The Free Press
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.
As recently as 2009, Democrats were more likely to smoke cigarettes than Republicans, and their president, Barack Obama, was known to sneak the occasional smoke in the White House. But last month, a study found that a majority of nicotine users—56 percent—voted for Donald Trump in the last election. Big Nicotine bet big on Trump, too, with a subsidiary of Reynolds American, the second-biggest tobacco company in the United States, becoming the largest corporate donor to the main pro-Trump super PAC this past September. Basically, Trump looks set to be the smokers’ president.
It’s quite a rebrand. The first Trump administration announced a ban on flavored e-cigarette pods in 2019. (“We can’t have our kids be so affected,” he said at the time.) But after Biden picked on menthol cigarettes, proposing to ban them, it drove voters away from the Democrats. And Trump, clearly, sensed an opportunity to attract the nicotine-hungry. This past September, while on the campaign trail, he took a meeting with a vaping lobbyist, then immediately promised he’d “save vaping”—for adults, anyway.
But this isn’t just a mercurial Trump move. The right more generally has been embracing nicotine. It began, so far as I can tell, with a Carlson monologue in June 2022. At the time, Carlson’s nightly program on Fox News was the number one cable news show in the country, and the Biden administration had just announced its proposed ban on menthol cigarettes. Tucker railed against the proposal, calling it a “war against happiness.”
It’s a subject Tucker then returned to repeatedly. In 2023, he delivered a fiery diatribe that multiple sources I spoke to, including the cigar seller Knowles, cited as inspiration. “Why do they hate nicotine?" asked Tucker. “Because nicotine frees your mind.”
At the time, Tucker was a great fan of Zyn, enthusiastically promoting the tobacco-free nicotine pouches, which resemble tiny tea bags. (He described them as “the hand of God reaching down and massaging your central nervous system.”) The love only went one way, though: Zyn reportedly turned down an invite to form a partnership with Carlson, who was apparently left furious.
Perhaps that’s why, last September, he announced his plans to launch Alp, a competitor of Zyn. Tucker claimed that employees of Philip Morris International—which owns Zyn’s parent company, Swedish Match—had donated to the Democrats, seeing them as proof that the brand is not something conservatives could champion. Swedish Match said in a statement that the company was “bipartizyn,” clarifying that neither Philip Morris International nor Swedish Match made contributions in the most recent presidential election. But that didn’t stop Tucker.
According to a November report, Alp seems to be doing well, with preorders that “significantly outpaced initial expectations.” One survey found that 86 percent of America’s nicotine pouch users were likely to opt for Alp. Meanwhile, Zyn has been in the political hot seat: Last January, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for it to be regulated. (“It’s a pouch packed with problems,” he said.) Conservatives across the board leapt to defend it—and have continued to do so since. Obsessing over Zyn “is good right-wing politics,” Eric Knowles (no relation to Michael Knowles), a social psychologist at New York University who studies political behavior, told Vox last year.
But if championing nicotine is a way of triggering the libs, those who believe in it enough to try selling it end up confronting the cold, hard facts of American bureaucracy. As anyone, presumably including Carlson, knows, setting up a business that sells nicotine is insanely difficult—the sort of thing that could turn anyone into an anti-regulation conservative.
Regulations also make marketing your products nearly impossible. Forbidden by law from advertising nicotine products in any place that is not an over-21 venue, Carlson—and his conservative fans—had to depend on going viral. The founder of Hestia Cigarettes, America’s newest cigarette brand, knows a little something about that. David Sley hands out his cigarettes to everyone he meets—from friends to niche internet celebrities to Lady Gaga—and, sometimes, they do the advertising for him.
“I mean, I can’t buy ads on Instagram or Twitter,” he told The Free Press over Zoom last month, “but I have gotten a lot of mileage out of just, you know, tossing some loosies to friends.”
Hestia, which was set up in 2010, started taking off in 2023 because of “cigfluencers” and was once described by The New York Times as “a darling among those of artisanal, anti-oligopoly tastes, including some conservatives.”
But it wasn’t an easy road. Sley told me that his cigarettes only exist, effectively, because of a loophole. “I started out with filtered little cigars because I couldn’t get the FDA to approve Hestia cigarettes.” That he got around this problem was kind of a fluke: “I purchased and then resuscitated a defunct brand and renamed it Hestia.” Even then, for over a decade, he was only able to sell his cigarettes in four states—until last summer, when he joined the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, a legal framework between the tobacco industry and 46 states, whereby companies basically compensate authorities for the cost of caring for people who get sick from smoking.
The whole experience has made Sley very skeptical of the nanny state. “Until I got thwarted by every governmental organization trying to launch my own company, I was a whole lot less conservative, I’ll put it that way,” he told me.
Sley believes the right’s embrace of nicotine represents a backlash. “I think there’s an utter distrust of the government telling you what’s best for you, especially after Covid,” he told The Free Press. He also credits the virus with making certain people more hedonistic. “Post-pandemic, we all have an idea of our own mortality. None of us get out of this alive, and there’s a desire to do something you enjoy.”
Michael Knowles also had to overcome various bureaucratic hurdles before he had a stroke of luck: A member of Congress, who he met by chance, introduced him to the CEO of a Nicaraguan cigar manufacturer, which began producing Mayflower Cigars. The company already had distribution licenses it would’ve taken years for Knowles to get. He agrees with Sley. “Tobacco makes you more conservative,” said Knowles.
“To put it bluntly. I’m not encouraging people to go smoke two packs of cigarettes a day,” he said. “But the jihad from our liberal elite against nicotine is not a question of moderation. It's an all-out assault.”
There’s no guaranteeing that Trump’s second term will benefit the pro-nicotine crowd. He’s famously a teetotal nonsmoker, who has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, promising to Make America Healthy Again. Kennedy hasn’t said what that means for nicotine, but for what it’s worth, in October, he was spotted buying Zyn in Los Angeles soon after news broke that he’d been getting sexts from journalist Olivia Nuzzi.
If Tucker’s lucky, maybe Kennedy will get stressed enough in his confirmation hearing to pop an Alp.
