Many people have turned away from cigarettes in recent years, opting for “healthier,” smokeless alternatives.

And now the Food and Drug Administration has effectively backed up the claim by changing its regulations — for a crowd-favorite brand, no less.

‘Using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.’

On Tuesday, the FDA updated its regulations of ZYN nicotine pouches so that the products can be marketed with language suggesting that ZYN, made by Swedish Match USA Inc., is indeed healthier — or are at least less harmful — than cigarettes, as many people might have suspected.

Specifically, the FDA says the label can say: “Using ZYN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.”

RELATED: WARNING: Nicotine may cause focus, motivation, and joie de vivre (which is why they hate it)

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

“FDA’s decision is an important moment for the more than 45 million legal-age nicotine consumers in America,” Philip Morris U.S. CEO Stacey Kennedy said in a statement obtained by CNBC. “Today’s news ensures these adults have access to accurate, science-based information, including FDA-authorized evidence that switching from cigarettes to ZYN reduces the risk of smoking-related diseases like heart disease and lung cancer.”

The new regulation will apply to 10 flavors of the original product line at two different strengths, three milligrams and six milligrams.

The flavors are chill, cinnamon, citrus, coffee, cool mint, menthol, peppermint, smooth, spearmint, and wintergreen.

It apparently does not, however, apply to ZYN’s new flavors, peach, black cherry, and dragonberry, which were teased on ZYN’s Instagram page last month.

“FDA’s review of modified risk products is intended to ensure that adult users have clear, science-based information about the relative harms of tobacco products, so they can make informed choices,” Bret Koplow, acting director of the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, said in a statement obtained by The Hill.

“Today’s decision allows these products to be marketed with a modified risk claim that informs adults who smoke about the lower risks associated with these products,” Koplow added.

It is important to note that this regulatory update is a marketing authorization, not an “FDA-approval.” The FDA says that “no tobacco product is safe” and instead deals in terms of “relative risk.”

According to the FDA’s website, the application to gain this marketing authorization “must demonstrate that the product will significantly reduce harm and the risk of tobacco-related disease to individual tobacco users and benefit the health of the population as a whole.”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Cigarettes, Zyn, Fda, Politics 

This week while dining at a McDonald’s in South Burlington, Vermont, I went to the men’s room — and for a split second thought I’d entered a wormhole to the 1990s.

Did you ever go to a dance club that was illuminated by black-light bulbs? You know, the ones that glow purple-blue and make dirt and dandruff stand out like Christmas tree lights on your shirt?

My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks.

That’s what it looked like. It was so dim I could barely navigate to the sink. I glanced up at the ceiling fixtures and sure enough, the bulbs were all dim blue. Why?

The answer will tell you all you need to know about how far my state has fallen.

Sugar crash

Consider this a companion piece to my recent article about sugar heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb and the priceless collection of American art, architecture, and industry she bequeathed to the people of the Green Mountain State.

I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Webb’s 39-acre park of wonders is an island of civility and charm losing its shoreline to blight, criminality, and despair. The same can be said of the other remaining pockets of old Vermont still hanging on.

At first, that men’s room was more puzzling than depressing. I’ve never seen a McDonald’s with a “sci-fi dystopia” decor before.

Then it hit me: This must be one of the gratingly permanent neurotic hangers-on from the days of COVID. Of course!

If such a conclusion would have never occurred to you, you must live in a red state. Or at least one of the relatively saner blue states of the northern plains.

If so, let me explain what those of us in deep Democrat territory lived through during COVID.

New England breakdown

Here in New England, the entire region went clinically insane. Everything shut down. Elderly men wearing masks outdoors on city streets screamed (yes, vocally screamed), “WHERE’S YOUR MASK?!” at people like me who went barefaced on Main Street in January.

People were thrown out of urgent care waiting rooms for not being vaccinated. A doctor implied she would report me to the state health board because I would not promise her that I would obey the governor’s self-quarantine order simply because I visited my family at Christmas.

My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks. Then the restaurant across the street threw us out for the same reason, while mothers actually clutched their children to their bosom and stared at us as if we were muggers.

Yes, I know this sounds like something out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but I’m telling the truth. All of this really happened, and almost everyone went along with it.

Germ warfare

Today, six years later, the neurosis of that era has become the “new normal.” While the incidence has decreased, you still see people every day wearing masks outdoors on the street or alone in their cars. The post office in South Burlington still has not taken down its jury-rigged plexiglass barriers between the counter worker and the customer. The all-caps sign ordering you to STAND HERE is still there.

So naturally I thought the bulbs in the McDonald’s were meant to emit some kind of special germ-killing wavelength. Doesn’t that seem like something the geniuses who came up with all-day face diapers and “six feet apart” would suggest?

I drove 45 minutes home to the outskirts of Montpelier believing I’d figured it out. And then I did a little research.

The dim blue bulbs are not there to banish germs. They are installed to frustrate IV drug users by shining a light that makes it impossible to locate a blue vein under the skin. They are there to stop junkies from making the bathroom their private opium den or — should they overdose — their public deathbed.

“Officials in Philadelphia are handing out blue light bulbs because the glow supposedly masks the blue-tinted lines of veins — making it harder for intravenous drug users to find a vein,” National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep intoned in 2019. That’s right, a full seven years ago.

You can find quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this phenomenon starting in about 2018. CBS News covered it in 2018, and so did Fortune magazine.

RELATED: How an NYC socialite’s riches preserve America’s beautiful, bustling past

Electra Havemeyer Webb. Slim Aarons/Getty Images; Background: Shelburne Museum

‘Symbolic violence’

And, from what I can tell, most of the more critical follow-up coverage only second-guessed this “important harm reduction measure” because it might make shooting up drugs more dangerous for the poor junkies. I couldn’t find any coverage that even mentioned the more important effect.

That more important effect is the degradation of civil society for normal, respectable people. The capitulation to the tyranny of junkies, criminals, and vagrants. We are a society that will not say: “No. You cannot make a place like McDonalds, which used to be a treat for children, into a no-go zone that arranges itself around the habits of low-lifes without doing a thing to make children and families feel welcome.”

Look at how an Inverse article criticized the blue lights. The article headline called the practice “symbolic violence.”

“But there are some huge problems with this approach,” author Peter Hess wrote. “Research has shown that drug users will still try to inject drugs in a blue-lit bathroom, even if it means they could accidentally miss their vein, which increases the risk of infection or soft tissue damage.”

Stand and fight

Pardon me for not giving a tinker’s damn if some addict gets soft-tissue damage. I’m part of the majority class of normal, productive citizens. We matter too. It is us and our families who pay the price for this, quite literally through taxes confiscated from us to give “safe injection spaces” for people who ought to be in a psychiatric ward. We’re paying a social and morale tax, too, as the world adds bumper cushions for the worst among us while telling law-abiding people to suck it up or get out.

This dystopia-in-a-bathroom story is just one symptom of an ongoing decline in areas governed by Democrats, progressives, and communists.

Burlington, Vermont, once a glittering city on the shores of Lake Champlain, is losing businesses in the tourist district because the city’s progressive mayor and her city council cry crocodile tears for the “unsheltered” community and refuse to hire enough police to crack down on open prostitution and drug crime.

My town, Montpelier, is barely holding on. The 19th-century Victorian Main Street is still there, but its charm is becoming blurrier and harder to see through the accumulation of graffiti, rutted streets, and open homeless encampments and drug dens in the alleys.

Whenever one writes an article like this, the most common reaction is, “Why don’t you just move, then?” My response: “Why don’t you stand and fight for the town you love?”

​Blue states, Burlington, Civil society, Communists, Covid, Homeless encampments, Lifestyle, Vermont, Woke, Intervention 

In the immediate wake of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, 2025, depraved leftists celebrated in classrooms, in town squares, online, and elsewhere.

Some of those who publicly relished the news of the young father’s murder were publicly shamed, received reprimands, or even lost their jobs.

‘I am very pleased.’

One such radical managed to turn her encounter with accountability into a major payday.

On Sept. 12, 2025, Tamar Shirinian, a Lebanese-born LGBT obsessive then working as an assistant anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a Facebook comment about Kirk’s assassination, “The world is better off without him in it,” WVLT-TV reported.

“Even those who are claiming to be sad for his wife and kids … like, his kids are better off living in a world without a disgusting psychopath like him,” Shirinian apparently continued, “and his wife, well, she’s a sick f**k for marrying him so I don’t care about her feelings.”

The radical’s comment soon went viral, prompting a response by the university.

University of Tennessee Chancellor Donde Plowman notified the radical in a Sept. 15 letter that she was being placed on administrative leave pending termination proceedings, stressing that “violence on a university campus wounds the heart of our academic mission, and no statement endorsing a campus shooting can be acceptable to an institution.”

RELATED: Montreal shooter’s alleged manifesto calls for far-left communist totalitarianism, ‘revolutionary terror’

Trent Nelson/the Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

“By celebrating violence and murder in your social media posts, you have violated the university’s expectations for the people teaching our students,” Plowman continued. “Your decision to post incendiary comments publicly at a time of heightened anxiety reveals that you do not have the competencies necessary to be an effective instructor.”

Plowman highlighted in a subsequent letter dated Sept. 16 the policies the radical had violated warranting her termination.

In her six-page response, Shirinian blamed her nasty comment on Charlie Kirk, claiming that she made the post after seeing one of the murdered man’s quips that had made her “quite emotional” and put her “in a state of grief.” After displacing blame, she proceeded to attack the dead man for several pages.

After attributing 11 other comments to Kirk that “disgusted” her, the foreign-born radical painted herself as the real victim, identifying hate mail messages she supposedly received and complaining about the backlash over her remarks.

Plowman wasn’t buying what Shirinian was selling and saw to the radical’s termination on Feb. 11, just weeks after Shirinian asked the UT Board of Trustees in a letter to reinstate her.

In the termination letter, Plowman wrote, “Your words celebrated a gruesome murder, which horrifically took place on a college campus similar to our own, and then went on to callously demean the grief and loss felt by the widow and young children of the victim while also mocking any grief felt by others who sympathized with the surviving family.”

“The antagonizing tenor of your words makes you a target for potential retributive violence that could put our students and faculty in harm’s way, as well as irreparably damage the public’s trust in our University,” Plowman continued. “I have a responsibility to minimize any such risks.”

Months earlier, however, Shirinian — who was apparently making around $92,000 a year as of January — sued the university, once again pushing her victim narrative and denigrating Charlie Kirk.

In addition to spending roughly nine pages complaining about various things Kirk said before he was murdered, the Oct. 29 lawsuit accused the university of violating Shirinian’s First Amendment rights by “retaliating against her as a professor in a public university for expressing political speech in a purely personal capacity.”

The case was supposed to go to trial In January 2027, but the university blinked.

The university has reached a $1.9 million settlement with Shirinian — a settlement which WBIR-TV reported was approved in a meeting of the UT Board of Trustees Audit and Compliance Committee on Monday.

John Compton, the chair of the board, suggested that continuing litigation would eat up valuable time, attention, and resources that would be better invested in advancing the university’s mission.

While the radical gets a big payday, she will not have her faculty position restored.

Robb Bigelow, Shirinian’s attorney, said the agreement was a “mutually acceptable resolution.”

“We think it recognizes the seriousness of the issues presented while avoiding the time, expense, and stress of continued litigation. We wish the University, its students, faculty, and staff nothing but success going forward,” Bigelow said.

“I am very pleased with the outcome,” Shirinian told WBIR.

The settlement must now be approved by the full UT Board of Trustees and the state, including Governor Bill Lee (R).

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Charlie kirk, University of tennessee, Lawsuit, Politics, First amendment 

A 36-year-old mother was charged with manslaughter after her 18-month-old son died in April after choking on unpopped popcorn kernels at her Long Island apartment.

Prosecutors believe Olivia Bithorn was drinking vodka in the bathroom of her unit in Merrick after giving the bag of kernels to her son, Luke Russell Jr., and his 3-year-old sister.

‘Everyone in her life had basically written her off except her husband, who was … trying to make sure she had a place to live and was staying sober.’

The little girl alerted the mother after the boy became unresponsive.

“Her son was blue and cold to the touch,” said Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly, who appeared to get emotional at the details.

“They estimate, allegedly, he was dead for over an hour before 911 was called,” she added.

Donnelly said Bithorn was getting sick in the bathroom because she drank too much alcohol. An empty bottle of Tito’s vodka was found at the apartment.

“It’s an accident if you leave the room for a few minutes … but it’s criminal if you actually give your child these kernels to eat and not be present if something happens,” she added.

Prosecutors said Bithorn had a long history of alcohol abuse and put her children at risk because of her drinking problem. She cycled in and out of rehab programs for years, crashed a car, and even disappeared for three days at one point.

She had separated from her husband of three years while battling alcoholism.

“Everyone in her life had basically written her off except her husband, who was trying to, even though they’re separated, trying to make sure she had a place to live and was staying sober,” Donnelly added.

RELATED: Homeless man makes ‘horrific’ discovery near dumpster at Los Angeles parking lot, police say

Her estranged husband was in court but declined to comment as he left.

Merrick is a small hamlet of about 22,000 residents on the south shore of Long Island.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Alcoholism, Baby death, Choking, Long island, Manslaughter, Mother, Crime 

There are moments when an entire ideology reveals itself to the American public — not in a faculty seminar, not in a university land acknowledgment, not in a mandatory “inclusive excellence” module administered by a deputy assistant associate vice provost of DEI, but on a basketball court.

Caitlin Clark being struck in the throat by Alyssa Thomas was one of those moments.

DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or ‘inclusive excellence,’ is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.

The WNBA later decided the incident was a “non-basketball act,” a useful clarification for those of us who had not noticed that punching a player in the throat is not among the standard fundamentals of the game. Dribbling, passing, shooting, rebounding — yes. Throat strikes — apparently, no.

The referees, however, seemed to be conducting an advanced seminar in nonintervention. They saw nothing. Or more precisely, they saw what everyone else saw and did not think it required interruption.

The WNBA reviewed the play and assessed Thomas a Flagrant Foul 2 with a one-game suspension. Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has publicly said Clark is being targeted and that the league and refs are not protecting her. Meanwhile, Clark’s presence has coincided with major WNBA attendance and ratings growth.

This is where the Caitlin Clark story becomes larger than basketball.

For years, America’s universities have devoted themselves to replacing character formation with grievance formation. Students are taught, with all the solemnity of medieval theologians but none of the metaphysical seriousness, that the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed, privileged and marginalized, white and non-white.

Every inequality of outcome receives the same explanation: whiteness. Every frustration becomes resentment. Every failure gets assigned a villain.

This curriculum does not produce justice. It produces vice.

It teaches envy and calls it “equity.” It teaches resentment and calls it “consciousness.” It teaches contempt for one’s neighbor and calls it “liberation.” It tells young people that the chief moral fact about another person is skin color, then professes shock when people begin treating one another accordingly.

Enter Caitlin Clark.

The WNBA has long existed less as a product of overwhelming public demand than as an institutional cause. It was the league America was instructed to support. Like many progressive projects, it was sustained not by market interest but by moral instruction: Watch this. Celebrate this. Subsidize this. Affirm this.

Then, something embarrassing happened.

RELATED: The latest violent attack on Caitlin Clark exposes the WNBA’s real problem

Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

A player arrived whom the public actually wanted to see.

Clark did not require an ideological sales pitch. She did not need a campus office to explain her importance. She did not need a seminar on representation and patriarchy. She could shoot from the logo. She could pass as if she had seen the play unfold three seconds before everyone else. She brought eyes to the league, filled arenas, moved merchandise, and made casual fans care.

That is precisely the problem.

The DEI imagination can handle excellence only when it can be absorbed into its preferred categories. If Clark’s success could be explained as “white privilege,” the story would be safe. But basketball is a cruelly empirical game. The ball either goes in or it does not. The pass either arrives or it does not. The defense either stops her or it does not. No diversity consultant can revise the box score.

Clark’s excellence is infuriating because it is visible. It is not a theory, a grant proposal, or a paragraph in a strategic plan. It is the fruit of natural ability disciplined by relentless work.

Even family support, private schooling, and access to good coaching do not manufacture Caitlin Clark. They may provide opportunity. They do not produce logo threes, court vision, and competitive fire. Many athletes have access to lessons. Few can do what Clark does.

That fact is intolerable to a culture that has taught itself to scoff at diligence, fortitude, self-control, patience, hope, faith, and love. The old virtues are too demanding because they require personal responsibility. DEI prefers a more comforting doctrine: Your failures are someone else’s fault, your anger is moral insight, and your neighbor’s success is evidence of systemic injustice.

We have seen this moral theater before.

After George Floyd died under the knee of Derek Chauvin, the image played endlessly across America. Universities made it the centerpiece of institutional repentance. Faculty meetings became revival services for Black Lives Matter. Professors who had never shown much interest in moral absolutes suddenly discovered original sin, provided it could be located in “whiteness” rather than in the human heart.

The radicals had their icon. They had their liturgy. They had their marches. They had their administrative decrees.

But what happens when the image does not serve the approved narrative? What happens when the visible act is not a white officer restraining a black man but a black WNBA player striking a white superstar in the throat?

Suddenly, the moral machinery becomes less efficient. The referees miss it. The league responds later. The commentators explain. The defenders contextualize. The public is asked not to notice too much.

But we do notice.

We notice that Clark is not merely guarded. She is battered. We notice that punishment often comes after public outrage rather than during the game. We notice that the league seems oddly embarrassed by the very player who has made it more relevant than ever. We notice that when excellence appears in the wrong demographic package, the apostles of equity become strangely tolerant of abuse.

RELATED: Caitlin Clark gets fist to the throat as WNBA primed to explode: ‘She’s a straight white basketball player’

Justin Casterline/Getty Images

This does not mean every foul against Clark is a racial incident. Basketball is physical. Stars get hit. Great players attract aggressive defense.

But the pattern surrounding Clark has become hard to ignore, and so has the ideological atmosphere in which it is interpreted. When a society is trained to see whiteness as a moral defect, it should not be surprised when white excellence is treated as something to be punished rather than admired.

DEI has trained institutions to cultivate suspicion, bitterness, and selective compassion based on skin color and sexuality. It has trained people to blame their problems on abstractions rather than repent of their vices. It has trained the public to redistribute honor and resentment according to race.

Its hope is not in virtue but in power, not in truth but in control, not in love of neighbor but in the forced rearrangement of social goods around resentment.

Caitlin Clark has become the face of DEI abuse because she exposes the lie. She shows that excellence is not reducible to privilege. She shows that work counts. She shows that talent must be disciplined. She shows that the public will still respond to greatness when it sees it.

And for that, she must be punished.

The throat strike was not merely a foul. It was a parable. It showed what resentment does when it cannot refute excellence. It tries to silence it, intimidate it, and make it pay for existing.

We should learn the lesson. DEI, whether it appears as decolonizing, social justice, critical race theory, BLM activism, or “inclusive excellence,” is not a path to justice. It is a catechism of resentment.

It does not teach us to love our neighbor. It teaches us to hate by skin color.

The answer is public rejection of DEI in all its forms.

​Caitlin clark, Critical race theory, Equity, Opinion & analysis, Sophie cunningham, Whiteness, Wnba, Black lives matter, Racism, Diversity equity inclusion, Lesbians, Derek chauvin, George floyd 

Last week, the Supreme Court voted for the federal government’s ability to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria — and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) isn’t having it.

“We saw today the Supreme Court make a decision that is putting so many people’s lives in jeopardy. And I just came back from a rally with 1199 as I stood alongside a number of Haitian New Yorkers who are concerned about what this means for their status in our city,” Mamdani began in a video statement.

“And frankly, this city, the one that we love, is one that has been built by so many from so many different parts of the world. And that includes our Haitian brothers and sisters, our Syrian brothers and sisters. And we stand here ready to be in solidarity with all of those who are concerned by today’s decision,” he said.

“Now, what that means when it comes to our city is if you are worried about what this means for your status, if you’re worried about what this means for your family, I would encourage you to call our Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs hotline,” he added.

“Notice when the Supreme Court goes on their side, you absolutely must positively follow it. But if it doesn’t go their way, well, then they have all kinds of NGOs that come out of the woodwork to subvert,” Glenn comments.

“Is New York part of the United States or not? Because I’m fine with it. Cut it off … not one federal dollar goes to New York City. I am fine with that,” he continues.

Glenn points out that behind Mamdani is a flag, but it’s not the American flag.

“I just saw a rainbow flag behind him … so he’s got that flag,” Glenn says, explaining that the mayor is threatening “rebellion.”

And President Donald Trump appears to be taking notice.

“The Communists are finally making their move. I’ve been waiting and preparing for this for a long time,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“I mean, that makes me happy,” Glenn adds.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Glenn beck, Zohran mamdani, Supreme court, New york city, Immigration, Haiti, Syria, Asylum, The glenn beck program