On even rarer occasions, those people have surrounded themselves with like minds. This hasn't always worked out well. Lincoln's "Team of Rivals" ended up spending more time squabbling, maneuvering for position, and backbiting than war-fighting. Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" arguably prolonged the Great Depression with its interventionist economic policies.

Now, today, in American politics, it's increasingly looking as though, of all the people in the American government, there is not one brain among them. Matt Walsh writes in a new op-ed at Daily Wire:

You may have heard about Tony Fauci’s admission in a closed-door House committee hearing the other day. Fauci began by denying that he ever played a role in shutting down any schools in this country. That’s a lie, of course. Fauci’s agency provided official guidance calling on schools to shut down, which exposed those schools to civil liability if they refused. Then Fauci was asked about his infamous guidance that everyone needed to “socially distance,” or stand six feet apart. As you probably remember, this six-foot rule became gospel in this country, virtually overnight. Every business and school and government building and airport put up little placards and stickers on the floor, instructing everyone to obey. At the time, we were told that “the science” mandated this rule. But the other day, Tony Fauci admitted what he always knew all along, which is that there was, in fact, no scientific data justifying this whatsoever. He says, essentially, that they just made it up on the spot.

That's nothing new in government, of course, although Dr. Fauci has shown a level of unrepentant arrogance about these bad decisions that are hitherto unknown; he has gone from being the highest-paid government employee to ever shut down the economy of the world's most prosperous nation based on guesswork, to a guy who got a generous pension (and is making a lot of money on the lecture circuit). 

See Related: Fauci Admits Social Distancing Wasn't Scientific and the Wuhan Lab Leak Wasn't a Conspiracy Theory

We have been taken over by governing methods that combine oligarchy, kakistocracy, and credentialism; for that last, one need look no further than "Doctor" Jill Biden, the possessor of an Ed.D., the Dane Cook of graduate degrees. For the second example, see her husband, Joe Biden; for the first one, Joe's son, Hunter, and his allies in China and Ukraine.

See Related: Too Clever by Half: Fauci Testifies Before Coronavirus Subcommittee, Continues to Play Semantics

Is it too much to ask for a little ordinary competence? Genius isn't necessary, but competence would be nice. 

And let's not forget the panic-mongering that these incompetents get up to, Walsh says.

Recall again the story that broke the other day in Axios. Here’s what they wrote: “BREAKING: The climate of 2023 was the hottest seen in at least 125,000 years; for the first time in instrument records, daily global average temperatures went well above a Paris guardrail of 2°C.” 

Along with that scary headline, Axios includes a chart that only goes back until the 1970s, strangely enough. But all the same, they’re insistent that 2023 was the hottest climate the world has seen in at least 125,000 years. Now, I could reference a bunch of experts who contradict this theory. I could tell you all about Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, who debunked this garbage science in the Wall Street Journal recently. Milloy pointed out that — if you can believe it — we didn’t have satellites or temperature stations to measure temperature 125,000 years ago.

Now, it's not impossible to take some pretty informed guesses as to climate 125,000 years ago, but methods differ wildly, and things like isotope ratios in layered ice sheets, and pollen types found in shales and sandstones, do not give anything like the precision of actual, real-time measurements. They are accurate enough to show broad trends, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, at a time (55 million years ago) when nobody was driving SUVs or using gas stoves. But basing public policy on these broad trends is, at best, incompetent; it is, at worst, purposely destructive.

See Related: Fauci's Latest Admissions Are the Death of Expertise

The military used to be home to men of courage and determination, like Dwight Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, George Patton, and a man whom I served under myself, Norman Schwarzkopf. There are damn few like them today, as our military has become a jobs program for anyone with the mental illness du jour instead of being a fighting force. 

There are a few people in the national government that stand out. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) comes to mind. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) is another. There are some bright spots, but they are few, and with every election cycle, it seems like the darkness encroaches a little more. We are, today, looking to the chief executive of the Federal government and seeing a man who was only marginally competent at his very best, a man who is deeply and fundamentally corrupt, and who is now slipping, daily, further into senility -- and also who claims he is running for a second term. And what's more, a significant number of Americans support him - 40 percent, at the latest count.

Earlier I mentioned Cato and Cicero. The world they knew came apart, and Rome devolved from a republic to a tyranny. Rome eventually fell, plunking the Western world into a dark age that lasted hundreds of years. The United States is now the pivot on which the civilized world turns, as surely as Rome was in the days of Cato and Cicero; the rise of a corrupt kakistocracy in the United States has the potential to collapse the world into a new dark age.

Our primary hope at preventing this is for people of courage, vision, and most of all intelligence and capability, to once more seek to serve the people in government. As to how to bring that about; I've no idea. But it has to happen -- and soon.