A coffee shop in Largo, Florida, is making light of political division, but being ripped for fueling it, too.
Called Conservative Grounds, the shop sells "black coffee matters" shirts, Make America Great Again hats, and is weighing calling the decaf coffee "Sleepy Joe," The Washington Post reported.
"It's a place for conservatives to feel welcome," co-owner Cliff Gephart told Fox-13. "There's not going to be anyone throwing a drink in your face because you're wearing a MAGA hat."
Or so he hopes.
"Our community isn't as polarizing as this makes us seem," Dharma Kava Lounge owner Andrew Apted, who operates in the same strip mall in the Gulf Coast town between Clearwater and Tampa, told the Post. "It's dividing us over coffee of all things, and coffee shouldn't divide us because we all like coffee."
There are opportunties to take pictures with cardboard cutouts of President Donald Trump and first lady Melania.
"I don't feel like we're catering to one party," Gephart, the self-proclaimed Republican told the Post. "It's about a conservative lifestyle."
It is also about giving conservatives a place to have coffee, responding to the news last year police had made customers at an Arizona coffee shop uncomfortable, the Post reports.
"It's about respect for our police officers, for our law enforcement," Gephart told the Post.
But Apted argued it is a place seeking to scare away liberals.
"If they are pushing away liberals there, at the end of the day, they have built a safe space for people that share their ideology, only," he told the Post.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.