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.

RELATED: Famed neuroscientist claims he’s disproven free will — but his peers say he failed miserably

RDB/Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

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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​Science, Technology, Brains, Horror, Yale university, Drug, Pharmaceuticals, Experiments, Disease, Health, Politics 

If there is a single idea that President Donald Trump holds with conviction, it is that the 2020 election was stolen.

Millions of Americans agree with him. How it was stolen, and by whom, is still being investigated six years later. That is a problem, because another national election arrives this fall, and Americans deserve an answer as to whether the way we now conduct elections can actually produce honest results.

Normal legislative remedies have failed. Congress has not passed the SAVE Act to ensure that only citizens vote, nor does it appear likely it will. It has done nothing about mass mail-in balloting or the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. Yet these are precisely the parts of the system that millions of Americans no longer trust — and for good reason.

The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong.

Consider what happened this past April. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell summoned the chief executives of America’s largest banks to an unannounced meeting, alarmed by a new artificial-intelligence model capable of finding and exploiting security flaws faster than any human defender could patch them.

If the men charged with protecting the nation’s financial system feel compelled to convene Wall Street on short notice over what artificial intelligence now makes possible, our election systems — built with similar computer technology but with far less security — are open to the same threat and worse.

Our electronic voting systems

For most of American history, Americans voted on paper ballots, counted by human beings, watched by other human beings. Electronic voting promised speed and accuracy. What it delivered is elections that take weeks instead of a day, accuracy that is openly in doubt, and a counting process that has lost the transparency a republic requires.

Citing proprietary software, the major vendors have become black boxes. The public is told to trust the output. Oversight is inadequate, and skepticism is the rational response.

The deeper problem is the very idea that voting and tabulation should be done electronically. The major suppliers — Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems (now Liberty Vote), and Hart InterCivic — all record and tabulate American votes on networked digital equipment running proprietary software. The vulnerability is, in part, that many of the electronic components are made in communist China. But even if all the components were made in the United States, they are not immune to a remote intrusion, a firmware exploit, or a software supply-chain attack.

The vulnerability is the architecture itself: an opaque, software-driven counting process exposed, directly or indirectly, to any determined bad actor, most especially a nation-state adversary. That is not a vulnerability at the margin. It is a structural compromise of the most sensitive function of self-government.

This is not theoretical. The People’s Liberation Army fields a cyber force approaching one million men, and American critical infrastructure is one of its principal targets. In 2019, federal officials seized a Chinese-built power transformer destined for Colorado; analysis at Sandia National Laboratory revealed what appeared to be a hardware back door enabling remote disablement.

In 2023, Microsoft identified Volt Typhoon, a Chinese campaign pre-positioning malware inside U.S. critical infrastructure to enable sabotage. To imagine that our election systems are immune to the same treatment is folly, more so now that the aforementioned use of artificial intelligence has become another weapon in the adversary’s arsenal.

Some will point to the recent Reuters account of a federal examination of Dominion machines seized from Puerto Rico, in which investigators reportedly found no Venezuelan code and only one chip sourced from China. They will conclude that the foreign-component concern has been overstated. But that misses the point entirely.

The question is not whether a particular batch of machines, examined on one occasion, contained components from a designated adversary. The question is whether a computerized voting system, however sourced and however audited, can be defended against the cyber capabilities of a nation-state intelligence service.

The honest answer is no. The same Chinese cyber force that pre-positioned malware in our power grid, water systems, and ports does not require a chip stamped in Shenzhen to reach an American voting machine. It requires only that the machine exist, be connected to a network at some point in its life, and run software that can be updated. All three conditions are met.

RELATED: John Cornyn’s defeat could be the end of the GOP establishment

Antranik Tavitian/Bloomberg/Getty Images

New evidence

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has declassified the Jan. 15, 2020, National Intelligence Council memorandum “Vulnerabilities in U.S. 2020 Election Infrastructure,” which judged that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all had “the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.”

Senior officials briefed President Trump in February 2020. The public was never told. Subsequent declassified memos indicate that Chinese actors gained access to voter-registration databases in 12 to 18 states. Gabbard has opened a probe into allegations that intelligence officials suppressed this evidence, kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, and hid it from Congress.

This was a serious misrepresentation by members of the Intelligence Community, especially since the Chinese Communist Party declared a “People’s War” against the United States in May 2019 in response to President Trump’s efforts to halt its theft of American intellectual property.

Communist China, which spends roughly $20 billion a year on intelligence and influence operations inside the United States, has every interest, as a matter of high government policy, in who sits in the Oval Office.

The motive could not be plainer. A second Trump term meant continued tariffs, continued enforcement against Chinese IP theft, continued pressure on Huawei, ZTE, and the Chinese semiconductor industry, and a hardening U.S. posture across the Indo-Pacific. A Biden administration meant the reversal of all of it.

Consider the numbers. Obama received 69 million votes in 2008. Clinton received 66 million in 2016. Biden received 81 million in 2020. A 15 million-vote surge for the least charismatic Democrat in living memory cannot be explained by enthusiasm.

The January 2020 assessment noted that “adversaries could also use the registration data … to tailor other interference or influence efforts.” It is well within the realm of possibility that communist China, armed with the names on those rolls, mounted an industrial-scale effort to produce counterfeit ballots indistinguishable from genuine ones and therefore votes for Joe Biden.

Such a possibility must at least be entertained. Otherwise, one is left to ask the obvious question no one in Washington wants to ask: Why did communist China hack into those voter databases in the first place?

Can elections be secured?

Congress will not act. Blue states will not reform their mail-in practices or replace their electronic systems. Securing federal elections therefore falls to the president in his role as chief magistrate. Two executive orders are needed even if they will be challenged in court.

The first is an emergency declaration outlawing electronic voting machines in federal elections, on the grounds that any networked, software-driven counting system is inherently vulnerable to nation-state cyberattack and cannot, under current conditions, deliver an election the public can verify. Executive Order 13848 from 2018 recognized the threat of foreign interference but triggers only after the fact.

America cannot afford after-the-fact remedies.

The second would require, since the electronic voting machines would no longer be used, federal elections to be conducted on paper ballots, hand-counted by human beings observed by other human beings, with photo ID, accurate voter rolls, election-day voting, and mail-in ballots reserved for the military and the genuinely confined. The counting would be live streamed. The result would be the most transparent election in American history.

States today hold the constitutional delegation to conduct elections, and ideally, they would administer such a system themselves. Given the political divide, many will refuse. One alternative is for the federal government — preferably the National Guard, federalized and operating under each state’s adjutant general — to administer the election directly.

Critics will invoke Article I, Section 4, which empowers Congress to alter the times, places, and manner of federal elections. That route would be preferable if our political system were not broken. Others will invoke states’ rights. But states do not have rights. Citizens have natural rights, and states are obliged to defend them. When states fail to defend the most basic right of a self-governing people – the right to a fair election – the federal government has the duty to act.

RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs

Elen11/Getty Images

The country’s critical infrastructure, which includes our election system, falls under the Department of Homeland Security. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Election Assistance Commission sit in the executive branch. The notion that the federal government has no role in federal elections is plainly wrong.

The problem is that those agencies are not currently equipped to defend against a nation-state cyber adversary at this scale. And cybersecurity against communist China is beyond the capacity of any individual state government acting alone.

If federal authorities had actionable intelligence that a cyberattack was going to occur on America’s electronic voting systems during a federal election but did not have the ability to stop it, are they simply to stand aside and let the attack occur?

The commonsense approach would be to find a method of conducting the election that was not vulnerable to cyberattack. That is precisely why the president’s executive order is so urgently needed.

The choice at hand

As Director Gabbard’s declassifications confirm, China has gained access to the voter-registration data that defines our electorate. No election conducted on networked computers that a hostile intelligence service has the demonstrated capacity to breach, and on voter rolls that service has already breached, can deliver the legitimacy a republic requires.

Paper ballots, hand-counted, observed in the open, can. However controversial it may sound, it is the only way to ensure a fair election for the American people.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Election security, 2020 election, China, Russia, Election interference, Dominion voting systems, Trump, Foreign interference, Federalized elections, Opinion & analysis 

World-renowned director Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a big-budget epic adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem that follows Odysseus’ perilous journey home after the Trojan War. Set to release this July, the film sparked scandal the moment marketing began.

Not only is Helen of Troy, who is described as a fair-skinned Greek woman in the original text, played by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o, but Elliot (formerly Ellen) Paige, a biological woman who started identifying as a man in 2020, plays a male character in the film. Although her specific role is unknown, one viral theory claims that she will play the mighty Achilles — the greatest warrior in all of Greek mythology.

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre was surprised and disappointed when he learned about the direction Nolan’s “Odyssey” would take.

Nolan is “a man whose work has often been described as conservative or even reactionary,” he tells libertarian author and political activist James Keena.

As one of the greatest film directors of the modern age, Nolan, MacIntyre argues, “would have had the authority to tell a studio no” if it was pushing woke ideologies, like race and gender swapping.

“Why is it so hard for even some of the most stalwart directors like Christopher Nolan to avoid this trap?” he asks Keena.

“This is an ongoing assault on Western civilization and the norms of Western civilization. When you look at the story of ‘The Odyssey,’ it’s part of Greek literature. That is one of the foundational things in Western thought,” Keena replies.

He explains that Homer’s central hero, Odysseus, is the kind of character that progressive thinkers detest. He’s “a very strong, type A male personality” who’s on a mission to return to his “nuclear family” and “re-establish law and order” in his kingdom of Ithaca, where suitors have invaded in his absence to steal what’s rightfully his.

“You can see why it sort of conflicts with what the ethos is now as to what a family should be, what a male should be like,” says Keena.

MacIntyre agrees, highlighting how Odysseus is a prime example of the patriarch archetype — the husband, father, and king who endures extreme hardship in order to return home and restore order to his household and kingdom.

“You want to, if you’re a radical leftist, undermine those things that kind of hold together the American or the Western identity,” he says.

But there’s an even deeper (and darker) reality at play in Nolan’s woke “Odyssey,” says Keena.

“When you look at the collectivist group of philosophies Marxism, socialism, communism, they can’t tolerate Western civilization or the concept of America,” he says.

Their unifying objective, he explains, is to “attack it, destroy it, replace it” by infiltrating every institution.

“And so what we’re seeing on all levels, not just about movies or literature, but education, music, anything that you can pick out in society right now, is essentially a collectivist assault on Western civilization because it has to be destroyed in order to make room for the socialist revolution,” says Keena.

To hear more, watch the full interview above.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist’s commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The auron macintyre show, Auron macintyre, Christopher nolan, The odyssey, James keena, Western civilization 

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.

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Kevin Carter/Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images

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.

​Align cars, Automakers, Automobiles, Biden administration, Canada, National security, North american manufacturing, Supply chains, Technology, Toyota, United states, Lifestyle, Bernie moreno