2 weeks Ago By Charlie Kirk
One of the patterns emerging in our politics is the moral confusion infecting the left. For example, they think exposing a 13-year-old to a dancing drag queen is perfectly fine, yet by the time they are 18, the youth is shielded from conservative speakers on campuses and given special days off if they hear an idea they consider offensive. The left protects the adult from adversity while throwing the teenager to the transgender wolves.
This moral confusion caught my attention when my friends and employees remarked on how backward the Democrats’ priorities have become. The topic of vaping came up. Although I don’t like or support vaping, it is irrefutably better for you than cigarettes or liberals’ favorite pastime, smoking weed.
Vaping is popular among many of my hardest-working employees, which flummoxed me. The more I learned, the more I realized that many vapers are former smokers. Vaping, for them, is a transitory tool to a less harmful form of nicotine.
Despite vaping’s role in helping people move away from tobacco, the Democratic Party has predictably declared war on it. Enter Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. The morally confused specialist in partisan lawfare has turned her sights on the independent vaping industry.
This isn’t about protecting public health or safeguarding children, as she claims. It’s about scoring political points, consolidating power and doing the bidding of Big Tobacco, all at the expense of small-business owners, workers and consumers. If this sounds familiar, Ms.
James has a long history of using her office to advance her political ambitions. From the moment she took office, she made it clear that President Trump was her No. 1 target.
Her endless lawsuits against Mr. Trump weren’t about justice. They were about grabbing headlines and boosting her profile in liberal circles.
Now, she is applying the same playbook to flavored vaping, an industry that Mr. Trump promised to save. Ms.
James recently filed a lawsuit against vape manufacturers, accusing them of marketing flavored products to minors and violating New York’s vaping laws. On the surface, this might sound like a noble cause. Who doesn’t want to protect children? But dig a little deeper, and you’ll see what’s really going on.
Flavored vapes are overwhelmingly used by adults, not children, who are trying to quit smoking cigarettes. These products are an off-ramp for millions of Americans looking for a less harmful alternative to smoking. And guess what.
Big Tobacco hates them for it. Here’s the truth: Big Tobacco’s cigarette sales have plummeted as vapes and other smoking alternatives have gained popularity. CEOs of Big Tobacco companies have openly lamented this trend because it threatens their bottom lines.
Now they’re investing heavily in tobacco alternatives themselves. They don’t care about protecting children. They aim to use political pawns like Ms.
James to make the regulatory environment so burdensome and expensive that it will put independent shops and manufacturers out of business. They believe they can monopolize the market on tobacco alternatives once the regulatory environment becomes too expensive and burdensome for independent vape manufacturers to survive. By cracking down on flavored vapes, Ms.
James is helping Big Tobacco eliminate its competition while claiming to protect public health and enforce laws. This isn’t just an attack on an industry; it’s an attack on everyday Americans. The vaping industry comprises small-business owners who run small retail shops in your community, not multinational corporations with billion-dollar lobbying budgets and million-dollar attorneys.
These small businesses employ thousands of workers across the country. Let’s not forget about the consumers. Millions of adults use vapes as a safer alternative to smoking.
By targeting flavored products, Ms. James is effectively forcing these consumers back into the arms of Big Tobacco or onto the black market for unregulated products that could pose even greater risks to public health. I never thought I would be writing about “vaping,” but it’s much bigger than that.
It’s another example of powerful interests using their influence to crush something working, like ivermectin for COVID-19 or better eating to solve obesity. Ms. James is replicating this pattern, and she must be stopped.
She should refocus her desperate efforts on the spike in crime in New York City instead of whether or not a bodega is selling nicotine products. Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC. .
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