It can be unpopular to be right-wing at a restaurant. This doesn’t mean conservatives need an app to tell them what public spaces will accept their views.
Nevertheless, they have one: The new, free app 63red Safe allows conservatives to rate restaurants through four questions: “Does the business serve persons of every political belief? Will this business protect its customers if they are attacked for political reasons? Does this business allow legal concealed carry under this state’s laws? Does this business avoid politics in its ads and social media postings?”
The app’s description says that it helps “insure” — yes, that’s a typo — that “you’re safe when you shop and eat!”
Over the past year, Republicans haven’t exactly been popular in the public sphere. Press secretary Sarah Sanders and her family were kicked out of a Virginia restaurant last summer, and other well-known Republicans, such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife, have been heckled so much by protesters that they had to leave their dinner.
A California chef went viral in January for tweeting that he wouldn’t serve customers wearing “Make America Great Again” memorabilia. “It hasn’t happened yet,” J. Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote, “but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served, same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate.”
Despite this, conservatives are not particularly unsafe: Bigots across America target people of all ideologies and backgrounds.
This is exactly why conservatives are better off not trying to create their own list of safe spaces. It simply expands the culture of victimization they seem to hate so much.
Luckily, the app doesn’t even work. When I downloaded 63red Safe and looked up nearby restaurants, it never stopped searching. User reviews, most of them one star, reported the same. The app’s Twitter account defended the hiccup because the “servers are getting slammed.”
Without the app’s results, who knows if nearby businesses are safe for people with conservative beliefs? I guess we’ll have to be brave enough to go out and see for ourselves.
