Army Reserve Major Shocks with the World's Most Explicit Congressional Campaign Video

If you're running for political office, releasing a video on the world's 10th-most popular website sounds like a good idea, right? A site more popular than Twitter or Wikipedia and almost as popular as Instagram seems like a great place to reach out to voters.

That's certainly what Army Reserve Maj. Mike Itkis, an independent candidate in New York's 12th Congressional District, thought when he released a video with Nicole Sage to promote his candidacy.

This is the point in the story where you're either thinking to yourself, "Who's Nicole Sage?", "He made a video with NICOLE SAGE?!?!?!?!," or trying to pretend to yourself that you don't already know who she is.

Nicole Sage is a well-known adult video performer. She joined Itkis to record a porn video called "Bucket List Bonanza" that Itkis released on Pornhub.com, which really is the 10th-most popular website in the world.

As of Oct. 19, 2022, the sexually explicit video already had 833,000 views. If you want to know exactly what happens in the video, you'll have to find it for yourself and we've already given you enough intel to make your search an easy one. It is decidedly not safe for work.

Itkis is facing an uphill battle in his congressional campaign, running in a redrawn district against incumbent Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who won his campaign with 74.5% of the vote in 2020. The New York 12th district includes the East Side of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

Itkis' campaign website promotes three basic issues for his campaign: improved domestic cybersecurity, promoting a "sex positive" culture in America and, surprisingly, ending the war in Ukraine, even if U.S. policy objectives "differ from those of the Ukrainian government."

When you know you're bound to lose the campaign, you might as well make the best of things. Itkis told City & State New York that he considers the video a "conversation piece" that will bring awareness to his candidacy and his campaign platform.

Itkis also claims the video is his first time on camera. "I'm very much an introvert," he said. "I'm kind of a nerd who doesn't like to be the center of attention if I can avoid it. But I thought the issues I'm trying to address are so important ... I wanted to have my issues talked about in some way."

That mission is an unqualified success. Here we are writing about Mike Itkis and his very adult video, and here you are reading about it.

You could consider Mikhail Itkis an immigrant success story. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1969 and moved to New York City in 1979. Itkis earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1991, a graduate degree from Baruch College in 2008, and another graduate degree from Western Governors University in 2017. He began serving in the U.S. Army Reserve in 2009 and reached the rank of major.

As for the video, we will note that the video opens with the boilerplate statement that adult film producers ask their performers to make before shooting a scene, the one where they describe the circumstances of the shoot and that they're performing of their own free will. That's a clip that's supposed to stay in the vault in case there are issues at a later date, but Itkis wants everyone to know that everything here's on the up-and-up.

Maybe the Army Reserve is too shocked or mesmerized by the video to come up with a coherent response to Itkis' bold move, because their statement to Military.com really doesn't address the issue at hand. They wrote, "The Army Reserve takes allegations involving good order and discipline or service discrediting conduct seriously and investigates such matters in accordance with Army regulations."

When pressed, the Reserve followed with this non-statement: "The Army Reserve is aware of the allegations and is conducting an investigation. Under the Privacy Act, the Army Reserve cannot comment on individuals under investigation or investigation findings. The Army Reserve is committed to upholding good order and discipline within its ranks."

Readers with an interest in the subject may notice a resemblance between Itkis and the late Army veteran David Conners, who made adult films under the stage name "Dave Cummings" and called himself the "oldest living male pornstar" after he began his career at age 55. Dave died in 2019 at age 79, so he unfortunately didn't live to see his fellow soldier take up the sword.

Is this an example of a soldier using his Army training and having the situational awareness to understand that it takes an epic gesture to generate interest in an independent candidate who doesn't have the campaign war chest to compete with his Republican and Democratic rivals? Is Itkis just working with the tools he has in a nearly impossible situation? Are homemade porn videos a new form of political guerilla warfare?

Maj. Mike Itkis is sure to get trounced in the November elections, but if his campaign tactics take hold, we'll look back to 2022 as the beginning of a sea change in American politics.

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