Want to quickly spot idiots? Here are five foolproof red flags | Arwa Mahdawi

“If you want to be successful in this world, you have to develop your own idiot detection system,” the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, recently told the Northwestern University Class of 2023. Pritzker, a billionaire and self-described “cheugy dad”, clearly knows a thing or two about successful commencement speeches: his talk has gone viral. While the 20-minute speech, which was organized around quotes from characters in The Office series, wasn’t entirely about idiot-spotting, that section of it seemed to resonate the most.

You can see why. We live in a golden age of grifters, bullshitters and scammers. We live in an age where some of the world’s most powerful people managed to successfully fib his way into government. And has a seat in US Congress despite routinely going on unhinged rants about, inter alia, the “”. Clearly not enough people have functioning idiot detection systems.