The latest 'solution' to reckless driving could limit freedom for all of us
If a driver is so dangerous that the government needs to electronically control his car, why is he still allowed to drive?
That's the question New York lawmakers don't seem interested in answering.
Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) recently signed legislation requiring certain repeat speeding offenders to install GPS-based speed-limiting technology in their vehicles. Under the new law, drivers who rack up 16 or more speed-camera violations within a year can be ordered to install an Intelligent Speed Limiter that prevents their vehicle from exceeding posted speed limits. Drivers who refuse can ultimately lose their vehicle registration.
Reckless legislation
At first glance, the proposal sounds reasonable. Most Americans agree that chronic reckless drivers should face serious consequences. But the real question is not whether dangerous drivers deserve punishment. The real question is why someone with 16 speeding violations still has driving privileges in the first place.
New York already has speeding laws. It already has fines, insurance penalties, license points, court appearances, and suspension mechanisms. If a driver has accumulated enough violations to be considered such a serious threat that the state now wants to electronically control their vehicle, then why weren't existing laws sufficient to remove that driver from the road?
That question goes directly to the heart of the issue. Rather than addressing the apparent failure of existing enforcement systems, lawmakers have chosen to create an entirely new layer of technology, surveillance, and government oversight. Instead of asking why repeat offenders remain licensed, they're asking the public to accept the idea that government should have a greater role in controlling privately owned vehicles.
That's a significant shift, and it deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
Pre-crime preview
The legislation relies on Intelligent Speed Assistance technology, commonly referred to as ISA. The system uses GPS data and digital mapping to determine the posted speed limit on a roadway and can prevent a vehicle from exceeding that speed. Unlike traditional enforcement, where a driver is punished after breaking the law, this technology is designed to intervene before the driver can make the decision.
The automotive industry is already moving toward an unprecedented level of connectivity. Modern vehicles collect enormous amounts of information. They receive over-the-air software updates, communicate with manufacturers, monitor driving behavior, and increasingly operate as rolling computers. Consumers have already watched vehicle ownership evolve into something that looks increasingly like a subscription service, with features activated remotely and software determining how products function.
Now government is entering the equation with technology designed to control how a vehicle operates.
That should concern anyone who values personal privacy and consumer rights.
Starting small
Supporters insist the law applies only to a small group of repeat offenders. That's true today. The problem is that government programs rarely remain confined to their original scope. Nearly every major regulatory program begins with a narrowly defined target. Politicians identify a group that few people are willing to defend, implement a new policy, and assure the public that the measure will be limited. Once the infrastructure exists, however, expanding it becomes significantly easier than creating it.
Today the threshold is 16 violations. Tomorrow it could be 10. Later it could be expanded to fleet vehicles, commercial operators, or other categories of drivers. Once the principle is accepted, the debate shifts from whether government should have this authority to how broadly it should be applied.
Imperfect technology
The practical questions surrounding this law are equally troubling. GPS technology is useful, but it is not infallible. Speed-limit databases are not always current. Construction zones change. Temporary restrictions appear. Road conditions evolve faster than mapping systems can update.
What happens when the speed-limit database is wrong? What happens when a roadway has recently changed and the system hasn't been updated? What happens when a driver needs rapid acceleration to avoid an accident?
These are not hypothetical concerns. They are the types of real-world situations automotive engineers consider every day. Yet lawmakers frequently discuss speed-limiting technology as though vehicles operate in a controlled environment where every situation can be anticipated by software. The reality is far more complicated.
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Punishing cars, not drivers
Then there is the issue of fairness.
One of the most overlooked aspects of this legislation is its reliance on camera enforcement. Traditional traffic stops identify the driver. Automated camera systems identify the vehicle. Those are not the same thing. Families share cars. Businesses operate fleets. Vehicles are borrowed, rented, and loaned every day. Yet policymakers continue to build enforcement systems around the vehicle itself rather than the individual behind the wheel.
That distinction matters because accountability should be directed at the person responsible for the behavior, not simply the machine involved.
There is also a financial component that deserves attention. Installation costs for these systems can run into the thousands of dollars, with additional fees for monitoring, maintenance, administration, and compliance. Government officials often frame these costs as penalties for offenders, but every new regulatory program creates opportunities for vendors, contractors, software providers, installers, and administrators.
Whenever government mandates a new technology, there is almost always an industry waiting to benefit from it.
New York is hardly alone in pursuing this approach. Washington State has adopted its own Intelligent Speed Assistance requirements for certain offenders. Virginia and Washington, D.C., have moved in a similar direction, while Illinois lawmakers have advanced proposals involving mandatory speed-limiting technology. What once appeared to be an isolated experiment is rapidly becoming a national trend.
As more states adopt similar programs, lawmakers should answer a basic question: Why create a technological workaround instead of enforcing the penalties already available under existing law?
Accountability ... or control?
The answer may be uncomfortable. Suspending licenses removes the driver from the system. Technological monitoring keeps the driver in the system while creating new layers of oversight and control. One approach focuses on accountability. The other focuses on management.
Those are fundamentally different philosophies.
New York's "super speeder" law is being sold as a narrowly targeted safety measure. Maybe that's how it begins. The larger concern is where it ends. Once government gains the authority to electronically regulate how privately owned vehicles operate, future expansions become much easier to justify.
The most important question isn't whether a driver with 16 violations deserves punishment. It's whether Americans are comfortable creating the technological infrastructure that allows government to control how a privately owned vehicle operates.
Today, lawmakers call it a solution for super speeders. Tomorrow, it could become something much broader.
The backlash against AI reveals it’s a terrible scapegoat
One day, not long ago — no one can recall exactly when — AI dropped from the sky, a deus ex machina springing fully formed from the head of, well, maybe its own head.
Or so it seems.
The context around the technology matters even more than the content.
In reality, AI’s origin story runs much deeper. So does the backlash against it. Both look stranger than they are because our shared memory of the recent past keeps shrinking.
AI has been a long time coming. In the mid-20th century, when human imagination still outran human and machine memory, artists produced vivid narratives about supercomputers and superintelligence. Scientists and engineers did the same, especially after World War II. Go back and read atomic-age Vannevar Bush, who mentored the namesake of Anthropic’s Claude, and the surprise is not that AI arrived. The surprise is that it took so long.
So why has AI produced such powerful future shock?
Not long ago, Americans rushed to embrace new technology. Yes, we were naïve about social media. We underestimated how people and governments would peep into our personal cyberspace. But when social media exposed our own questionable collective character, the reaction was not fury. Troubled? Yes. Shocked? No.
Even now, despite evidence that smartphones have entrenched bad habits and unhealthy temptations, we broadly regard the phone-and-app ecosystem as manageable. The trade-offs seem worth the bother if we clean up our act and make responsible choices.
AI is different. For millions participating in the backlash, AI differs from smartphones and social media not merely in power and scope, but in perceived injustice. Smartphones may rot our brains slowly. According to the backlash, even moderate AI use will swiftly destroy society.
The history we long to forget
Left-wing critics describe this destruction in terms of justice and the human nature Marx called our “species being.” Right-wing critics reach for the language of spiritual illness and stolen souls. The claim remains roughly the same: AI uniquely threatens our humanity, so the conversation about how to respond need not account for anything else.
Introduce any complicating factor outside AI and its creators, and critics may accuse you of distraction, dissembling, excuse-making, or apologizing for a permanent underclass — perhaps even human extinction.
I understand why so many people are so freaked out and so unwilling to pull focus away from AI. But the biggest reason lies outside AI and the AI debate.
Look at the arc Americans traveled with smartphones and social media. These transformative technologies became ubiquitous around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Thanks to “innovative” monetary policy and frantic institutional improvisation, the world avoided penury, and technological development kept moving along its established trajectory.
Many Americans surely spent more time online as economic slack and stagnation spread after the crisis. Yet that shock was nothing like the blow that came during the COVID lockdowns.
Over those two decades, America’s fundamentals became dangerously unsound. Governance embraced can-kicking, corruption, patronage, fraud, and self-dealing legerdemain that cooked the country as much as it cooked the books. But the populist backlash — as veterans of Occupy Wall Street, the Ron Paul “rEVOLution,” or the Bernie Bro movement will remember — remained contained and controlled.
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At least until Trump came along.
Even during Trump’s first term, few Americans felt like sitting ducks in the shadow of cataclysm. Times were tough, the middle class felt squeezed, and the dollar didn’t go as far. But those pressures had become baseline dynamics — the same problem set Ross Perot once explained with his chicken-foot pointer in populist third-party infomercials.
The lockdown era obliterated that holding pattern. It also wiped out many people’s ability to process the new normal. The socioeconomic malaise accelerated into territory so unsustainable that people simply stopped trying to understand it.
They blocked it out like an event too awful to remain in our memory.
Runaway inflation. Church closures. Rising living costs. Soaring entry costs for upward mobility. Devalued savings. Exhausted savings. The mathematical impossibility of building a middle-class life across family, education, and wealth formation within the given number of workweeks in a year.
That was the comprehensive catastrophe.
And it unfolded before robust AI asserted itself on the social scene.
Rebirth and return
That means we cannot understand the AI backlash unless we recognize that the context around the technology matters even more than the content.
For many millions across the political spectrum, the American dream was already destroyed before they could form real judgments about AI. In a national atmosphere of spiritual sickness, financial insolvency, economic weakness, and social disintegration, AI appeared as the final blow — especially as AI leaders themselves forecast the end of paychecks, jobs, careers, and perhaps humanity itself.
Deep down, many Americans feel that the habits, institutions, and confidence that might have allowed them to participate fruitfully in the AI era were stripped away years ago. AI seems big, alien, and wrong. Worse, it seems forced on them at a moment of unprecedented weakness, after any hope of recovery has already vanished.
Because they now feel they can fight the “clankers” and their makers in a way they cannot fight their own downward mobility and immiseration, AI has become the perfect scapegoat.
And that is the danger.
Killing AI will not regrow our spiritual and social roots. In fact, our structural situation has deteriorated so badly that leaning harder on the machines than we otherwise would may now be necessary.
We need a financial reboot. We need to dismantle the governance system that sucked us dry. We need to shift from overextended sole superpower to sustainable civilization-state fast enough to avoid the geopolitical spike pit between those two conditions.
Without those urgent needs, we would have more time and room to maneuver on AI. But we do need those things, and we do not have much choice or time — at least not if we want to hold the country together long enough to give Americans back the freedom to regrow their spiritual and social shoots.
The real way. The slow way. The human way.
Treating AI as the ultimate scapegoat for all our ills will distort and delay that process. Treating AI as the ultimate savior will derail and damage us in the opposite direction.
Nor will the fantasy of curing our national trauma by using AI to solve all human problems restore American life as a challenge worth living. Our new technology can be much more, and much less, than a replacement plan for people reduced to polyp status.
That is the opening for a constructive approach to AI that most of us can ultimately live with.
$965 billion AI giant warns we need to hit the brakes — but will China?
Anthropic helped build the AI race. Now, it's warning the finish line may be coming faster than anyone expected.
The company, recently valued at a staggering $965 billion, says its latest AI systems are approaching dangerous capabilities that could fundamentally change the future of technology, prompting calls for a worldwide slowdown in frontier AI development.
“They did this because it’s getting close to improving itself without human help,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray explains on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”
“In April, Claude ran a full AI research project completely on its own. Humans picked the topic and then it just did it. Claude came up with every experiment, ran every test, and delivered the results. Two human researchers spent a full week on the same problem,” he continues.
While the researchers only made it 23% of the way there, Claude made it 97% of the way there.
“Claude Mythos preview is now 52 times faster than a skilled human at improving AI training code. So it can fix its own training code. The same task takes a human four to eight hours. Claude does it better. Claude already writes 80% of Anthropic's own code,” Gray says.
While in March 2024, Claude could reportedly handle a four-minute task on its own; now it handles 12-hour tasks.
“That number doubles every four months,” Gray explains, adding that “week-long tasks are expected by 2027.”
“So when they call for a development pause, I mean we’re caught between a rock and a hard place, right, on this technology. No one wants to pause or slow down on this because there’s so much at stake,” he continues.
“There’s money, there’s advancement, there’s so much going on here ... and they can’t risk falling behind others. Worse than companies not being willing to do this, China certainly isn’t going to pause,” he adds.
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The one word that can help you use technology — without letting it use you
Technology. I’m not a “technology writer” by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself writing about it a lot.
I don’t opine about the next breakthroughs in AI or the newest generation of iPads that are set to be released at the end of Q3. Are there new iPads coming out in Q3? I don’t know. I’m not a technology writer.
But it is the most viable and scalable path forward in a world oversaturated with digital technology.
But I do think a lot about the role of technology in our lives. About the way we live differently alongside it and how we are shaped in strange ways by it.
Same but different
In some ways, it’s a very 21st-century concern. Technology — digital technology in particular — has been advancing at an unparalleled rate in our century, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing.
But, of course, technology didn't begin with the digital. Cars are technology. The washing machine was once cutting-edge technology. Same for the printing press, the mechanical clock, and the wheel. Technology has been around, advancing, and disrupting for a long time.
We live in a post-assembly-line world. That term — the assembly line — isn’t even particularly interesting to us. Same with the Industrial Revolution. That’s just something boring we learned about (and then promptly forgot) in middle school.
But the Industrial Revolution and the assembly line were quite radical at one point. They changed the way people work, and they disrupted society. A fair share of the carnage of the 20th century is due, in part, to the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution.
The train changed the way we move, the printing press changed how we learn, the telephone made us closer even when we were farther, the radio made mass society possible, the television made books less relevant, and the invention of the washing machine — yes, the mundane washing machine — played some role in the social revolutions of the 1960s.
All-consuming
In this sense, the age of AI is no different from the steam age. In another sense, however, it is unlike any technological revolution we have ever experienced: far more immersive and all-consuming than anything that came before.
Because it is more possible than ever to always be connected to everyone on earth in a perpetual state of latent distraction and worry, our time presents unique challenges for all thinking people who want to live a decent life that might be be hard to recognize to those who came before us.
For a few, the answer is blowing it all up. For many more, the answer is embracing every single aspect of every new form of digital technology imaginable like a dog lapping up fresh water. Both are wrong. The extreme answers are often the most alluring because they only require addressing one decision point. This way or that way? Once you settle on which, you just scale it out the whole way and set the cruise control.
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Split the difference
Yes, as with most things, the middle path is the way forward. I know, it’s not sexy, and it’s not at all alluring. Moderation never is. But it is the most viable and scalable path forward in a world oversaturated with digital technology.
Intentional technology use — that’s what it is, and that’s what we will call it. That first word is the key word: intentional. Most of the drift into toxic technology consumption and brain rot is due to being less than intentional in terms of how one uses technology.
Defaulting to “just using the phone” or “just asking Grok” or “just scrolling” because you have some time to waste. Concluding that watching more, streaming more, scrolling more, and outsourcing more of your decision-making to technology because there isn’t anything inherently wrong or immoral about it.
That kind of unintentional approach to technology can quickly lead to surrendering all of your agency to the bots. As the gamers would put it, you go from being a player to one of those automatons the player meets along the way: a non-player character.
Best intentions
To use technology intentionally is to ask if we can do it ourselves before enlisting digital help. Intentional technology use is asking ourselves if we like ourselves when we use some product, app, or digital service — and, if the answer is no, changing course.
Intentional technology use is setting aside time apart from technology so we can remember what it means to be purely human. Intentional technology use is about balancing convenience and thoughtfulness. It’s about managing the speed of the modern world without losing the pace of organic human society.
Intentional technology use isn’t about making everyone’s choices regarding technology the exact same. People will decide differently. Everyone’s lives won’t be alike. That’s a feature, not a bug.
The key is that first word — intention. Without that, we're just floating down the stream, pushed wherever the currents of technological progress take us. The 21s century is unlikely to become less complicated. To thrive as humans in this most disruptive of times, we must keep asking ourselves the fundamental question: Who are we, and who do we want to be?
Teen takeover planned for Florida beach thwarted; cops say they used social media against organizers
Police said a teen takeover intended to take place at a Florida beach was thwarted after cops turned the tables on the organizers — and used social media against them.
Authorities in St. Johns County told Fox News they squashed the planned event after finding social media posts encouraging youths to gather at St. Augustine Beach for what officials said was shaping up to be a chaotic and violent gathering.
'You don't know if it's going to be 10 people, 100 people, or 1,000 people ... showing up, so it's extremely taxing on our resources, especially being a small police department like we are.'
"This wasn't an invite for a teen party or a beach gathering. This was an invitation to come take over our beach and create chaos and possibly leading to violence," St. Augustine Beach Police Chief Daniel Carswell told Fox News on Monday.
Authorities pre-emptively canceled the planned takeover in the interest of public safety — and to send a signal to those planning to participate, the news network noted.
"[We did this] to put everybody on alert that if they come, if they're going to respond to this invitation, there's going to be zero tolerance here in St. Augustine Beach," Carswell added to Fox News.
St. Johns County Sheriff Robert Hardwick said targeting suspicious social media chatter began with analyzing community reports and monitoring organizers' attempts to act behind the scenes, the news network said: "The organizers started moving it around, basically on posters, trying to be strategically behind the scenes, trying to get people to bite into the actual event itself. And again, we just don't tolerate this garbage in St. Johns County."
Carswell added to Fox News that he couldn't recall any prior attempts to stage such an event in St. Johns County but highlighted other instances across the country, including some in Florida.
"These things are spread ... via TikTok and social media," he noted to the news network.
"You don't know if it's going to be 10 people, 100 people, or 1,000 people ... showing up, so it's extremely taxing on our resources, especially being a small police department like we are," he continued.
Police posted on Facebook their response to one teen takeover announcement, noting the following "PSA":
The planned event is not permitted and has been canceled by the St. Augustine Beach Police Department. While we welcome and encourage everyone to enjoy our community and beaches, any unlawful gathering, criminal activity, or disturbance of the peace will be met with immediate enforcement action. To ensure the safety of our residents and visitors, there will be a substantial law enforcement presence at and around the St. Augustine Beach Pier tomorrow afternoon. We appreciate the public's cooperation in helping maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for all.
A violent teen takeover in Florida last month led to the arrests of suspects as young as 12, officials said, adding that Tampa Police officers arrested 22 people in connection with the incident in the area of Curtis Hixon Park, which police said resulted in "significant disruptions, fights, and other issues."
In April, fights erupted and sheriff's deputies were hurt after more than 1,000 teenagers descended upon ICON Park in Orlando as part of a planned takeover.
Tampa Police added that with summer approaching, the growing "takeover" trend has become a concern for communities across the country — not just in Tampa.
Indeed, a massive brawl broke out in a Washington, D.C., Chipotle restaurant last month — with chairs being thrown and used as weapons — just one day after U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced she would prosecute parents of youths taking part in teen takeovers, WJLA-TV reported.
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You Should Control Your Child’s Phone — Not Silicon Valley
Big Tech has lawyers, lobbyists, and limitless resources. Parents have the law, the Constitution, and the truth. That should be enough.Disembodied human brains kept 'alive' for drug testing by controversial American startup
Several years ago, a team of researchers obtained numerous pig brains from a slaughterhouse and revived them off-site for experimentation purposes. That team has since moved up the food chain. Now it obtains human donors' brains, restores their functions, and uses them to test experimental drugs.
Bexorg, a Connecticut-based biotech startup spun out of Yale University, boasts about having created a "platform that leverages the untouched potential of nature's most complex and enduring mystery: the human brain."
'It’s a remarkable brain bank.'
Whereas other researchers might be limited to experimenting on lab-grown, human pseudo-brains or cell cultures, the team at Bexorg meddles with "full mature, intact, and isolated brains for days on end" with the stated aim of advancing brain disease therapies.
Unlike the company's slick pitch, the reality appears to be something of a horror show. After all, the over 700 brains that have been subjected to experimentation at Bexorg so far were apparently far from inert.
Bexorg takes human brains from their newly deceased donors' bodies, places them in what are effectively vats, and feeds them liters of blood substitute and other fluids that provide oxygen from an artificial lung and carry away waste to a fake kidney. The tubes that carry the sustaining fluids are connected to blood vessels in the brain via four plastic ports.
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According to the peer-reviewed academic journal Science, the company's proprietary life-support system BrainEx keeps the disembodied brains alive and preserves their key functions so that they can metabolize experimental drugs and react to other stimuli.
After roughly 24 hours in a state of drugged limbo, donors' brains are cut up into hundreds of pieces for further study.
Although the brains are alive and reactive for the benefit of "drug discovery," Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja has stated that "higher-level brain functions are not restored."
According to a 2019 study in which Vrselja and other members of what became the Bexorg team used their technology to revive pig brains obtained from a food processing facility, "The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4h of global anoxia/ischemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Indeed, quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions."
To ensure against the re-emergence of consciousness among the subjects of their "wet-lab" experiments, researchers suppress the human brains' electrical activity with anesthetics, specifically the drug propofol.
Propofol apparently causes brain activity to become unstable until the brain loses consciousness.
"The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness," Brenand Parent, a bioethicist from New York University Langone Health who sits on Bexorg's board, told Science.
Despite the company's reassurances and use of multiple measures to block neuronal activity, some have raised serious ethical concerns about Bexorg's technology, which initially developed with the help of funding through the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. A source familiar told Blaze News that the company is not presently receiving NIH funding.
"This is brand-new, and there's no kind of institutional oversight," Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham told ScienceAlert in 2019 regarding the earlier experiments on pig brains.
"This is not animal research, because the brain comes to the researchers from an already dead animal," continued Latham. "But if consciousness were somehow induced in the brain, we don't have ethics committees … that are constituted to even think about how to do the kinds of trade-offs you do when you do research on human subjects or on animals."
Vrselja claimed in a December 2025 study published in the Alzheimer's Association's journal, Alzheimer's and Dementia, that the 5-year-old startup's "perfusion‐based postmortem brain model can recapitulate the complexity of the brain at the cellular and systems level."
The December study claimed further that "utilizing human disease brains as a preclinical model promises to substantially increase the probability of success in developing new therapies for AD."
Bexorg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
Bruna Bellaver, a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, told Science that BrainEx is "a huge step up from mouse models."
Bruce Car, the chief science officer at Biohaven, one of Bexorg's collaborators, has used roughly 130 of the Bexorg-sustained brains to test drugs. Car told Science that one of the drugs, the intended use of which is to prevent toxic proteins from building up in the brain, didn't perform as desired in a mouse, but worked in the disembodied human brains at a lower-than-expected dose. This apparently saved Biohaven a year of development.
"It’s a remarkable brain bank," said MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who instead uses pseudo-brains grown from human stem cells.
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Cheap Chinese cars: Trojan horse built to undermine US security?
Why are Washington and Detroit so worried about Chinese automakers?
Most Americans assume the answer is cheap cars. But lower-priced imports are only the visible part of China's advantage.
Companies like BYD aren't simply building vehicles. They're building integrated ecosystems that include batteries, software, and charging infrastructure.
The bigger story is who controls the batteries, software, supply chains, and technology that increasingly determine who wins — and loses — the future of the auto business.
Hard line
To control a nation's car industry is to control an industry that sits at the center of manufacturing, technology, and national security.
That's the assumption behind Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno's proposal to block Chinese vehicles and components entirely — and it signals a turning point. His message is blunt: Chinese automakers should not gain a foothold in the United States. This isn't an incremental policy adjustment. It's a hard line.
The automotive industry isn't some niche corner of the economy. It accounts for roughly 22% of trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, making it one of the most important industries on the continent. And now it's being challenged by a global competitor that plays by very different rules.
While the United States tightens restrictions, the international response remains divided. Europe has imposed steep tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, arguing they are being dumped below cost. Canada has taken a different approach, agreeing to allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into its market.
That divergence matters because supply chains don't stop at national borders.
Washington is already signaling that any attempt to route Chinese vehicles through Canada or other backdoor channels will face scrutiny. The message is clear: If Chinese vehicles can't enter directly, they won't be allowed to enter indirectly.
Losing control
Nor is this happening in isolation. The Biden administration already laid much of the groundwork through executive actions targeting Chinese vehicle imports over concerns about software, hardware, and data security.
Those concerns aren't hypothetical. U.S. officials have confirmed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have infiltrated critical infrastructure systems.
Now apply that reality to modern vehicles, which increasingly function as rolling computers. The issue isn't simply where a vehicle is assembled. It's who controls the software, connectivity, and data flowing through it.
That's why Moreno's proposal focuses not only on vehicles themselves, but also on software integration, component sourcing, and corporate partnerships.
That may be a step in the right direction, but the auto industry itself is now pushing for even tougher restrictions.
Fast lane
Major industry groups representing automakers, suppliers, and dealers argue that simply moving Chinese production onto U.S. soil doesn't solve the underlying problem if the technology, software, and supply chains remain controlled elsewhere. That leaves policymakers weighing the benefits of investment and jobs against concerns over long-term dependence on foreign-controlled technology.
At the same time, the global auto industry is changing faster than many manufacturers anticipated.
Toyota executives have warned that the industry's traditional cost structures and manufacturing assumptions may no longer be sufficient in a rapidly changing market. This isn't about minor adjustments. It's about adapting to a fundamentally different competitive landscape.
Chinese companies dominate battery production, accounting for roughly 80% of global output. Batteries are the most expensive component in most electric vehicles and increasingly important in hybrids as well. Control over battery production translates directly into pricing power and manufacturing flexibility.
Companies like BYD aren't simply building vehicles. They're building integrated ecosystems that include batteries, software, and charging infrastructure. That level of vertical integration allows them to move faster and often at lower cost than competitors relying on fragmented global supply chains.
Cashing in their chips
Technology companies are also entering the automotive space with a different mindset. They're not burdened by decades of manufacturing habits or legacy systems. They're focused on software, speed, and scale. Watch companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm, which are becoming increasingly important players in automotive technology.
For traditional automakers, the challenge is no longer just building a better vehicle. It's building vehicles faster, cheaper, and smarter while navigating regulations that seem to change with every election cycle.
That uncertainty has become a growing frustration across the industry. Executives increasingly complain about regulatory whiplash that makes long-term planning difficult.
Two years ago, the industry was being pushed toward full electrification. Today, many automakers are shifting resources toward hybrids as consumer demand evolves. Those strategic pivots are expensive.
Hyundai executives have acknowledged that competing directly with Chinese manufacturers on price is likely a losing proposition. Their strategy is to compete on quality, brand reputation, and dealer networks.
Price is right
Consumers, however, ultimately care about affordability.
If Chinese manufacturers can consistently deliver competitive vehicles at significantly lower prices, pressure on Western automakers will continue to grow.
That's why this debate isn't going away.
The push to block Chinese vehicles and components is as much about buying time as it is about setting policy. It gives American and allied manufacturers time to strengthen battery production, secure supply chains, and improve their competitive position.
But time alone won't solve the problem.
The United States still possesses enormous advantages in engineering talent, established brands, and one of the strongest dealer networks in the world. Those advantages remain meaningful, but they aren't permanent. They have to be reinforced with competitive products, realistic pricing, and a clear, long-term strategy.
Cars are no longer just transportation. They are increasingly software platforms, data hubs, and strategic industrial assets.
That is why the debate over Chinese vehicles has become far bigger than tariffs or trade policy. The question is whether the United States can remain competitive in an industry being reshaped by technology, batteries, and global supply chains.
Once control of those systems is lost, getting it back becomes far more difficult than anyone expects.
Congress may be quietly seeking to integrate US and Israeli militaries — but critics have taken notice
The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization bill last week.
Section 224, a provision buried hundreds of pages into the $1.15 trillion defense policy legislation that outlines the "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," has generated some controversy on the fringes of Capitol Hill.
'This provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship.'
Committee member Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is among those who rushed to characterize section 224 as benign, stating that it amounts to a "security agreement" that "will allow for the US to leverage advanced Israeli technologies."
Some, however, have expressed concerns that the initiative will effectively mean a politically consequential integration of the U.S. and Israeli militaries along with their respective industrial supports.
The legislative proposal
Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA draft would have the secretary of war designate a Pentagon official to oversee the synchronization of "cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation."
The designee would, among other things,
- identify Israeli-origin or jointly developed technologies that the U.S. could integrate into its systems and programs;
- facilitate the transition of such technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;
- establish "frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry"; and
- promote "joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies."
The section clarifies that the "cooperative efforts" pursued under this technology initiative can be carried out through numerous domains including: counter-unmanned systems; anti-tunneling and subterranean threats; missile and air defense technologies; AI; directed energy; cyber warfare; biotechnology and biomanufacturing; network integration; and defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.
Backlash
Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, claimed in a recent analysis for Responsible Statecraft that "if fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world."
While acknowledging that the U.S. has worked closely "with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan," Freeman said that section 224 would not only "fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future" but afford the foreign power "the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S."
Beyond potentially setting the stage for more Israeli influence over American politics and fusing together the two nations' military-industrial complexes at a time when the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, Freeman — echoing a colleague at the Quincy Institute — suggested that the initiative will shield the relationship from public scrutiny by migrating it from a visible aid vote in Congress "into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal."
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon did not respond to Blaze News' requests for comment.
Responding to Freeman's report, departing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted, "If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor."
"We are a sovereign country," Massie added in a post Rep. Van Orden suggested was the "dumbest possible take."
Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he will introduce an amendment in committee to axe section 224. Khanna noted further that "Trump can't kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social."
A New Policy, the PAC founded in 2024 by a pair of Biden staffers who quit over the administration's support for Israel, is campaigning against section 224.
"At a policy level, this provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship, shifting the leverage we currently hold because of our security assistance to Israel over to the Government of Israel who would be able to hold key [Department of Defense] capabilities hostage through the integration of Israeli technologies into the DOD supply chain," states the PAC's template letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee. "Section 224 also assumes a commonality of national security interests between Israel and the U.S., which, as the current conflict with Iran clearly demonstrates, does not exist."
Code Pink, the leftist group co-founded by former Democrat political activist Jodie Evans, has also seized upon section 224 as a cause du jour, calling upon Congress to reject "US integration with the Israeli military."
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