Underdog candidate for Florida governor James Fishback went face-to-camera to pitch his 50 percent income tax for OnlyFans creators last month. It would be called a “sin tax” meant to discourage “certain behaviors.” This came at around the time he got into an X spat with Sophie Rain, a Florida resident believed to be one of the site’s top earners.
This week, he joined a Kick stream hosted by Myron Gaines* to discuss the policy with some OnlyFans creators.
“It’s not a war against women,” Fishback explains, “it’s a war against a platform that exploits, commodifies, and objectifies women.”
The OnlyFans girl to his left says that she would have gone down a different road were it not for the trauma she experienced – and if she could have easily made money another way. Fishback makes a concerted effort to appear empathetic, touching the back of the woman’s neck in an attempt to reassure her.
“I want to go to school for real estate,” she went on, brainstorming about what she might do next.
“I think he’s anti-growth, so that’s bad for me,” one Florida real-estate heir told Cockburn when asked what he thought of Fishback.
Fishback, who was previously pals with Bari Weiss, now hangs out with far-right anti-Israel zoomers. That is to say, he’s all over the place, but hell-bent on appealing to the youth. There is Radfem Fishback, Groyper Fishback, Moral-Majority Fishback and Fishback: Mamdani of the South. (Cockburn’s colleague Ben Clerkin spoke to the latter version for the latest edition of The Spectator.)
In contrast with his approach to sex work, the candidate plans to address other parts of the economy with left-populist policies. He just wants people to have housing, honey. Yet multiple industries would be hit hard in the unlikely event of a Fishback win.
*Eagle-eyed observers may recognize Gaines from the footage of him clubbing and sieg-heiling on a party bus with fellow podcasters Nick Fuentes, Clavicular and the Tate brothers. He also wrote the 2023 book Why Women Deserve Less. With friends like these…
On our radar
CASH OUT President Trump has branded the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down his tariffs a “disgrace.”
BOOT-EDGE-EDGE? Pete Buttigieg leads a new 2028 Democratic primary poll of New Hampshire voters with 20 percent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom tie for second with 15 percent each.
CANCEL CULTURE IS BACK An upcoming UCLA campus talk by CBS News and Free Press editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has been canceled after 11,000 people signed a petition and a senior academic threatened resignation.
Colbert and Talarico’s censorship hoax
Did the Trump administration censor a Stephen Colbert Late Show interview with Senate candidate James Talarico this week? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Given how much everyone Cockburn knows has been talking about the controversy, it pretty much feels like the opposite of censorship.
Colbert said CBS lawyers had barred him from airing his Monday interview with the Texas Democrat Talarico, citing fears it would violate FCC rules and invite government retaliation. FCC chairman Brendan Carr, Colbert’s mortal enemy, claimed that the outcry over the Talarico interview was a “hoax.” Millions of people have viewed the interview on YouTube, where Colbert posted it. Talarico’s campaign has raised at least $2.5 million this week.
Until recently, the FCC considered late-night and daytime talk shows exempt from a federal rule that requires news programs to allow candidates equal airtime. Dallas-area Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Talarico’s opponent in the Democratic primary, claims she didn’t demand equal time, that the move to YouTube was a “good strategy” for Talarico’s campaign and that the censorship controversy gave him the “boost he was looking for.” The government, she said, didn’t censor the interview, but that CBS did pre-emptively “bend the knee” to the Trump administration.
Seedy Gonzales
Another plot line in The Young and the Texas, the Lone Star State’s ongoing political soap opera, involves Representative Tony Gonzales, whose district includes parts of El Paso and San Antonio and an 800-mile stretch of the US-Mexico border. Last year Regina Santos-Aviles, a Gonzales aide, died after lighting herself on fire at her home in Uvalde. This week the San Antonio Express-News interviewed another staffer from Gonzales’s office, who provided a text message where Santos-Aviles said she “had an affair with our boss.”
Texas’s congressional primary is March 3, and early voting began this week, so the timing had maximum impact. Brandon Herrera, a gun-rights activist who’s giving Gonzales a serious primary challenge, spoke out, saying, “Similar behavior in our military would lead to court-martial and dismissal from service.” Gonzales has repeatedly denied the affair and accused Herrera of exploiting Santos-Aviles’s death, saying, ‘it’s shameful that Brandon Herrera is using a disgruntled former staffer to smear her memory and score political points, conveniently pushing this out the very day early voting started.”
Adrian Aviles, Santos-Aviles’s widower, spoke to the Express-News, saying that Gonzales’s relationship was “very sexual in nature” and that they separated when he found out about the alleged affair. “Tony abused his power,” Aviles said. “He should have held himself to a higher standard as a congressional leader.”
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