Right after the 2024 election, Tucker Carlson ramped up the promotion of his new nicotine pouch product, prompting Elon Musk to weigh in on the conservative host’s challenge to Zyn by calling out the “fun police” who stand against both Tucker’s odd humor and his zeal for pouches. The fun police are real, and they’ve shapeshifted and moved between political parties from era to era.
Politics has gotten weird, especially if you grew up at the turn of the century during the George W. Bush administration when the definition of counter-culture was to blast Green Day’s American Idiot while blogging about Monsanto and bumming cigarettes at Warped Tour. Today, that same left-wing movement is the vanguard of what Noah Rothman and Andrew Doyle both dubbed “The New Puritans” in their 2022 books about the left’s prudish energy regarding speech and expression.
That censoriousness didn’t end with moral panics over comedy and open debate on college campuses, instead, it has stretched into the realm of lifestyle choice to such an extent that smoking alternatives like nicotine pouches have been labeled as right-wing subculture. No one has ever researched this, but you could probably find a strong correlation between avid fans of Rage Against the Machine and support for banning gas-powered lawn tools, flavored vapes, plastic straws, and menthol cigarettes. We live in times where Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong put his reputation on the line for Kamala Harris, of all people.
The American left’s realignment as a neo-prohibitionist block took hold in 2012 when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled his plan to ban sugary drinks in NYC. In the years prior, Bloomberg had become the symbol of government activism around personal health with his action against trans fats, pushing restaurants to cut salt from their menu by 20 percent and sky-high taxes on cigarettes to discourage smoking.
It was a very different world. Michael Barbaro, now known for his New York Times podcast The Daily, wrote in the NYT about Bloomberg’s noxious hypocrisy on nanny-state regulations. Barbar cataloged the Mayor’s well-known habits ranging from salting his pizza to salting his popcorn so heavily that it “burns the lips”. HuffPost reporter on right-wing politics, Christopher Mathias, ripped into Bloomberg’s cigarette taxes as the cause of NYC’s thriving black market for “loosie” cigarettes.
“People have the right to get fat and drink too much, and I should have the right to smoke without being taxed out of next month’s rent,” said Mathias, just a few years before Eric Garner would be infamously killed at the hands of a New York City cop after being caught selling loosie cigarettes outside a bodega. The probationary policies of Bloomberg had predictably led to a black market for consumer products, and even more predictably led to tragedy when the crackdown on lifestyle freedom was enforced.
If the Democrats had to own the handwringing over warning labels on profane music thanks to Tipper Gore, Democrats had to absorb the brand damage thanks to their most high-profile mayor going to war against soda.
If the politics of the “fun police” are confusing, you’re not alone. It’s just as strange that Democrats are leading the crackdowns on nicotine pouches, which help lower smoking rates, as it is that Republicans are more likely to appear on irreverent podcasts with MMA fighters and roast comedians.
If Footloose was being made today, you’d have to put money on the anti-dancing Reverend Shaw Moore being a Democrat. Dancing and revelry between teenagers could lead to unsanctioned physicality that makes someone somewhere uncomfortable. The puritanism of the modern left started with nanny state lifestyle regulations, fused with #MeToo in 2017, and racialized after the riots of 2020.
The end result is a once counter-cultural political party whose standard bearer is afraid to sit down for a chat with abortion advocate and psychedelics know-it-all, Joe Rogan.
Elon Musk isn’t wrong. The fun police are out there and they really don’t like whatever Tucker Carlson is up to in his whimsical new chapter as a Maine-based podcaster with his own line of nicotine pouches. You can always be certain, however, that the fun police change sides when you least expect it. Keep a mirror handy, because you might see them there too, one day.
Stephen Kent is the Media Director of the Consumer Choice Center
