Maybe, but does no one else have a competitive school system? That seems incomplete.

Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s

I mean, if you're talking about IQ, you're misreading those statistics. It's not the Intelligence that's been going down. It's the Quotient that's been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That's in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.

how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?

I don't think the "ruling elites" have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don't think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they're trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they're thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.

That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than "Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins" is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they're doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.

If there's an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it's top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.

They want to fuck and exploit you

So did the Cave Man. But we're so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we're just getting dragged along behind them.

information does travel faster, but it's more selective than ever -- most americans aren't even aware of the staggering amounts of propaganda they're swallowing that is actively fostering this type of mass societal regression despite it being publicly available to them through things like the epstein files and the freedom of information act.