In an interview over the weekend, Hunter Biden shared some rough news: Joe Biden’s metastatic prostate cancer has spread to “his bones and further.” “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects,” the younger Biden told the BBC. “But he’s still out there.”

Cancer is brutal; our thoughts and prayers are with the former president. Happy Monday.

Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein at 10:00 a.m. EDT today for MAGA Mondays on Substack and YouTube.

Eyes Wide Shut

by William Kristol

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Thus George Orwell. But we’re not yet living in Orwell’s totalitarian society. So the members of our ruling party don’t quite reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. They simply avert their eyes and ears from the evidence around them. They minimize its importance and rationalize its significance. And above all, they do nothing about it.

Ohio Rep. Max Miller’s Republican colleagues are well aware of his behavior. They know of what Sen. Bernie Moreno, his ex-father-in-law, calls “the clear pattern of abuse [Miller] has left in his wake.” They understand why Moreno said that Miller “should not serve in the House of Representatives.” They could easily have spoken up last week and told Miller to leave. They could have said they wouldn’t endorse his re-election. They could have announced they wouldn’t help fund his race.

But Miller wants to stay in the House and on the ballot, and President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have stood by him. And so House Republicans don’t want to deal with the matter. Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, “most of his GOP colleagues in the House refuse to discuss the allegations against him.”

After all, they presumably figure, Miller represents a Republican district, so he may be able to win. He’s wealthy and has announced he’s lending his campaign $1 million, so that should help. And as their speaker has helpfully reminded them, “people have domestic disputes.” Indeed, “It’s part of being flawed humans.”

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, fifty out of fifty-two Republicans voted early Saturday morning to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general. This probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. The GOP-controlled Senate had previously voted to confirm Pam Bondi for that job, along with rubber-stamping other flawed humans like Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth for various positions.

But as conservative lawyer Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, pointed out, in way the vote for Blanche was worse:

The one meaningful difference here is with respect to the others senators could claim they were deferring to POTUS and hoping for the best, with Blanche they’ve seen how he operates in this role, abusing power, and they’ve chosen to ratify it. Craven and despicable.

But what was craven to Nunziata was a privilege to Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the deciding vote in favor of Blanche. Cassidy explained to Margaret Brennan yesterday that “I would read history books and I would read about these great decisions on the Senate floor. . . . The fact that I, Bill Cassidy, was able to do that, I am so privileged, and whenever I just for a second am hit by the gravity of that, and the honor of that, I get emotional.”

Cassidy got emotional about the privilege of casting his historic vote. He chose not to get emotional about Blanche’ s coverup of the Epstein scandal. As Lisa Rubin notes,

Prior to his speech, neither Cassidy nor his staff met with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, despite their repeated entreaties. Notwithstanding that, Cassidy said during his floor speech that among the reasons to support Blanche was that leaving him as an acting AG without Senate confirmation could risk DOJ’s progress on . . . human trafficking.

Perhaps Cassidy agreed with his colleague, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the deciding vote in getting Blanche reported out of committee. When Cornyn was asked to respond to Epstein survivors who said a yes vote on Blanche would have a chilling effect on survivors of sexual assault coming forward, Cornyn replied: “I don’t believe there is anything we could do to assuage them at this point. . . . That’s one of those things that cannot be remedied by a ‘no’ vote.”

So what’s the point, if you’re a Republican senator, of voting against a cabinet nominee central to a sexual assault coverup? What’s the point, if you’re a Republican House member, of speaking up against Max Miller?

I began with the great social democrat George Orwell. I end with the great liberal John Stuart Mill. Mill was concerned about the fate of personal liberty and public spirit in modern democracy. In his 1867 inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, he remarked that “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

But one has to ask: If they do nothing but look on as bad men compass their ends, are they still good men?

Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die

by Andrew Egger

In our lunatic age, you sometimes run into headlines that you know at once will make people lose their minds. So it was this weekend when the internet was informed that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is freezing her eggs.

In a series of Instagram videos, the congresswoman said she had made the decision to “feel more in control of my life,” and had chosen to be public about it “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice,” particularly against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s anti-abortion policies. As she gave herself a hormone shot, she admonished her viewers: “Don’t be weird about this, even though I know you all will be.”

Obviously, she was right. Egg-freezing is an increasingly common procedure—AOC isn’t even the first congresswoman to do it—but MAGA influencers went berserk over the news, with reactions ranging from handwringing to grossly leering.¹

Fertility discourse, understandably but stupidly, tends to go like this. Everyone treats it as just another culture-war cudgel: The right accusing the left of insufficient concern for family formation amid cratering birthrates, the left accusing the right of faking concern over families to try to squish women’s rights. Boring, boring, boring!

So I’m going to sidestep the whole mess and simply use it as an excuse, as I do whenever I get the opportunity, to bring up one of the most impactful things I’ve ever read, which I think everyone should read, which is in no small part responsible for my and my wife’s own decision to start having kids young, which if it were up to me they’d teach in schools: a 2018 article by lefty writer Tom Scocca titled “Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die.”

In our social world, in our cultural class, at our point in history, people are brought up . . . to structure their lives as if time were something a person accumulated. . . .