Tom Wainwright
speaker
83 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 4d ago
Tom Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
year after Charlie Kirk was shot dead in mid-flow, the conversation he began is continuing.
Last week, allies of the conservative campaigner and debater held a rally just five minutes' walk from the scene of his killing at Utah Valley University.
The event was the latest campus gathering organized by his group, Turning Point USA, which seeks to help young liberals to see the light, or failing that, at least to enrage them for clicks.
The horrible circumstances of Kirk's death, murdered in public, allegedly by a young man who will shortly stand trial, turbocharged his fame.
But the movement he began is part of a much bigger trend.
As audiences ditch books and newspapers in favour of video clips and social feeds, the world is entering a new age of the orator.
carbs.
Ideas that were once spread by headlines and columns are being conveyed by podcasts and TikToks.
As people spend more time plugged into screens and AirPods, the human voice is making a comeback.
That has consequences for how people communicate and perhaps for the kinds of ideas that spread.
Charlie Kirk's approach, sitting at a table beneath a sign challenging passers-by to prove me wrong, was reminiscent of a much earlier political culture.
In the days when manuscripts were copied out by scribes and read only by a tiny elite, people wanting to share news or ideas had to do so orally.
Only with the invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy did the masses start to get their information by text.
Those seeking to influence others put away their soapboxes and loudhalers and started writing pamphlets and articles instead.
Now there are signs that this 500-year trend towards text is sliding into reverse.
People everywhere are sounding the alarm about a decline in reading.
Parents struggle to cajole their children to pick up a book.
Professors despair that students can't finish reading lists.
And once they're adults and no longer nagged by teachers or parents, many people stop reading altogether, relaxing not with a paperback but a vertical video feed.
More than half of American adults say they've not read a single book for pleasure in the past year.
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