Ed Coper

What was the upshot of this?

Did Cracker Barrel back down?

They backed down.

They made a grovelling apology to the White House, thanking Donald Trump for his feedback.

They deleted the Pride page from their website.

And much more worryingly, they lost about $150 million worth of market value because of the criticism and because of the storm.

So it had a material impact on the business that not only kind of make them

poke their head back in the shell like a turtle, but it also sends this chilling message to any other company in America, and they're not the only ones who face this outrage.

And it always ends the same way, that the outrage wins a complete victory and reason hides its head and bows to outrage.

Tell me how that unfolded.

This is a really brilliant example.

So first of all, if we depart from social media outrage for a second and talk about science, the science says that having household gas actually emits toxic gases into your household that are very dangerous to breathe.

Now, we should have a policy debate about what we do.

Now that we have this scientific information, how do we protect kids?

How do we protect everyone from something that might be poisonous?

Unfortunately, in this day and age, it's very hard to do so when you can whip up social media into a frenzy.

So the Consumer Product Safety Commission, they just mentioned it in an offhand comment in an interview with Bloomberg that they're going to look into it.

And this is enough to trigger the outrage machine.

All of a sudden, you have celebrity chefs taping themselves to their stoves saying, come and take it.

You have Charlton Heston with the NRA, from my cold dead hand, come and take my gun.