Rhetoric may well find its place as an esteemed study once again.
I thought this video [1] was interesting and it introduced me to the difference between rhetoric and dialectic. Rhetoric is using emotion to convince people. Dialectic is using reason. He points out that you need to know how to read your audience to choose the correct angle of argument. Some people get hung up on, for example, always persuading through facts (dialectic), when what they really need to do is reach for emotion (rhetoric).
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting intro to the topic.
Yeah, no. I mean, I don't know this guy from Bob, but the above has neither citation nor argument, and everything I've seen disagrees with that assessment.
Skim the list of the board of advisors...
https://www.persuasion.community/p/our-board
Several names pop out - and not because they're alt-right / reactionaries / populist right-wingers. Some bios:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Applebaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Kasparov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheri_Berman
Again, I don't have any personal knowledge here, but it's interesting to consider, eg, this bit from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yascha_Mounk#Political_positio...
> Mounk stated that he had changed his position on nationalism. He initially considered it a relic of the past that must be overcome, but he now advocates an "inclusive nationalism" to head off the threat of aggressive nationalism. On the German television newscast Tagesthemen, he stated that Germany is on a "historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one."
I suppose words like "nationalism" and "mono-ethnic" might appear in an alt-right missive, but IMHO the above doesn't sound anything like an alt-right perspective.