyone who entered into the redistricting face-off without a moment’s thought for the ways such a confrontation could spiral out of control, and would likely end, has only themselves to blame if they are dissatisfied with the final outcome.
Normal People Don’t Need to Be Told to Be Normal
Maybe you missed this, but the media class in Washington is currently chuckling disgustedly at a new memorandum circulated by center-left group Third Way, purporting to offer 45 terms Democrats need to drop from their political vocabulary posthaste, because they offend people. This is no appeal to wokeness, mind you, in fact its exact opposite:
Among the blacklisted terms: privilege … violence (as in “environmental violence”) … dialoguing … triggering … othering … microaggression … holding space … body shaming … subverting norms … systems of oppression … cultural appropriation … Overton window … existential threat to [the climate, democracy, economy] … radical transparency … stakeholders … the unhoused … food insecurity … housing insecurity … person who immigrated … birthing person … cisgender … deadnaming … heteronormative … patriarchy … LGBTQIA+ … BIPOC … allyship … incarcerated people … involuntary confinement.
It’s good advice, but a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has already galloped off to the glue factory: Kamala Harris used nearly every single one of these terms during a misbegotten political career that climaxed in a failed presidential campaign that bonded her party to this particular variety of noxious progressivism. Merely dropping the terminology for a few years — if Democrats are even capable of taking such advice — will not erase our American cultural memory of them as the party of maximal cultural leftism.
Branding exercises are all anyone in politics seems to even bother engaging in these days; they rarely work (especially as re-brandings) because they are understood by a hyper-skeptical modern society to be hollow. The Democrats can drop this sort of language from their messaging as much as they wish, but until they drop the spirit of this rhetoric from their political objectives, they will remain just as culturally alienated from the mainstream as they are now. Or, to quote an online friend: Normal people don’t need to be told to act normal.
Cracker Barrel Rebranded Because It’s Dying, Not Because It’s Woke
Finally, while we’re on the subject of branding, the verdict is officially in on the new “rebranding” initiative of the venerable restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, and the jury has voted for the death penalty. Controversy still rages, however. After nearly a full week of public debate, we are seemingly no closer to resolving the question on everybody’s minds: Has Cracker Barrel “gone woke” with their new generic overhauled logo? Are my forefathers experiencing cracker erasure? In fact, Cracker Barrel is in the midst of a partial retreat as I write this on Monday morning — Fox News reports that “Uncle Herschel,” whoever the heck he is, apparently isn’t going anywhere!
I cannot stress how over-the-top all of this is. We at National Review of course covered the controversy last week with our typical mixture of taste and élan, and I didn’t think I had anything to add, especially given that I’ve never eaten at a Cracker Barrel, or even so much as lived within a ten-mile radius of one (this is not an exaggeration). But after reading people who ought to know better raging online about how “the Barrel must be broken,” as if a fading restaurant chain has been taking notes on wokeness from the faculty of the Columbia University Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department, I have to at least settle one issue.
Cracker Barrel isn’t woke, it’s dying. The restaurant — which is publicly traded — has lost half its value over the past five years alone. I can summarize that even more grimly by quoting a friend of mine who happens to be a high-level branding expert: “Your grandma’s favorite restaurant is dying because your grandma likely already died herself several years ago.” The people who like Cracker Barrel “as it was” are a fading, aging demographic. The quality of service has dropped since the Covid era. Cultural mores and profit margins alike have shifted irrevocably toward an uncertain future in a sector (restaurant dining) that itself faces bleaker prospects than ever.
To you, “Cracker Barrel” may summon wonderful childhood road trip memories; for me, it is a line of grocery store cheeses. I was in my twenties before I even knew there was a restaurant associated with the name. The rebranded logo and restaurant spaces look objectively terrible to me, but then again I had no particular feelings about the original. I can only assure you that everything was not hunky-dory with the brand before evil woke scolds decided to take it over and upend it. The chain is in huge trouble, and something needs to change. This is probably not going to be the answer, but the one people always suggest (“just make the food and service better!”) costs actual money, which is something that dying chains in dying industries tethered to dying legacy brands tend to lack.
Those are the blunt commercial economics behind Cracker Barrel’s redesign. What they were doing quite simply was not working. It was a road to ruin, regardless of your nostalgic fondness for the way it was. They have to either change or die given new market realities; my guess is that they will die, or at least fade and shrink. Otherwise, I do not care about the rebrand until and unless they substitute “Uncle Herschel” with Dylan Mulvaney on their logo, at which point I’d have more to say.
Until next week.