New app sets out to help conservatives find ‘safe’ places to wear MAGA hats

Are you a conservative who is wary of dining out while wearing your red “Make America Great Again” hat? Do you wish you knew where you could freely sport a “Trump 2020” shirt while running errands? There’s an app for that. Earlier this month, an Oklahoma developer launched “63red Safe,” described as “an app to keep conservatives safe as they eat and shop.” The idea, according to founder Scott Wallace, is to “simply get these politics out of restaurants and businesses” — by gauging whether they would be friendly to conservatives.

“Reviews of local restaurant and businesses from a conservative perspective, helping (ensure that) you’re safe when you shop and eat!” reads the app’s description in the Google Play store.

Wallace, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, said he conceived of the idea in November, when he was out with his youngest child and considered buying “one of those MAGA hats.” Then he wondered whether it would make them targets for harassment, even in Oklahoma City.

Just a few months before, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had been asked to leave the Red Hen, a restaurant in western Virginia, because she worked for President Donald Trump, he noted.

“I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t the right thing to do,’ ” Wallace

told The Washington Post in a phone interview last week, talking about displaying his support for Trump. “That was very uncomfortable for me. I don’t want to be a nation where putting Che Guevara on a Tshirt … or wearing a MAGA hat … makes you a target.”

So he and two associates set out to develop something like a Yelp app, one that would evaluate establishments on four questions:

• Does this 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 questions, as you read through them, are designed to be apolitical,” Wallace said.

But he admits that the aim is ultimately to help identify whether businesses are “safe” for conservatives.

“The truth is, from a political standpoint — not talking religion or race or sexuality — conservatives are under physical attack,” Wallace said, citing an altercation in which a conservative activist was punched at UC Berkeley. “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. ... I want to call out those local businesses” where an attack against conservatives does or could manifest.

Wallace said the reviews will be crowdsourced and rely on “the honor and trustworthiness of the reviewers themselves,” much like Yelp does.

Wallace said he is ignoring the hate mail and “annoyed tweets” the company has received and is focusing on a bigger picture: creating apps under the “63red” umbrella aimed at younger conservatives so the brand can “be a factor in the 2020 elections, both at the local and national level.”

He also emphasized that there is no hidden message or conspiracy theory behind the app’s name, which he chose at random.

“Everyone asks. It means nothing at all, absolutely nothing,” he said. “It’s a goodlooking logo. It’s a unique name.”