Americana

The online roots of the conservative ‘ZYNsurrection’

THE NEWS

This was not Chuck Schumer’s first skirmish with nicotine. The Senate Majority Leader had stopped cigarettes from being shipped in the mail, expanded the FDA’s power to regulate tobacco, and warned that flavored e-cigarettes were being marketed to minors. On Wednesday, Schumer took aim at nicotine pouches, asking the FDA to investigate the popular brand ZYN.

“It comes in a whole lot of flavors,” Schumer explained. “Smooth, spearmint, citrus, cinnamon, chilled. It’s dangerous.”

Within hours, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “ZYNsurrection.” North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, who leads the House GOP’s campaign committee, posed with a ZYN pack and dared “big brother” to “come and take it,” interpolating an old Texas slogan; Georgia Rep. Mike Collins turned that into a meme. Florida Rep. Michael Waltz told Schumer to “close the border,” if he cared so much about young people; fentanyl was a threat, not nicotine salt in plant-based pouches, dissolving in users’ mouths.

“If Sen. Schumer proceeds with this bad policy, voters will be mobilized, and there will be consequences,” said Tim Andrews, the director of consumer research at Americans for Tax Reform. ATR had tangled with Democrats over nicotine bans before; its advocacy for the vaping industry may have helped Republicans in 2016, and helped stall a proposed, Trump-era flavored vape rule.

“It shouldn’t be a political issue,” Andrews added, pointing out that Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman had pre-emptively opposed any ZYN restrictions.

Republicans are much more engaged in the issue now, attacking on two fronts: Health and culture. The Philip Morris-owned brand, they say, is a “life-saving” alternative to smoking, akin to nicotine gum, without the clear cancer risks of cigarettes. Schumer, wrote a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was “about to make a lot of people single issue Republican voters.”

The culture war angle played out primarily in conservative media. Why would Schumer, or any Democrat, want to restrict access to nicotine? Why had they cracked down on menthols and piled on “sin taxes,” while supporting legal marijuana, an issue the Majority Leader has eagerly embraced? (Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“They’re promoting weed to your children but they’re not letting you use tobacco or even non-tobacco nicotine delivery devices, which don’t cause cancer,” Tucker Carlson told viewers in a 2020 Fox News monologue. “Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind, and THC makes you compliant and passive. That’s why.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Democrats, who generally try to avoid conservative media influencers, might not have known how popular ZYN had become in that space. There, it’s seen not as a vice, but as a work-enhancer — addictive, but well worth the trade-off. It fits in with a broader class of medically questionable supplements, dietary fads, and brain-boosters that have become tightly associated with right-wing and wellness podcasts in recent years.

“They fear a society when a man wakes up in the morning, drinks black coffee, pops a cool mint upper decky, and takes on the world,” said Greg Price, the communications director at the State Freedom Caucus Network. “A man with nicotine, protein, caffeine, and creatine coursing through his veins is an unstoppable force. Imagine if Joe Biden had a couple smooth sixes that he took every day. Maybe he’d know where to walk when he finished his speeches.”

ZYN is the dominant brand in the American nicotine pouch market, which moved hundreds of millions of units last year. It’s also Carlson’s choice, a fact that’s turned on more conservatives. The most influential right-wing pundit in America urged podcaster Theo Von to take ZYN (“once you try this, you’re going to get a lot richer”) and posed with the “world’s largest ZYN” after the Nelk Boys, popular prank YouTubers, lowered it from a helicopter.

“The volume of nicotine in here could save the world,” joked Carlson, who’s signed ZYN packs for fans.

This was the fandom Schumer tangled with on Wednesday — people who’ve kicked smoking by switching to pouches, and people who see dark motives in any nicotine crackdown. Progressives, said the Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles this week, “want to encourage people to be passive and lazy and dumb.” Demonizing or restricting access to nicotine, while supporting popular marijuana legalization measures, gave the game away.

“I’m not the prime minister of ZYNdia. I’m not even the mayor of ZYNcinatti,” Knowles told viewers on Wednesday. “But I’ve popped in a nice little lip pilly every now and again, and it’s amazing. I think that’s actually what neuralink will feel like — it feels like you’re just taking an electrical charge and plugging it into your brain stem.”

There is, of course, a class element to tobacco culture that also helps drive the current political arguments around policy. As president, Donald Trump faced an intense industry campaign to back off an announced crackdown on youth vaping that Republicans warned could alienate their newly expanded blue-collar base. That may have helped convince one FDA commissioner to resign (he denied it), and a limited ban on flavored vapes was announced later in Trump’s presidency that partially incorporated industry concerns. This month, a conservative group is experimenting with ads aimed at Black voters in South Carolina that tie Biden to a proposed menthol cigarette ban (which the White House notably delayed a decision on in December).

The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a question about Schumer’s rollout, but Grover Norquist, who mobilized vapers in Trump-era “vape the vote” campaigns, said that Democrats targeting ZYN would turn out voters who wanted to be left alone.

“I’ve been in states where the vapers are showing up to stop a bill, and it’s like the home schoolers showing up, in droves,” said Norquist. “I can’t do that with taxpayers.”

THE VIEW FROM PHILIP MORRIS INTERNATIONAL

The conservative and Republican embrace of ZYN helped build instant opposition to Schumer, and the nicotine industry financially supports some conservative think tanks. But on the record, ZYN’s manufacturer isn’t courting this stuff.

“Our marketing practices — which prohibit the use of social media influencers — are focused on preventing underage access and set the benchmark for the industry,” the company said in a statement. “Real-world evidence shows this approach is working: the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA show oral nicotine pouch use by those under the legal age remains exceptionally low.”

NOTABLE

• In the New York Times, Dani Blum talks to public health officials about the unknown risks of nicotine, which “aren’t yet clear. The pouches may contain other carcinogens.”
• On Breaking Points, Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti wondered what exactly Schumer was doing with his press conference; “this idea that they’re being targeted towards children seems ridiculous to me,” said Enjeti.

New Hampshire. Republicans broke their turnout record on Tuesday, with nearly 325,000 votes cast in the race between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley. That helped the party flip a Democratic seat in the closely split state House, giving the GOP a little room. But it ran slightly behind Secretary of State David Scanlan’s turnout projection, while Democratic turnout greatly surpassed the 88,000 votes he’d expected.

Nearly 125,000 New Hampshire voters showed up to deliver an easy write-in victory for Joe Biden. As of Friday morning, the president had won nearly 80,000 votes, or 64% of all ballots cast. He ran especially strong in places where most voters had college degrees — the wealthier towns in Hillsborough County, the liberal towns along the seacoast. Dean Phillips held one of his biggest rallies in Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, but Biden carried 79% of the vote there.

Louisiana. Republicans signed off on a new, court-ordered map that would give the state a second majority-Black seat at the expense of Rep. Garret Graves, whose current district encircles the city of Baton Rouge. Graves has until July 19 to file for re-election, either in his re-shaped seat or in the neighboring district won in 2021 and 2022 by GOP Rep. Julia Letlow.

Texas. Donald Trump and 25 Republican governors backed Gov. Greg Abbott, as he ordered the placement of new razor wire to stop migrants from crossing over from Mexico. The Biden administration had triumphed in the Supreme Court, which ruled (without further explanation) that it could remove barriers set up by Texas. Just one Republican governor didn’t side with Abbott – Vermont’s Phil Scott.

Nikki Haley for President, “Nikki Haley Delivers.” Before polls closed in New Hampshire, Haley’s campaign went on the air in her home state with two South Carolina-specific ads. One positioned her as the race’s only non-geriatric option, with Palmetto roots. This spot focuses more on her six years as governor, which ended in 2016, represented by an old news clip about job growth and a montage of Haley media hits — ground-breakings, fighting the Obama administration over immigration, vetoing pieces of state budgets.

Schiff for Senate, “I Know.” Adam Schiff’s cash advantage in California’s U.S. Senate race was built by one issue: His pursuit of Donald Trump. He’s got the resources (tens of millions of dollars on hand) to both remind Democratic voters of that and introduce himself as a person to northern California progressives and other voters who don’t know him as well, or don’t like him. This bio spot avoids Trump entirely to focus on David McMillan, a screenwriter who Schiff mentored in the Big Brother program. “I’m a little biased,” says McMillan, promising that he’ll make Californians proud.

Even before voting had finished in New Hampshire, and before he’d won, Donald Trump was casting aspersions on the state’s semi-open primary. It was unfair, he said, that so many non-Republicans were crossing over. “They’re only voting because they want to make me look as bad as possible,” he said.

Not everything Trump said was true. But that was. New Hampshire’s undeclared voters made the race far closer than the caucuses one week earlier in Iowa. Democrats who’d switched their registration before the primary — initially to support Chris Christie, eventually to support Nikki Haley — broke heavily against Trump. The exit polling showed us the scale of that.

To win on Tuesday, the Trump campaign squeezed Nikki Haley from the right and left. For GOP voters, it accused her of being soft on illegal immigration; for non-Republicans, it highlighted her openness to changing Social Security. That made Haley’s tricky task impossible. She needed to cut into Trump’s Republican support while overwhelming it with undeclared voters and former Democrats, and she couldn’t. The fact that she fell short in the state with the biggest share of anti-Trump independents in its primary electorate is why the ex-president’s campaign sees no path forward for Haley.

White House. President Biden picked up the endorsement of the United Auto Workers on Wednesday, far earlier than some other Democrats in election years. It came with a bitter denunciation of Donald Trump by union president Shawn Fain, who called the Republican candidate a “scab,” for holding a rally at a non-union facility in Michigan during the UAW’s strike last year against the big three car makers.

Dean Phillips, who won just under 20% of the vote in New Hampshire, took his campaign to South Carolina this week. Marianne Williamson cleared her schedule and held a zoom call with supporters, after winning just 4% of the primary vote; she did not drop out of the race and pushed back against false reporting that she would.

Haley campaigned in South Carolina the day after her New Hampshire loss, while Trump put down an effort to aid him by declaring him the “presumptive” nominee at next week’s Republican National Committee meeting in Las Vegas.

News of that effort was first reported by The Dispatch, and was condemned by the Haley campaign, which has positioned the candidate as the anti-establishment challenger to Trump: “We’ll let millions of Republican voters across the country decide who should be our party’s nominee, not a bunch of Washington insiders.” After multiple RNC members complained about the resolution, Trump called on Maryland RNC committeeman David Bossie to withdraw it, which he did.

House. AIPAC’s PAC made its first 2024 endorsement on Wednesday, getting behind Westchester County Executive George Latimer and his primary challenge to Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Americana spent the last two weeks in Iowa and New Hampshire, following candidates and talking to voters about their looming decisions. In this edition, instead of the usual Q&A with a newsmaker, I’ve compiled a few of the more telling conversations we had with New Hampshire voters, who turned out massively on Tuesday.

John Myers (Bretton Woods, Haley voter): My former college buddy worked with her in South Carolina. He was the state treasurer when she was governor. His comment was: Watch out for her, she’s the real deal. The best thing she said tonight was that chaos follows her competition; she gives me the impression that she won’t stand for chaos. I voted for Trump in 2016, because he seemed like a wake-up call. And he was a wake-up call. I liked his energy, his aggressiveness, and his apparent love for the country. But I didn’t realize how chaotic he’d be.

Mike Robison (Hanover, Phillips voter): I was seriously thinking about voting in the Republican primary against Trump, just to register my opinion. I wasn’t thinking of voting in the Democratic primary, for two reasons. For one, it doesn’t seem like the Democratic Party wanted to have this primary. And secondly, it’s kind of bad that Biden’s not even on the ballot. He should have provided his name. It wouldn’t bother me if a message was sent here. But if I was inclined to write in somebody on the Republican line, like Liz Cheney or Chris Christie. I know that at least they won’t pardon him.

Kathy MacLeod (Rochester, Biden voter): I’m a lot more progressive than Joe Biden, but that doesn’t really matter. Having Joe Biden, and having sanity in the White House and having a seasoned world leader, is important — even though he’s in a horrible position. I’m still scared to death of what’s going on, but to wake up in the morning, and know that there’s a sane person in the White House, with sane people around him, I feel better.

Blake Campbell (Nashua, Trump voter): I think that Nikki Haley really connected into corporations and pharmacies and stuff — weapon manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin. I think she’s like way too in bed with them. Her involvement — they’re all on board with the WEF and WHO agenda. They shut everything down in 2020. Now they’re planning for the next pandemic and trying to institute social credit scores. I’m not worried that Trump would pick her for VP, but you never know. Trump’s hit people with folding chairs in the ring. He knows what kayfabe is.

Ken Minasian (Londonderry, Haley voter): I like her Ukraine policy and the fact that she’s gonna build the wall. I like that she’s gonna do something about immigration. I don’t know if I believe the accusation that she doesn’t treat them as “illegals.” They are illegals. Trump put that in an ad, and I’m not sure how accurate that is. But I worry about Trump. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the general election because as many friends as he has, he has enemies. Now, he didn’t do anything illegal. I don’t think he incited the “insurrection.” I think that’s a bunch of crap, and he’s been treated unfairly ever since he came down those stairs at Trump Tower.

• eight days until the South Carolina Democratic primary
• 13 days until the Nevada Republican caucuses
• 18 days until the special election to replace George Santos
• 31 days until the South Carolina Republican primary
• 39 days until Super Tuesday
• 283 days until the 2024 presidential election