LA is burning, and the Right is furious—about sign language interpreters

In emergency updates, American Sign Language interpreters are crucial to the safety of Deaf people—close to a million of whom live in the Los Angeles area alone. They’ve also become the latest target of right-wing online influencers like Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, who offered a very obnoxious take on his eponymous Charlie Kirk Show last Wednesday, calling live ASL interpretation a “distraction” in the context of the fires; other right-wing media figures have piled on, adding ASL to the increasingly preposterous list of “woke” practices somehow related to the fires.

But the Americans with Disabilities Act protects the right to equal information, as National Association of the Deaf board president Lisa M. Rose wrote in a response to Kirk.

“Sign language interpreters provide crucial visual context, emotional nuance, and cultural mediation that captions alone cannot convey,” Rose wrote. “This real-time interpretation can be life-saving during emergencies, when clear and immediate understanding is vital.”

Kirk was far from the only right-winger to attack ASL interpreters: “critical race theory” profiteer Christopher Rufo said on X that no “wild human gesticulators [are] necessary,” referring to a video of a Los Angeles County emergency management news conference; Richard Hanania said ADA requirements to have ASL interpretation “have led to a nightmare.”

Bad takes on ASL interpreters and their purpose are not new, but given the current hold of anti-DEI activists on the Republican Party, and the speed with which other social and news media organizations have capitulated to Trump on advertising, fact-checking, and diversity initiatives, those attacks may soon lead to fewer ASL interpreters on emergency news broadcasts. There are already gaps in meeting that requirement, and not just from the right—in 2020, for instance, a judge had to force Andrew Cuomo to include an ASL interpreter in his lauded Covid briefings.

Kirk and Rufo obviously know little about ASL if they’re criticizing it for being expressive—which it’s supposed to be. As Arika Okrent wrote in a 2012 Atlantic article “signers are animated not because they are bubbly and energetic, but because sign language uses face and body movements as part of its grammar.” What’s for certain is that interpretation is vital, not annoying—the exact opposite of Kirk, Rufo, and Hanania’s takes.