A Republican developer launched a new application to help conservatives find “safe” restaurants and stores where they can wear “Make America Great Again” hats in peace.
Oklahoma developer Scott Wallace launched “63red Safe” earlier this month, a Yelp-type app that bills itself as “an app to keep conservatives safe as they eat and shop.”
“Reviews of local restaurant and businesses from a conservative perspective, helping [ensure] you’re safe when you shop and eat!” reads the app's description on the Google Play store.
Wallace told The Washington Post he came up with the idea in November, when his son wanted to buy “one of those MAGA hats” but worried it would make them targets for harassment.
"I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right thing to do,’” he told The Post. “That was very uncomfortable for me. I don’t want to be a nation where putting Che Guevara on a T-shirt … or wearing a MAGA hat … makes you a target.”
Wallace soon launched the app, which allows users to evaluate restaurants and stores based on whether they “serve persons of every political belief,” “protect its customers if they are attacked for political reasons,” “avoid politics in its ads and social media postings,” and “allow legal concealed carry under this state’s laws.”
“The questions, as you read through them, are designed to be apolitical,” Wallace claimed, before adding, “The truth is, from a political standpoint — not talking religion or race or sexuality — conservatives are under physical attack.”
The app allows users to label establishments “safe” or “unsafe” based on those criteria. Among the restaurants labeled “unsafe” on the app is the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, which asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave last year.
Wallace told The Daily Beast that his biggest concern is “antifa.”
“I believe that, between now and 2020, we’re going to see the rise of the socialist goon squad,” Wallace told the outlet. “I think antifa was nothing compared between now and what’s coming in 2020. And I’m deeply concerned.”
Along with the review app, Wallace also launched a chat app and news aggregator for conservatives.
Wallace’s apps are among numerous attempts by Trump fans to create the very “safe spaces” for themselves that they decry progressives for seeking. Some of those attempts have gone worse than others.
Last year, a former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio launched an app called “Donald Daters,” a dating site for Trump supporters. On the first day of its launch, the app accidentally leaked the personal information of all its users. (Admittedly, that only amounted to 1,600 people.)
Another pro-Trump dating app, imaginatively dubbed Trump Dating, was found to feature countless fake profiles using photos of prominent celebrities. Its homepage launched with a stock photo of a convicted child rapist.
Conservatives have also launched Gab as an alternative safe space to Twitter, where many Trump supporters have been banned for espousing white nationalist views.
Gab has rapidly become a haven for white supremacists. It was where Robert Bowers, the white nationalist who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, ranted that Jews were the “enemy of the white people” before posting his final message prior to the massacre.
“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” he wrote on Gab. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
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