You’re not supposed to inhale the smoke from cigars. Some have up to 25 times more nicotine than a single cigarette. But that’s what I was doing with the ones that were sent to me by Michael Knowles. So I felt a little lightheaded as the Daily Wire commentator explained to me, on Zoom, why he’d named his new cigar company Mayflower: It was also the moniker of the boat on which some of his ancestors—on his father’s side—arrived in America.
But if Knowles’s brand evokes images of the old WASP establishment—the cigars come in a plain wooden box with a white, gold-embossed flower on the cover, simple and elegant—the establishment isn’t what he is selling.
“Our liberal establishment wants everyone to be hooked on depression pills and pot and opioids,” he said. “The one drug they seem to object to is nicotine.”
Knowles launched his cigar company on November 9, 2023—and sold out four months’ worth of supplies within 36 hours. In its first year, Mayflower Cigars made a respectable $3.6 million from sales.
Yes, nicotine use is objectively in decline. Raw sales of cigarettes have declined over the long term. Other products aren’t faring much better. With the exception of smokeless options like Zyn, other nicotine products, like cigars, have also become less popular. But at the same time, strangely, there’s a sense that nicotine has become more popular: a cause célèbre to be championed by a certain kind of conservative commentator who’s sick of Big Government getting in the way of their fun. Their high priest is Tucker Carlson, who describes nicotine as “a massive life-enhancer”—and, for the last few years, has been railing against efforts to regulate the industry.