Just in time for the War on Christmas, yet another dating app just for lonely Trump supporters is (supposedly) about to hit the market, and it’s just as awful as one would expect. Righter, according to its placeholder website, promises that it’s where “Right Minds Meet.” In an interview with the Daily Beast, of all places, the startup’s founder described one of the pivotal moments that led her to create the latest right-wing romance app.
Die-hard Trump supporter Christy Edwards Lawton was at a Manhattan party last year when she noticed a beautiful woman across the room.
The woman, who had “stunning” good looks, according to Lawton, seemed like someone who would have no trouble finding love. But she also had a surprising secret: she couldn’t find a boyfriend in New York City because she voted for Trump.
“I’m a Republican,” the woman whispered to Lawton, she recalled. “They don’t want me.”
Faced with romantic despair, Lawton saw opportunity.
That probably totally happened and isn’t made up at all.
Another pivotal moment for Lawton, she claims, was the unceremonious ejection of Trump mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, in June.
And thus Righter was born, catering to the involuntarily celibate supporters of the worst president in modern history! The app has a sparse internet presence, with Google results populated mostly by snarky articles dating back to October. The digital matchmaker, which tells right-wingers that they’ve been shunned on dating apps for their views, has also been promising to launch “soon”—since September.
It’s unclear what’s behind the delay, but it’s totally possible that the app has run into some issues with the name “Righter” itself, which has belonged to an arcade game app for several years.
Oops.
Righter’s social media accounts, which appear to be the entirety of its current marketing plan, are something to behold. Much has been said about their Twitter, so I journeyed elsewhere.
The Righter Instagram is a garbage fire, y’all. It features poorly captured (and cropped) clips from shows and movies featuring fictional characters who would never be caught dead dating a fictional Trump supporter. Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, who, on the show, campaigned for McGovern. The entire cast of Friends, who had kids out of wedlock and lived in sin! The most surprising clip, of course, is the “semen on the ear” scene from There’s Something About Mary, which follows a fairly graphic and entertaining masturbation scene.
Obviously an iconic clip but … the caption makes no damn sense.
“RIGHTER is launching with an unprecedented upgrade never before seen in a dating app…private, confidential access to top doctors in lifestyle health.”
Is it because Mary’s a doctor? Went right over my liberal snowflake skull.
Beyond the clips and a couple nods to Trump’s black friends, Righter’s Insta is packed with “romantic” generic images of (only white, only heterosexual) couples doing super normal straight white-people stuff, Righter’s social media team (whom I suspect is just Lawton) then ruins these relatively harmless stock photos with creepy captions and text overlays that just make you say, “Huh?”
This bland photo, likely intended to populate ads romanticizing debt, is cleverly captioned “Chivalry isn’t dead if you date conservatives.”
Other text choices simply make one say, “Eww.”
The couple that smells together stays together, of course.
That sounds like an ad for a regional burger chain, but okay.
And no app for Trump supporters would be complete without a tribute to the orange king of husbandly devotion, complete with head-scratching text.
Wait for it.
After that “leading” act of genius, it should be no surprise, then, that on the vast majority of Righter’s Insta posts, there’s one massive, glaring error: The word “conservatism” is misspelled.
Again, and again, and again. It’s unclear if that’s an error, or an attempt to reach potential clients where they are.
Probably the former, since “respects” is also misspelled. Also again, and again, and again.
Call me a liberal coastal elite, but I prefer people who know how to spell the political philosophy that guides them, and I swear it has nothing to do with that regional spelling bee I won in my youth and always find a way to bring up.
You can read more about the madness that is Righter, if you really want to, over at the Daily Beast. It has a lot of unique features, including a way for women to report men if they don’t pay for the first date, and a stone-serious promise to sue liberals who try to sneak their way into the app!
“I have a very nice legal team that will be handling that,” Lawton said. “This is zero tolerance.”
Ahhh. A “very nice legal team” to keep out the leftists. That explains where the ad budget went.
Best of luck, Team Righter, if that remains your real name! You certainly can’t do any worse than Donald Daters, which, upon its unsuccessful launch in October, was quickly discovered to have leaked all of its red-hat-wearing users’ data.