The Right Partner

The sister of Trump's ex-press secretary is launching a conservatives-only dating app

Hmm. I guess even with the FBI searching Mar-a-Lago for mishandled documents, Salman Rushdie being stabbed and the Inflation Reduction Act making it through the House of Representatives, it's a slow news week. Although I suppose a little click-bait never goes amiss in the news business.

Not that there isn't the kernel of an interesting news story here. While I don't find the involvement of Ryann McEnany (or the color of her jacket) in an announcement video for yet another niche dating site at all newsworthy, the idea that "The Right Stuff" is leaning into culture war issues could be something worth following up on. Granted, it seems that this is pet project of staff members of the former Trump Administration, and the money comes from Peter Thiel, so it's possible that this is more about politics than business. (After all, there is already a dating site called The Right Stuff - aimed at Ivy League and medical school students, graduates and faculty {because that could never go sideways...}.) But still, people are putting money, time and effort into the idea that single Conservative Americans care about having a site they can visit to perhaps meet people who firmly believe that there should only be two gender identities and that the pronouns used to refer to someone should be obvious. I don't know how many dating sites and/or mobile applications are out there. Forbes estimated some 8,000 back in 2013, 2,500 of those operating in the United States. Granted, a lot can change, and has changed, in 10 years. I'd be surprised to find that the 2,500 market participants in the United States holds true today, but even if the number has dropped to 1,500 as some newer estimates claim, that's still a lot of competition. So there's a fair chance that once the breathless coverage of this tenuously Trump-aligned site dies down, that the site itself dies with it.

But in the meantime, the idea that the conservative echo chamber needs another dating site (I refuse to believe that there aren't several already.) strikes me as something worth following up on. Because that, if anything, is the news story here. Granted, Peter Thiel seems to enjoy bankrolling Conservative causes, but a gay man putting money into an app that's "currently focused on heterosexual relationships" seems like it bears some discussion. Not out of the idea that Mr. Thiel is some sort of hypocrite, but in the sense that this exclusion is somehow important enough to the project to be necessary. After all, homosexual Republicans are nothing new, so it seems strange that they'd be so clearly sidelined in something like this. It speaks to who the American Right finds to be important to their chances, moving forward. It also speaks to the Right's embrace of a technology that it seems they'd have little time for. Are Conservative single people so thin on the ground that the traditional ways that people have met and courted over the years are now simply unworkable? That strikes me as unlikely. Daniel Huff, a staffer in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump Administration, said that Conservatives are "an important, underserved market." But it's not like people have been ignoring the idea that there's a market there.

And maybe that's why it's the click-baity celebrity-adjacent part of the story that's driving the coverage. The idea that some Conservatives are loudly complaining about how put upon and discriminated against they are is old news. So it doesn't drive coverage any more. But if that's not really worth taking note of, I'm not sure what part of this story is.