Trump supporters are feeling under attack lately. The iconic “Make America Great Again” hats worn by supporters of the President have been compared to Ku Klux Klan hoods. Some have alleged that they are being attacked when they go out to eat, and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in rural Virginia. Now, they’re looking for safe spaces where they can express their political views in peace.
It turns out, there’s an app for that.
The app 63red Safe was hailed by “Fox & Friends” hosts as “a Yelp for conservatives” after it launched earlier this month. According to company founder Scott Wallace, the idea is to “get politics out of restaurants and businesses” – but it does so by testing whether or not a restaurant allows concealed carry weapons and would protect customers who are attacked for political reasons.
“The best way to describe it, to me, is there’s sort of a general unease among conservatives right now. And whether it’s real or imagined, I don’t know,” Wallace said.
Reviews featured on the app are crowdsourced and rely on “the honor and trustworthiness of the reviewers themselves,” as is the case with other review sites (such as Yelp). After being featured on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, interest in the app spiked so much that the “63red” servers crashed. The company originally blamed Facebook (which is the source of the app’s location data).
“Apparently ‘Doing business while #conservative’ is a real thing,” the company stated in a tweet. “Thanks to Facebook, where we get our location info, 63red Safe can’t get any data. Our sincere apologies while we call Congress and try to break up this tech monopoly.”
Though the tweet was later deleted, Wallace still believes there are those at tech companies such as Facebook who may try to sabotage the app.
“Here’s how I view this,” Wallace told the Washington Post. “There’s Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft … at every one of these companies, there are ‘low-level functioners,’ people who have the levers and switches to get things done but aren’t up there in the vice presidential level.” Wallace went on to state that he believes that many tech companies have “socialist embeds” who use their positions to actively sabotage conservatives.
Currently on Google Play, the 63red Safe app has a rating of 2.1 out of 5 stars, with 272 total reviews, many of which appear to be fake (both positive and negative).
63red Safe isn’t the only “safe space” launched for Trump supporters recently. In October 2018, Emily Moreno launched DonaldDaters, a dating app for young conservatives. “For many young Trump supporters, liberal intolerance has made meeting and dating nearly impossible,” she said in a statement. “Support for the president has become a dealbreaker instead of an icebreaker. That’s why we need a new platform for Trump supporters to meet people without being afraid of talking politics.”
The app is free for both Apple and Android devices and has an option for people to block users they believe are liberals secretly trolling.
Jenn Bentley is a writer and editor originally from Cadiz, Kentucky. Her writing has been featured in publications such as The Examiner, The High Tech Society, FansShare, Yahoo News, and others. When she’s not writing or editing, Jenn spends her time raising money for Extra Life and advocating for autism awareness.
