A. S. Hamrah is this magazine’s film critic and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 and the forthcoming Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025 . Before he was a full-time film critic, Hamrah worked as a semiotic brand analyst. In 2007, n+1 published “ The Haunting of Payless ,” an interview between Hamrah and Emily Votruba about Payless ShoeSource, which had just ditched its old logo. Hamrah compared the rebrand to Lipton Tea’s, in which that brand’s avatar, the British yachtsman Sir Thomas J. Lipton, had been relegated to a small corner of the company’s packaging. Last week, another rebrand kicked up a controversy, one much stupider and more haunted than anything Payless has done. After Cracker Barrel—the highway restaurant chain, biscuit emporium, and “old country store”—removed a drawing of a Thomas Lipton–ish old man from its logo, right-wing commentators, including Donald Trump, went after the brand for kowtowing to an imaginary DEI regime.…