A new Gallup poll found that confidence in our institutions is collapsing.  That means that Americans have lost confidence in our government, social, and economic institutions to care for us.  It's about time.

Of the sixteen institutions addressed in the poll, Congress, under the leadership of San Fran Nan, lands at the bottom of the list, with only 7% confidence.  Surprise, surprise.  Maybe Congress should get back to legislating and budgeting — you know, the things that require them to talk across the aisle and find solutions to actual problems.

But instead of doing their actual job, this Congress is focused on calling half of the country a bunch of deplorable insurrectionists, attempting to eliminate the last vestiges of freedom, and running social engineering experiments of which only deranged and misguided atheists would approve.

The award for the institution with the second-lowest confidence goes to television news (11% confidence).  TV news has been on a downward slide ever since Dan Rather declared they were in the "fake but accurate" business.  That would be the business where the actual facts don't matter as long as the narrative sounds good.  Of course, that's just another way of saying the media are a piece of the propaganda machine.

Between "fake news" attacks on Trump and gaslighting for Biden, everybody can see what they're up to, and nobody believes them anymore.  They haven't just lost our confidence; they've also lost their credibility and their influence.  TV news has become the useful idiots who are no longer useful.  Now they're just a bunch of fools who've sacrificed their profession in the furtherance of misguided ideologies, which were destined to crash and burn anyway.  Smart.

Coming in at third from the bottom in our basement of institutional failures is big business (14% confidence).  Only a Wharton-trained CEO could possibly be surprised by this.

A family entertainment mega-corporation decided that it's in the business of sexually grooming juveniles.  Its management is shocked that its customers — reasonable parents — object.

The professional sports complex has hired a stadium full of athletes to lecture us about how evil we and our country are.  But please, keep buying those tickets and t-shirts.

Social media companies, who are in the business of promoting communication between Americans, decided to censor speech they don't agree with — as it turns out, they don't agree with about 50 percent of Americans.

It seems that big business is in the business of everything but business.  This explains why they're not just losing confidence.  They're also losing capital value.

At fourth place in the failure Olympics is the criminal justice system (14% confidence).  This one shouldn't surprise anyone.  Soros-funded prosecutors have decided not to prosecute criminals — as some perverted social reparations scheme.  The Department of Justice is only prosecuting Republicans — because it can. The local police are more proactive about hassling concerned citizens than confronting active shooters.  As a result, civilization has devolved to the point where you can't go to the grocery in any major city without performing a threat assessment first, and an Independence Day celebration is just code for "mostly peaceful" youths attempting to burn down their own neighborhoods.

Fifth from the bottom in the Gallup poll are the newspapers (16% confidence).  Remember what I said about the TV news?  Well, ditto.

In sixth place is the presidency — currently led by President "Return to Normalcy" (23% confidence).  Our confidence in this institution plummeted a whopping 15% in just one year.  It must be because Putin and Trump give presidents a bad name.  It couldn't possibly be because of anything Joe Biden did.  I'm only surprised that this one didn't go to the bottom of the list.

President Gremlin pledged to release 180 million barrels of oil from our strategic reserve to lower the price at the pump.  Now we're learning that it's going to China.

He broke the supply chain so badly that mothers can't buy baby formula.  In the midst of that crisis, his Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, took two months off for maternity leave — because the law said he could, even though the demands of the job said he shouldn't.

We can't talk about the presidency without also talking about the elephant in the room, our vice president, Kamala Harris.  Every time she opens her mouth, she sounds like a sixth-grader making a book report on a book she hasn't read.  That's certainly confidence-inspiring.

And we haven't even gotten to discussing the scores of American hostages that President "Adult in the Room" left in Afghanistan.  I use the word "scores" because nobody seems to know how many Americans we actually left to the tender mercies of the Taliban.  It's certainly confidence-inspiring that he doesn't seem to know the actual number and hasn't talked about them...for over a year.

All I can say about our failing institutions is: good.  Americans can't give up on them soon enough.  The United States was founded on the principles of freedom, limited government, self-reliance, and the value of the individual.  It's been an interesting experiment, but the nanny state test hasn't worked out so well.  In fact, one could say that it has failed to inspire confidence.

Americans need to get back to relying on ourselves, our families, and our friends for our welfare — not our institutions.  This should drive us back to what actually works — self-reliance, independence, and a renewed commitment to living lives of virtue (and insisting that others in our community do as well).