ackground:
In one of his podcasts, internet personality Charlie Kirk stated:
(You can see the original video clip here:)
Transcript: CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I’m gonna say this just off the cuff before I introduce our guest. Can we please just go away with half the screen during these emergency briefings to the sign language interpreters? I have nothing against, obviously, people that cannot hear, but there’s closed captioning. I mean, this is just over the top. We can’t do this. We gotta get back to how it used to be. It’s just, oh, it’s just too much. It’s a distraction is what it is. The reason is they do these emergency briefings for fires or terrorist attacks, and you’re looking at this and you’re not listening. I don’t like it. So we got — we just gotta — closed captioning’s perfectly fine. I think we have to — we gotta get back to basics here.
In response, the National Association of the Deaf Board shared this message with the community:
President Lisa Rose’s video
Transcript:
Hello, our beloved deaf and hard of hearing community and friends. There has been widespread discussion on social media about Mr. Charlie Kirk’s recent comments on interpreters during emergency broadcasts. This has caused a firestorm of discussion and questions related to the issue of accessible rights for deaf and hard of hearing people to these broadcasts.
The National Association of the Deaf wants to address these erroneous and harmful conceptualizations, while continuing to advocate for our community’s linguistic and human rights to full access to emergency broadcasts.
We have drafted a response letter to Mr. Kirk, which you can see below.
Thank you.
Link to the letter (PDF format): https://www.nad.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/President-Rose-Mr.-Kirk.pdf
ASL translation of the letter: