The moment absolutely nobody had been waiting for has finally arrived: The Right Stuff has launched. What fresh hell is this, you ask. It’s a new conservative dating app that promises to let you “view profiles without pronouns” and “connect with people who aren’t offended by everything”. Despite this all being very predictable stuff, the app has been getting a lot of attention for three reasons: 1) the ads are unintentionally hilarious, 2) it was co-founded by former Trump administration officials and Ryann McEnany, the sister of former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, is the app’s spokesperson; 3) creepy Trump-loving billionaire Peter Thiel, who has been called “the most important person in Silicon Valley”, has invested $1.5m into the project.
It’s that last bit that I find fascinating. The money isn’t much for a guy like Thiel, but it’s still an investment; I’d love to know what he sees in the app. He certainly doesn’t see an opportunity to use it himself: Thiel is gay and The Right Stuff currently only caters for heterosexuals. It’s also hard to imagine he sees a robust business model spearheaded by tech-savvy geniuses. While The Right Stuff has only just launched, it has, in the grand tradition of anything remotely connected to Trump, immediately run into legal problems. Turns out there is already another dating service, set up a long time ago, called The Right Stuff (targeted at graduates of elite universities) which is reportedly planning to send a cease-and-desist letter to the new iteration. “There are a lot of other really good rightwing names that they could choose,” the founder of the original Right Stuff, Dawne Touchings, complained to the Daily Beast. “They are very smart; I am sure they could come up with something!”
They could certainly come up with something sounding a little less Nazi-like. As well as being attached to another dating service, The Right Stuff is the name of a notorious neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying blog – a detail that you’d expect the founders of a new dating service – or someone investing £1.5m in an app – would make it their business to find out.
Nazi associations and possible trademark infringements aside, perhaps Thiel thought the app was worth backing because a conservative-only dating platform is a never-been-done-before innovative business idea? That’s hard to believe, because there have been tons of rightwing dating apps. In the past few years we’ve seen services such as Righter, Patrio, Dating Freedom Lovers, Awake Dating, Donald Daters, Conservatives Only, Trump Singles and Trump Dating promise to help rightwingers find love. (I actually joined Trump Dating myself in 2018, in service of this column, to see if a dashing fascist could redpill me, but I did not find love – just a hopeless place.) Anyway, apart from Awake Dating, which is targeted at conspiracy theorists or, as the site’s COO likes to phrase it, the “early adopter of inconvenient truth”, none of these services exist any more. They all failed miserably.
This time, founders of The Right Stuff want you to know, it’s different. “What we’re doing has really not been done before,” Daniel Huff, a Trump White House adviser and co-founder of the app told the Hill. “No one has built a high-quality, properly funded app with a dedicated team.” I would love to have tested this thesis out for myself but you can only join The Right Stuff with an invite and nobody has invited me. It seems that The Right Stuff are keen to keep liberals far away from the site.
You can’t trust liberals you see. According to Huff, The Right Stuff is much needed because, “Liberals own the education, media corporations, and we can’t let them control our personal relationships.” Which is a hilarious thing to say considering the conservative supermajority on the US supreme court is now doing all it can to control people’s personal relationships. Now that it’s overturned access to abortion, there are strong signs the right is coming for same-sex marriage and birth control. I don’t know exactly why Thiel invested in The Right Stuff, but I do know this: the right is busy trying to control everything other people do while clamouring for safe spaces of its own.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
