The answer is that they look mostly like every other dating app, just with shittier functionality, fewer people, and more selfies of men posing with assault rifles.

Similar to how cable and streaming have fragmented the viewing audience into hundreds of different channels and online options, the market for dating help has become just as segmented. Match.com, Tinder, eHarmony, and OkCupid go after everyone and allow the user to filter out and pare things down by swiping left or right; Farmersonly.com, JDate, and BlackPeopleMeet.com targeting people based on lifestyle, racial, and ethnic demographics that some people find the most important aspect in an intimate partner. And there are a whole host of reasons people reject others. Bumble introduced a filtering feature that allows its users to reject potential matches based on their astrological sign. But the rise of dating options based on personal ideology is a reflection of both segmented marketing and the polarization of the public in a time of political strife.

Recent polling found 45% of Democrats saying they would be unhappy if their child married a Republican, while 35% percent of Republicans felt they would be unhappy if their child married a Democrat. Compare this to 1960, when only 4% of Republicans and Democrats said they would be displeased if their son or daughter married someone of the opposite party. A survey of its users by OkCupid in 2017 found that 83% thought how someone feels about Donald Trump was important, and 74% felt that support of Donald Trump was a dealbreaker in dating. This has led to conservatives claiming they’re being discriminated against.

In recent years, a crop of conservative dating startups have launched in response to this phenomenon, all with one purpose: giving right-wingers a safe space to find love. Some, like Righter and Conservatives Only, are only for, well, conservatives. Others, like Donald Daters — tagline: Make America Date Again — claim they’re open to people of all political stripes who are interested in dating Republicans … Some of the people behind these conservative apps think liberals who refuse to date conservatives are doing something more destructive than looking for partners who share their values. To them, it amounts to anti-conservative discrimination.

Emily Moreno, the founder of Donald Daters, told me she once had a date walk out on her “before the drinks had even arrived” after she said she had worked on a Republican Senate campaign — and that was before Trump got elected.

“I continue to hear these stories from my friends about how when they’re on these standard dating apps, they’re always told they won’t get a first date. It’s right there in the bio,” she said, referring to the seemingly ubiquitous “Trump supporters swipe left.”

Among the options for lonely partisans looking for love:

• Trump.Dating, DonaldDaters, and TrumpSingles.com are all advertised explicitly to Cult 45 members, with slogans such as “Make America Date Again.” TrumpSingles.com claims more than 45,000 members. Trump.Dating wants people who are seeking to "deport liberals from your love life." It also excludes any possible gay conservatives out there by making the only choices for registration “straight woman” and “straight man.” The site also gets weirdly specific about European identity, with “Scandinavian/Mediterranean/Eastern European/Western European” being thrown around as possible backgrounds.
• ConservativesOnly.com was started during the Obama administration as “the ultimate dating and friend finder for like-minded people.” The right-wing app Patrio was started for “conservative, patriotic singles.”
• For a time, there was a Bernie Singles site, which had slogans such as "Meet other people who understand the world" and "The 1 percent aren't the only ones getting screwed this election season." The site seems to have gone bye-bye, but there is a new beta.

Even eHarmony, which was once known as a more conservative Christian-oriented site, has become more mainstream in recent years. It has the same number of Christian users as non-Christian users, according to its chief executive officer, Grant Langston. But like OkCupid, eHarmony has seen the number of users willing to date people of other political stripes shrink dramatically.

“I think there is some debate as to whether it is even possible, now, to mix people who are passionate about politics and on different sides of the fence,” he said. “Over the last year, our users have gone to great lengths to call out their political stripes in their profiles, and they are doing that as a way of saying, ‘If you don’t agree with me, let’s not communicate.’ So, putting people into one large pool may not be doing much to break down walls among the politically dedicated.”

One of the newest of these dating apps/sites appealing to conservatives is Righter. Founded by Christy Edwards Lawton, after she claimed to have met a “beautiful” woman at a Republican fundraiser in Manhattan who stated that the only men who wanted her were those who wanted her for sex, and that being a conservative was a detriment to finding someone who wanted a relationship. Lawton also states that the Righter app was launched after research into Tinder profiles in which, from sea to shining sea, there were messages saying, “Trump voters swipe left.”

Righter is specifically intended to be used only by conservatives, to the point that Lawton has threatened to sue any liberals who use the service when it launched late last year, while also marketing Righter with a stream of offensive messages meant to appeal to the people who’ve spent the past four years supporting offensive things and people.

Here’s a scene which hits a little too close to home from the just-ended Veep, depicting the future 49th vice president of the United States, Jonah Ryan (Timothy Simons):



The criteria for what qualifies as a "screw up" can be very subjective, but I would posit it’s any action or event said or done by a politician, a campaign, interest group, or media personality which:

• Seriously contributed to a politician or party losing an election, or a journalist or pundit losing their job.
• Seriously damaged a person's ability to move upward and onward in politics, on television, or to be read and taken seriously on the internet or print.
• Damaged the public image of a person, their political party, the institution they work for, or the ideology they advocate.

The sad part is there have been people who have said and done some really stupid, gross, objectionable things and have never been held to account for it. Some are even president right now.

This is because not all gaffes and mistakes are created equal. It can be argued that some are fair, and some aren't. And most of them are creations of media perceptions, or tactics that backfire spectacularly. Mistakes and gaffes usually come from malice, stupidity, or just plain bad luck. And the difference can be in the spinning at making mountains out of molehills.

The statements made by politicians run the gamut from ignorant and stupid to vile. Some even make one question whether representative democracy really is the best form of government we could have.

• “He said that he agreed with what Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearing, in which he said it was settled law.”
  • —Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), explaining why she thinks now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will not threaten Roe v. Wade
• “First of all, it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer.”
  • —Former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), attempting to mitigate his infidelity and having a child with his mistress and campaign staffer, which came to light during the 2008 campaign as his wife was dying from cancer
• “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.”
  • —Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), responding with his infamous “man on dog” answer to a question of whether homosexuality should be outlawed
• “The internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
  • —Former Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK), explaining the workings of the internet during a debate on net neutrality
• ''Well, let's see. There's — of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but —''
  • —Former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AL), unable to name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with other than Roe v. Wade, during an infamous interview with Katie Couric
• “(I have) a wide stance.”
  • —Former Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), explaining to his arresting officer why he was playing footsie in a Minneapolis airport bathroom
• “I do not support a livable wage.”
  • • —Congresswoman Karen Handel (R-GA), explaining her opposition to raising the minimum wage

  

• “Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth ...There isn't one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle … And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the Earth.”
  • —Former Congresswoman (and idiot) Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), explaining her opposition to measures meant to combat climate change
• "His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being—you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don't even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it."
  • —Donald Trump, arguing it was possible Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was the second gunman on the grassy knoll​​​​​​​
• "I think incest can be handled as a family matter within the family. The people know about it and they can get more serious about it. But I don't think it's rape because of the awareness of it within the family."
  • —Former Congressman Jay Dickey (R-AR), explanation to an El Dorado, Arkansas, Rotary Club audience as to his reasoning about the incest exception for abortions
• “But one of the things I’ve talked to the secretary of agriculture about: Why don’t you have the kids pay a dime, pay a nickel to instill in them that there is, in fact, no such thing as a free lunch? Or maybe sweep the floor of the cafeteria — and yes, I understand that that would be an administrative problem, and I understand that it would probably lose you money. But think what we would gain as a society in getting people—getting the myth out of their head that there is such a thing as a free lunch.”
  • ​​​​​​​—Former Congressman (and current TV pundit) Jack Kingston (R-GA), explaining why poor kids have it too good getting a government-provided meal
• “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
  • —Former Congressman Todd Akin, defending his position of no abortion exceptions on the grounds of rape by claiming women who are truly raped don’t get pregnant
• “We will never be able to win in the clash of civilizations if we don’t know who we are. If Western civilization succumbs to the siren song of multiculturalism, I believe we are finished.”
  • —Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), expressing white nationalist sentiments which have become much more (visibly) popular within the Republican party since his failed presidential campaign​​​​​​​
• “Some of them are valedictorians—and their parents brought them in. It wasn't their fault. It's true in some cases, but they aren't all valedictorians. They weren't all brought in by their parents. For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” ​​​​​
  • ​​​​​​​​—Congressman Steve King (R-IA), explaining his opposition and racist mental calculus to questions about the DREAM Act in an interview

For the last half-century, the news media has done and said things of equal stupidity at varying times. Any criticism of their divine right to crack dumb in between reading off a teleprompter invariably engenders a response wherein pundits wrap themselves in the flag, use the First Amendment as a shield, and argue the nobility of purpose in screaming “but her emails!” while occasionally giving free airtime to a megalomaniacal fool.

Among some of the dumbest things said by pundits and media personalities, and just remember all of these people are paid thousands, if not millions, for their insights and analysis:

• “No objective evidence Empire was ‘evil.’ A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit.”
  • ​​​​​​​—Bill Kristol, defending the honor of Emperor Palpatine (a.k.a. Darth Sidious) and the Galactic Empire
• “My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be.”
  • —Chris Cillizza, explaining why he doesn’t get hung up on facts and truth
• “I didn't hear the president demean women when he was running for president. Didn’t hear it.”
  • —Paris Dennard, defending Donald Trump against accusations of sexual misconduct, with Dennard himself being suspended months later when his own past of sexual misconduct came to light
• "If you've ever seen the X-Men movies, you know they're about a group of mutants who are the next wave of human evolution. They've got special powers, and if left unchecked they will eventually wipe out humanity as we know it. That's how I feel about Mormons."
  • —Meghan McCain, showing she’s as ignorant about Marvel characters and Mormons as she is about everything else
• “I’m still on my parents’ health insurance.”
  • • —Tomi Lahren, said by the then 24-year-old conservative Fox News contributor moments after criticizing Obamacare, which is what enabled her to remain on her parents’ health insurance until she’s 26.

• “Now look, I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes. Well—I'm not saying that he—I'm not not saying that either. God— what God does is God's business, I have no idea. But I'll tell you this: whether you call it Gaia or whether you call it Jesus—there's a message being sent. And that is, "Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it." I'm just sayin'.”
  • —Glenn Beck, trying to say what he wants to say without sounding like he’s saying it, because on some level he knows how batshit nuts he sounds​​​​​​​ saying it
• “You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, so long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.”
  • —Rush Limbaugh, not understanding what rape means​​​​​​​
• “Sometimes in life you just have to keep walking ... Some things in life need to be mysterious.”
  • —Peggy Noonan, explaining why it was best not to know about torture perpetrated by the Bush administration​​​​​​​
• “My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama … I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Rev. Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.”
  • —Mark Halperin, explaining why he thought John McCain not being able to answer a question about how many homes he owned was actually good news for McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign
• “How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you've made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don't know, marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common the more cohesive they are? Do you get along better with your neighbors or your co-workers if you can't understand each other or share no common values?”
  • —Tucker Carlson, revealing how insular and limited his life must have been to this point, since I get along with my neighbors because they’re kind people, not because of what color they are or the God they worship
• “To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.”
  • —Bret Stephens, in which the current New York Times columnist argues the problem with Europe is its lacking in defending Christian values from outsiders​​​​​​​

At least at present, Smollet maintains his story. But as the scrutiny about Smollet’s story has increased, the number of cracks in his version of events has become bigger and bigger as unnamed sources and rumors have dominated the news. Conservative media has latched onto this incident as an example of “fake news,” reporters and activists jumping to conclusions because of a bias against everything Trump, and a reason why Republicans will not believe reports of Trump’s lies and abuses. Similar to how some conservatives interpret the meaning of Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities as being about a “palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial” to answer for cultural sins, it is now a certainty within right-wing circles that Smollet’s allegations are not only not true, but evidence which discounts all allegations of this sort. Because, as we all know, truth and the facts have mattered so much to conservatives over the years.

Let’s accept as a given there’s something to be said in examining evidence before believing every story, and that if Smollet is lying his actions are both deeply repugnant and extremely damaging to other victims. Maybe this should give the media and blogs pause in drawing broad conclusions about what things mean until some facts are known and established, since it only hands ammunition to these pricks if the story turns out to have holes.

However, let’s also examine this hypocritical bullshit for what it’s worth.



As Doctor House said: “Everybody lies.” The extent and severity of those lies among individuals, and the context in which they’re told, distinguish them. Lies which waste resources that could be used for real crimes, make it harder for real victims to be believed, and done for someone's own personal aggrandizement should be sharply condemned and severely punished.

However, just because there are more than enough lies to go around, and too many horrible people telling them, doesn’t invalidate the concept of objective truth or mean the issues which surround them are imvalidated. It does not mean because one can point at mistakes, silly demagogues, and awful charlatans that reality becomes whatever one wants to believe it is and there are no real victims

Beyond this basic common sense there’s the fact this criticism and rationalizing might have more weight if it wasn’t coming from a group of lying hypocrites. The same people who claim to be the victims of bias and half-truths are the one who put their faith in a liar as their champion. And not only a simple liar: a liar who lies about everything every day, that they then lie to protect.

EVERY. GODDAMN. DAY.

From Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

From their point of view … It reveals a culture where white men are acceptable targets of hate who deserve no sympathy and no due process, and where the left-wing mob wields tremendous power through its command of the public sphere.

That view connects to a broader assumption shared by many conservatives: that white Christian men are a persecuted minority in modern America.

To non-conservatives, this sounds absurd. White men are the country’s most powerful and privileged citizens. The party they dominate currently controls two and a half branches of government, and they sit in a disproportionate number of powerful seats in the private sector. But in this argument, conservatives follow a maxim generally attributed to the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart: “Politics is downstream from culture.” By this, Breitbart meant that the balance of power in day-to-day politics is determined, in the long run, by the cultural ideas that shape the way people approach politics.

With liberal elites largely in charge of the country’s entertainment and higher education, in the Breitbart-conservative view, that means they control the commanding heights in our society.

The concept of white men being the persecuted in America largely comes down to being told they’re wrong, or freaking out over nothing when they're told it's something by the right-wing outrage machine. And within the “commanding heights,” whether it be scientists, Hollywood, the media, or Democrats, calling stupid ideas stupid has somehow become “elitist” and evidence of bias. It’s one of the most bitter ironies that the people who bitch and moan about political correctness and wear shirts saying “fuck your feelings” are the ones whining about respect whenever a TV show or movie has a story which steps on their toes, or a science article actually advocates … you know, science which goes against one of their beliefs.

It’s as if we are trying to placate children who want people to hold their hands and play along while they wish really hard for unicorns to be real.

From Reeeves Wiedeman at New York Magazine:

After work one day in January 2007, Scott McConnell left his office at the magazine The American Conservative in Arlington, Virginia, and walked to a nearby Thai restaurant that was hosting a panel discussion about the Duke lacrosse scandal… McConnell and his magazine had largely ignored the scandal; identity politics weren’t top of mind for conservative media then, and most outlets weren’t especially interested in defending a group of rich jocks who had hired a stripper. But by January, the case was imploding. The accuser had changed her story more than half a dozen times, one of the players had a well-documented alibi, and DNA tests found no match with any member of the team, a fact the prosecutors initially hid from the defense. McConnell was reminded of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about 1980s New York in which an overzealous prosecutor, the media, and the city’s liberal elite rushed to condemn an innocent white man accused of killing a black man. “There was this palpable yearning among the liberal establishment for guilty white people they could put on trial,” McConnell said, of the lacrosse case.

McConnell and one of his editors, Michael Dougherty, went to the Thai restaurant panel hoping to find someone to write about the case. They knew most of the speakers — an economics professor, an editor at the WashingtonTimes, a men’s-rights blogger — but their talks were so boilerplate that neither McConnell nor Dougherty could recall much about them. The fourth speaker, however, was a Ph.D. candidate in Duke’s history department who delivered a blistering critique of the Duke faculty’s rush to prejudgment. “Scott and I both thought, Here’s a young guy, he presents himself well, and his talk was the most interesting of the night,” Dougherty said recently. “God, I hate to think that we were part of creating this.”

Richard Spencer, the fourth speaker, is now America’s most famous self-identified white nationalist. “In this funny chain of events, the Duke lacrosse case changed the course of my career,” Spencer told me recently. “My life would not have taken the direction it did absent the Duke lacrosse case.” The speech at the Thai restaurant — “Ironic, isn’t it?” he said — pushed him from an academic track toward a more activist one. McConnell commissioned Spencer to write a piece for The American Conservative about the case, and, by the end of the semester, Spencer had dropped out of school to work at the magazine full-time. A year later, he coined the term “alt-right.” … It not only launched Spencer’s career, but that of White House adviser Stephen Miller, too. On the morning of Spencer’s talk at the Thai restaurant, Miller — who was then a senior at Duke — published a column in the student newspaper titled “A Portrait of Radicalism,” just a few days after he appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to chastise Duke’s faculty. Donald Trump didn’t have much to say about the scandal at the time; he hadn’t yet joined Twitter and was devoting his cable-news appearances to his simmering feud with Rosie O’Donnell. But Miller seemed interested in little else. He had become known to some at Duke as the “Miller Outrage Machine” for his willingness to take controversial stands in his biweekly “Miller Time” column, which he wrote for the campus newspaper as a way, he says, to “defend the idea of America.”

This sort of behavior is also present in conservative women. Recent research and ponderings attempting to identify why white women support Republicans and conservative policies more than their non-white sisterhood have largely explained the difference through gender roles and subservience to their partners. For example, during the recent hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Republican women (who are for the most part white) were the only demographic among which support for Kavanaugh increased as the process went along.

Why is that?

Republican women are “loyal to party” rather than caring about any criticisms about sexism, threats to women’s rights, or discrimination against females as a group. Taking all of this into account, conservative women seem to interpret criticisms of Republicans and conservative interests as a larger part of the believed victimization of (white) America.

For instance, in 2008, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin set the example of the strong Republican woman who could raise five children, maintain a professional career, and hold her own in the combative world of politics. She called herself a “hockey mom” and “Mama Grizzly” who would protect her cubs at any cost.

During the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Donald Trump provided a culturally acceptable “out” along these lines for conservative women who wanted to support the Republican judge but worried that doing so might be seen as a betrayal of female survivors of sexual assault.

Despite the fact that studies conducted in the past 12 years indicate that false reporting for sexual crimes is rare, Trump constructed an imaginary choice, urging Americans to protect their sons against “false accusations” by women. Pretending to be a wrongly accused son about to lose his job, he said, plaintively, “Mom, what do I do? What do I do?”

Republican women who wanted to support Kavanaugh could stand firm in their roles as mothers and, just like Palin’s “Mama Grizzly,” fiercely protect their cubs (sons), in this case against “false accusations.”

Now, whether these points explain Republican women’s behavior is a matter of debate. But the central problem with all of this is hypocrisy.

I can’t feel sorry for someone who thinks I'm their victimizer just because I ask them to treat people fairly. Why should I reach out to people who think I’m a demon because I’m a Democrat and I vote for people who have a (D) next to their name? The reason many of us feel antipathy to the point of outrage is because the other side is wrong. We know they’re wrong, and they piss on our feet and call us liars for saying it’s not rain. We know they’re wrong, and they enjoy the suffering their wrongness causes. And then they believe themselves to be victims? If it causes “libtard” tears, then it must be good for some of these nuts.

So ... sympathy for these sons of bitches for feeling persecuted? Never.