I appreciate the honesty when it comes to the naming of this group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion
>“Persuasion” stands for:
>1) A commitment to a free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life.
>2) A belief in the social practice of persuasion, which necessitates free speech.
>3) A determination to persuade, not to mock or troll, those who disagree with us.
In my view, they are succeeding admirably in meeting these 3 goals.
[0] https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1278707858188664832
In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life": healthcare costs, ongoing climate disaster, erosion of labor rights, rising nativism and authoritarianism on the far-right, etc. chief among them. To be as monomaniacally focused on "cancel culture" as Mounk (and many others on the center/right of the American political spectrum) strikes me as misguided at best and disingenuously self-serving at worst.
Persuasion seems to me a massive over-reaction to the minor injustice that is "cancel culture" wrapped in some self-important and grandiose rhetoric.
And generally, I find him to be the most prepared interviewer with the most thoughtful questions that I ever encountered in podcasting.