Vox: Nicotine pouches are “A gateway to right-wing politics”

I’ve read my share of demented attacks on nicotine pouches, but this one takes the biscuit. According to Vox, nicotine pouches are not just a gateway to cigarette smoking; they’re also a gateway to the alt-right.

What is happening over at Vox?

The media class is an absurd bunch. I’ve spent enough time around these people to conclude they’ve seldom read the books (let alone understood the ideas) that spawn the woolly talking points they want to force down our throats on social media or at dinner parties.

Too often, their opinions are thin, vacuous, and unearned. And they know it. Lightly push back on their views, and the deluge of fragility, name-calling, and emotional appeals flow like filthy water from a broken waste pipe. They are blissfully unaware of their illiberalism, intolerance, and perhaps most unforgivingly, their absolute basicness.

So, how many paragraphs might a gender-obsessed writer manage to get into an article about nicotine pouches before invoking the spectre of Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, or Donald Trump?

Sadly, the answer is a paltry five.

It’s worth noting that none of Musk, Tate, or Trump use, promote, or have made any statements that I could find about pouches. Tate claims to smoke 20 cigars a day, a detail that has not caused an epidemic in teen cigar smoking. Tate is also vocally anti-vape and regularly makes easily debunked claims about the harm-reduction product that would have Tobacco Control clowns in raptures.

The author of the Vox piece, Anna North, also manages to shoehorn in references to hyper-capitalism, masculinity, conservatism, and fascism. I don’t get the impression she has a good grip on any of these subjects.

The gateway effect (No, not that one!)

North also raises the possibility that pouches are a gateway to right-wing politics. These people are just beyond satire at this stage.

The thing is — and it’s shocking that people like North haven’t figured it out yet — is that fake liberalism is losing young men to the right because they are the establishment. People aren’t meant to think their parents or authority figures are cool. They’re also hyper-attuned to bullshit.

Until they come up with something better than a whiny, regressive, dishonest brand of liberalism, teenagers and young men are going to see through their grift. Eventually, they’ll see through Trump, Tate, Musk, or the next boogeyman’s grift, too. But maybe not before the next US election.

The thing is, young people will always want to rebel against the orthodoxy. When you’re a self-appointed mouthpiece for the regime, you just have to accept that you’re not part of the resistance gracefully.

So, just because Tucker Carlson likes ZYN doesn’t mean they have “tapped into a precarious moment in American masculinity.” When Schumer came after pouches, they became a minor news point because people are tired of nanny state policies. They are done with being told what to do by self-serving parasites who ignore them on issues that are important to them.

People have used stimulants for thousands of years. Nicotine pouches are a product that satisfies a demand for nicotine that you can’t legislate away. They’ll get it through vaping and pouches, or they’ll turn to cigarettes. It’s that simple.

The problem with hallucinating that nicotine pouches are a gateway to the alt-right is that people might believe you, to the detriment of their health.

Why the culture war is making people stupid

We covered the ZYN debate recently and lamented the fact that it was just another topic being piled on the culture war fires. I guess it was inevitable that someone would bend that into their grift.

One nuance that the author of this strange piece seems to ignore is that in Sweden, snus was once a predominantly male activity. This was for various reasons, from social norms to the pouches’ bulkiness to cosmetic worries about teeth staining. However, nicotine pouches have primarily solved these issues.

If we look at this data from the excellent Swedish Experience report from last year, the rise in the availability of clean nicotine pouches has had a dramatic influence on smoking prevalence for women. In fact, as snus and nicotine pouch use doubled, smoking rates amongst women halved.