LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS.

Today in celebrity gossip:  "Cardi B announces she’s expecting her fourth child, first with NFL star Stefon Diggs."

Strong the authenticity is in this one.

The Grammy-winning “I like It” artist is already a mother to three young children — Kulture, eight, Wave, three, and Blossom, one — that she shares with ex-husband, fellow rapper Offset. The former couple began dating in early 2017 before tying the knot in a secret wedding that September. After years of an on-and-off relationship, Cardi filed for divorce a second time in July 2024.

In October 2024, she sparked dating rumors with the 31-year-old New England Patriots wide receiver. They made their first public appearance together as a couple in May at a New York Knicks game.

She has figured out how to keep her spawn in Pampers.

“Now y’all can buy my album, so I can buy Pampers and diapers and all that type of stuff,” Cardi quipped. “I told ya, now go support my album because I’m a mother of four now.”

Her audience?  Maybe not so much.

American Mind's Dan McCarthy summarizes.  "The natural and traditional ties between people are subjected to a constant acid bath." In his view, what the self-styled thought leaders are doing is neither stressing the organism, in the sense of "whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger," nor assisting in the emergence of a fitter organism through mutation, adaptation, and selection. It's maladaptiveness for its own sake. "Outside the family, our culture of celebrity individualism is indistinguishable from underclass irresponsibility."  That's a point going back at least as far as Emmett Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up, wherein what trickled down from Hollywood to the poorer quarters was the bastardy and drug dependence, but in the poorer quarters there are neither expensive fixer lawyers nor cheap illegal immigrant nannies.

Thus, while Cardi is selling albums and the celebrity journalists and influencers will have plenty of baby bump photos to peddle for clicks and subscriptions, her fans in the paradises of the likes of Chicago might be hoping that the food pantry is stocked, that the EBT server doesn't crash at the grocer, that the violent baby-daddy soon to be released from prison will stay away.  And some things never change.  There are still pundits suggesting, in the wake of the disaster that was the Biden-Harris-Walz campaign, that their party isn't McGovernist enough.  That was a foolish argument in 2004, it is no better now.

The problem, dear Poor Man, is that the national Democratic Party has taken the morality out of poverty issues. As in avoiding being "judgemental" about bastardy, drug use, or being foolishly "authentic" is more important than noting the value of a few simple things, such as learning one's sums or being careful about who one gets naked with, or simply showing up, in avoiding to be poor.

It's on Normals to figure out the success sequence, despite the efforts of the sports and entertainment types to pretend it doesn't matter.