A touching tale
The anti-porn crusade is claiming more territory. Kentucky lost access to Pornhub earlier this month, with Indiana, Idaho and Kansas to join them a week from today and Nebraska to miss out from July 17.
Those states join seven others — Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia — where residents can’t access the world’s thirteenth most visited website, as they have passed or are passing laws that mandate age verification through uploading a government ID. Pornhub pulls access to locations that pass these laws in protest, as the company feels that on-device age verification is “the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike,” whereas uploading a government ID opens up users to the risk of data breaches.
A reminder: you currently only have to be thirteen years old to create a Twitter/X account — and X updated its adult content policy at the start of the month, which now says, “You may share consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual behavior, provided it’s properly labeled and not prominently displayed.”
X is pushing pornographers to label their content as such — and won’t let under-eighteen users or those without a date of birth on their account click to view posts that are marked. Cockburn has yet to notice the “P U S S Y I N B I O” brigade of OnlyFans influencers adopting the new rules — and wonders whether these new laws are really cracking down on kids looking to crack one off…
Is Washington’s war on Zyn ‘election interference?’
Elsewhere in government overreach: in response to a subpoena from DC’s Attorney General Brian Schwalb, tobacco giant Philip Morris International said Monday they would suspend national online sales on zyn.com. For the uninitiated, Cockburn’s nieces explain that Zyn is a form of nicotine pouch, similar to Swedish portion snus, except zyns don’t contain any tobacco, just varying levels of nicotine. On the Zyn website, pouches come in flavors including cool mint, peppermint, wintergreen, spearmint, cinnamon, coffee and citrus.
Philip Morris bought Swedish Match, the company behind Zyn, two years ago, hoping to expand their products beyond cigarettes amid strict regulations. The subpoena likely arose from the DC City Council prohibiting the sale of all flavored tobacco — including flavored synthetic nicotine products — in 2022. Philip Morris’s preliminary investigation “indicates that there have been sales of flavored nicotine pouch products in DC, predominantly related to certain online sales platforms and some independent retailers.”
Many, including Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, are concerned about the seductive grip nicotine products have on kids. On the other hand, results from the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey showed just 1.5 percent of youth used a nicotine pouch at least once in the past thirty days — and many Zyn fans use it as way to quit smoking.
Zyn is immensely popular with young American men at the moment, Cockburn’s nieces attest, particularly those who lean right. “The Schumer-Schwalb regime’s crackdown on Zyn is their latest attempt to hamstring Republican staffers in the run-up to November,” one House GOP staffer told Cockburn. “This is textbook election interference — and puts our democracy and freedoms at risk.” Let he who is without Zyn cast the first stone…
That famous Ukrainian fighting spirit
As Emerson College’s latest statewide polling shows Trump up one point over Biden in Michigan, Cockburn is reminded of the crazy reactions eight years ago when the former president eked out a win there.
Trump’s son, Don Jr., campaigned in Michigan just one day before the election, including at a Ukrainian civic hall in Warren. Things threatened to go south quickly when a Ukrainian man showed up armed with a baseball bat, ready to put the smackdown on Trump after finding out his wife was voting for the real estate mogul. The man was intercepted by local police and Don Jr. finished the event unharmed.
Coincidentally, Trump would later impeached for his “perfect phone call” with the Ukrainian president where he asked him to investigate the Bidens.
Why bother ‘pouncing’ over Queer Eye at the White House?
For those of you not yet informed by a Big Four corporation, it’s Pride Month. Disgraced congressman George Santos chose to mark the occasion by setting up a ludicrously overpriced OnlyFans account — $29.99 a month! Meanwhile, the White House brought in the experts from Netflix’s Queer Eye reboot, who met with Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff. “The cast of @QueerEye joined me at the White House to discuss the hard-fought progress the LGBTQI+ community has made in the past twenty years,” the VP tweeted.
A number of conservative influencers were revolted. “Meanwhile at the White House… they’re making a mockery of our great country. Disgusting,” wrote Libs of TikTok. “What is happening at The White House,” tweeted the militantly heterosexual Benny Johnson. “Can someone please tell me what just shook hands with Kamala Harris at the White House?” said “ex-con deplorable” Vince Langman in response to a video of nonbinary hairstylist Jonathan Van Ness meeting the veep while wearing a dress. “The White House has turned into Sodom and Gomorrah,” declared Cryptid Politics.
Queer Eye is of course immensely popular, particularly among the kind of suburban women that the Republican Party will be hoping to bring into the big tent in November. Cockburn can’t help but wonder who’s ostracizing those crucial swing voters more: the party embracing the flamboyant queers — or the side dismissing them in such dehumanizing language…
Sign up here to get Cockburn’s gossip column in your inbox on Fridays.
