Good evening, friends, thank you for joining us this week on the nonprofits. Tonight is Monday, January twenty seventh, and we have got a lot of interesting articles to cover this week. We are going to first go to California, where they're unfortunately dealing with the harsh realities of nature and many people's lives and livelihoods are at stake, and our hearts go out to them. But there's something else that we want to talk about going on with California, and AJ is going to kick it off.
That's right, California is burning during one of the most destructive and devastating forest flowers in the state's history. There's been twelve thousand structors destroyed, tens of thousands of people needs, you know, have to move to evacuations. There is a twenty seven human lives lost so far, and the impact
to animal life isn't even measurable at this point. But who has time for that, at least not the conservative right wing online influencers Charlie Kirk and Christopher Ruffe, both of whom have said that, you know, we need to look away from the wall burning and point us to what they consider the real destruction. Sign language interpreters taken
over half of the screen during televised emergency announcements. This article was from Mother Jones and written by Julian Metel on January thirteen, twenty twenty five.
Yeah, thank you so much. AJ. You know, I am not so sure how with all of the destruction and you know what, I'm being nice, I'm being nice. Not so sure. I mean, let's be honest, it's ridiculous all the destruction that is that is kind of spreading across California, and this religious demagogue has time to demonize sign language interpreters. Why do you think that is? What are your first thoughts on targeting another minority group versus talking about the real problem.
I think that it's been clear lately that the conservatives have just waged a war against all the things that they consider work, you know, with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusivity practices. They pushed so much that many businesses who had adopted these initiatives have since decided to completely drop them because they feel too much pressure, too much pressure from their conservatives, and they feel losing profits.
Every company feels losing profits. But these initiatives are meant to support both you know, customers, employers that come from marginalized communities, like people from different races, genders, sexual orientations, or the sabled people. And they've made so much progress at taking away the rights of, for example, transgender people, that it makes sense that now they have to find a different type of target, anyone who isn't like them, and it just so happened to be interpreters. But I
think that does not absolutely detalgate. I think that deaf people is detargent because trust me, there is the people that this service benefits who they want to take down.
Yeah, you know, Jonathan, she raises a point that you know it maybe the scapegoat, maybe the new boogeyman is the ASL interpreters. But yeah, there are certainly second in order excuse me, second and third order effects of that. Taking that away takes information away from a lot of people. How does this relate to the well, the conservatives, the
right wing movement in this country. I almost said Republicans, but you know, I have to remind myself that not everybody that makes up the party, granted it's a small number, is part of the red wave, if you will, But the people are that are part of the red wave, you know, have this desire to control information. At least in my opinion, I wanted to get your thoughts on that, and how does that relate to them making a boogeyman out of the A cell interpreters.
Well, and in my thoughts about it, they have to have some way of keeping people from being compassionate or empathetic to a Hollywood, a democratic stronghold. They cannot allow any positive information about the more liberal people in our society because that is a direct assault on their philosophy
of life. They are couching all of their activities on defeating an enemy, you know, and they've demonize entire segments of our population so that they can fight an enemy and that will get people to unite under their banner to fight a destructive enemy. But they're picking on people who can't normally have no political power and can't fight back, and this is something that is cowardly. It's really cowardly
to pick on a sign language interpreter. These people study for years to be able to be to emote and get people to understand all of what's being said and how it's being said, voice inflections, the underlying meaning of words that you cannot get from a printed page. You need that. It's part of a deaf person's grammar. You can't do without it if you really want to understand what's being said. I only took one sign language course. My instructor was completely deaf, and the only day we
had an interpreter was the first day. I didn't learn all that much in the two or three months I was there. I'm not real talented at it, but it made it perfectly clear when he was talking to a student halfway across the park from the front of the classroom about something that needed to be said in the class. It was quite amazing that the amount of emotion that
can be transmitted. I didn't get to interact with a lot of deaf people at that point, but I did live across the street from a deaf individual recently, and we managed expert lip reader. But that wasn't really you know, I had to ask her how to say certain things because I didn't think that they were expressing enough.
Yeah.
I was never very good at using the expressions on my face to communicate information.
But you know, that is a good point you raised. Because I don't think and granted people who are deaf have to navigate the world in far different ways than the rest of us do. Now, I couldn't imagine not living with one of my senses, or excuse me, living without one of my senses. I couldn't even imagine not having an appendage or having, you know, something debilitative, really affecting the way I live. But to not have one of your sensory information abilities is incredibly it must be
incredibly difficult to navigate life. But people people do it, and I think that we can relate in a sense to the way they receive information, because just because we have all of our senses, we still I mean, look at me right now, we still have our facial expressions
and and things like that that we communicate with. I think that taking away the ability for those for for deaf people to receive information, as minimal as it may be compared to the rest of us, UH, is a way to control information, just like the two of you have said. But it's also a very fascist, uh, a very fascist character characteristic if you if you will, I mean, let's look at the most famous yeah, right, I mean, let's look at the most famous fascist movement in all
of history, World War Two. The Holocaust right Germany, Uh, disabled people were targeted, and now we see that happening from the religious right, who can be characterized a lot of their policies as fascist, and it is dehumanizing in a way. And we have seen that over and over again from this uh, this right movement, just dehumanizing everybody that stands in their way. And Jonathan, I think you
up a great point about about the Hollywood factor. I haven't even I hadn't even thought about that, But the type of information that people pick up from from TV, uh, you know, that can have a devastating effect if it's transmitted.
You're trying to demonize not just disabled people, which is an actual tenet of the American neo Nazis is to get rid of all the disabled people and that. But one of the things that they they're doing is they are basically targeting everybody who isn't them. Yeah, you know, but they do it through these means, these these groups, and then they can keep they'll they'll move to another group. Eventually after they've sufficiently beaten down the disabled people. They'll
move to you know, somebody else. They'll move to Italians, or they'll move to somebody they can they can beat up and don't have a lot of power.
AJ, you had a point, and you were about to chime in forgive me, but you had a point on uh, people being dehumanized, and I wanted to to get you to expand on that.
Yeah, that's exactly the point that I was going to make. What Jonathan was saying is correct. Like the way that they do this is by the humanizing entire groups of people in order for their listeners or their supporters to then be okay with whatever they you know, they suggest that they're after so, but what they don't understand. There is the same language. As Jonathan also pointed out, it's a full language. There is is not English, Okay, It's
its own unique language. It has centered structure, it has visual cues, like you can have the same hand shapes for many different signs, but you place them in different positions and you make different faces and it means completely different things. It's like written versus spoken English, right, and you can miss a lot of context when you send the text message versus when you speak to somebody in person.
So if I were to I've learned some time language because as you all know, I'm also that so if I say something like if I say something like, you're not going to know what I'm saying. But if I say I hate you, then you're going to know by my face. Even if I didn't say it, or if I didn't make them mouth movements, you will know that I'm like saying something, you know, kind of like mean or like I'm having an emotional response, right, And that part I would have to say was one of the
things that bothered me the most about this article. It wasn't even like the call to stop sign language from being used, but rather one of the quotes that Christopher Rouffo said in response to the Los Angeles County Emergency Management News conferences. He said, no wild in no wild human,
justticulators are necessary. Now, I know that that word is not inherently negative, but in this context, he was kind of saying that that sign language, that people who you said language are wild, and then the clarifies, He clarifies by saying human. They had a disgusting feel to it, like maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but like it seemed like he was trying to save that balistic Well, I.
Don't think you're interpreting it wrong because by him calling them, by him calling them wild, it goes to show you
that he doesn't understand what is going on. And for anybody that wants to control the media or control the narrative to not understand the message that's being transported, this can be incredibly threatening in my opinion, And I think that is the reason you have Charlie Kirk labeling asl interpreters as woke, because it's akin to him not knowing what's going on and him fearing what he doesn't understand. And that right there, I think is what leads to
a fascist, a fascist kind of ideology. And Jonathan I wanted to see you know when I said fascism, you know you you kind of perked up a little bit. Uh, you know, how does this help the right wing agenda at all?
I think what it does is, again they're just trying to get their not just their base, but people sitting on the fence to hate the same things they hate, so they can form a tribe, a tribe that is external to the tribe of being a United States citizen, but it's still within the group. So the Venn diagram would have a little circle of fascists in here that they can use. It only takes a third of the people in most cases historically to take over a government.
So you know, they're trying to put themselves in power, so they can stay in power, and they can dictate to us exactly what we have to do and have us as little serfs and feudal slaves in order to make them wealthy and to fight their wars for them. As they go on marching trying to get the rest of the world to agree with them, even though they know they are totally wrong, and how they're anticipating things.
And one of the things that bothers me is that what they don't understand well, they actually understand it all too well, is people aren't born with any persuasion. They are educable, and so as they educate or program people to be like them, you don't get rid of this kind of evil.
And it's so astonishing.
It's so astonishing that this is happening in my lifetime, something that I never thought, something I never thought would have happened. You know, I have a funny story, and I don't mean to digress for a bit, but this relates. I gave a lecture a couple of weeks ago For those of you who aren't familiar, I'm an adjunct professor of National security studies. What are the schools I'm partnered with.
I gave a lecture on presidential powers, and I gave this ridiculous example to remain objective right to not say anything that would be controversial, I said, let's just say, for example, the United States went to war with Canada, and people chuckled, and I thought it was ridiculous. That's the only reason I said it. And then lo and behold, we're in We're in this fight where we're slinging shots back and forth with Canada. Uh, for reasons I'm not
going to get into. And I just can't believe that we're in the spot that we're in, to the point that we have religious clergy members, if you will, ignoring a wildfire, ignoring the fact that their God is not showing up to do anything, and instead attacking sign language interpreters. It is we are living in a circus. It's absolutely
mind blowing. And you know what, AJ, you know, forgive me, I forgot that you were that you were deaf, and and I, you know, forgive me, I didn't I didn't mention that and I actually I actually mentioned that we all could could you know, we had our capabilities. But you know, what was your thought? How personally did this strike you when you first read this article?
I was I was quite shocked. I think it's just a sort of a distraction, you know, and it cut me off guard because as someone who has depended on that type of communication, you know, I haven't always had my cochlear implants, so I either depended on the captions very often, or somebody telling me, Like if I was out and you know, I couldn't hear somebody out there talking to me, I don't or a wait dress or whatever, you know, I will have to turn to somebody in
my family and be like, hey, what did they say? Even that the person's right, they're in front of me. So for me to hear somebody saying hey, you know, like whether you hear this or not doesn't matter, was like shocking. I'm gonna say though, that this is actually dangerous. This isn't just about being fascist or the humanizing people. It's about putting people's lives at risk. There's about three
million people deaf people in California. About a million of them live in the Los Angeles area, which is where all the fires are happening right now. But this is just one state. The United States has about eleven million deaf people and forty five million people who have some degree of hearing lass. So this is a major number.
It's not just a few people that are listening to these emergency response communications that could potentially save their lives in those type of situations like a fire, a hurricane, tornadoes, like you need to move quickly, and so it's just it's incredibly frustrating because there's just so many implications to this, requests of removing American sent language interpreters from emergency announcements.
Yeah, and this, yeah, this leaves this leaves people incredibly vulnerable.
You know.
The thing that is shocking to me, I think, and you know, at this point in my life, very few things shocked me anymore. But you know, this idea that they have, you know, the right wing, the super conservative, uh maybe somewhat fascist right wing movement, It thrives on
demonizing or dehumanizing people, attacking people, making them vulnerable. And we all said in the beginning of the show, you know, they've moved to minorities, and then they moved to the LGBTQ, and then when they've done that, you know, they move on to somebody else. I almost feel like they're not succeeding because the LGBTQ movement is not succumbing to them. It's not succumbing to this movement. People are are stronger, people are more vocal, and I almost wonder why did
they move on to the ASL. I mean, they still haven't conquered the people they set out to conquer originally. And then I thought, you know, these people have no the the ASL community has no track record of having to defend themselves. It's such an easy target and it's so cheap. And so, Jonathan, I wanted to pivot back to you and kind of get your your final remarks on this topic. You know, I know that you you kind of came up with the idea of them having
an imaginary boogeyman. But where do we go from here? Debuted by the way, my friend.
Pulling a problem here. They've always had somebody to fight, you know, we had Communism to fight before that, we had Nazism to fight before that, we had the Spanish American War. There's always been somebody to focus their anger on rather than focus on improving the United States. And the only other thing I would say is you think that it's different from when you were younger. I'm thirty years older than you. Yeah. When I was a kid, we still said the Pledge of Allegiance in class and
meant it. You know, of course we were ducking under our desks for nuclear drills, but it was like a whole different world. This world, to me, is dystopian as hell. It is absolutely ridiculous that these people would have the gall to go after ASL interpreters when half a state.
Is burning down. Yeah, that is like the most absolutely evil thing to do. And I think they do that to desensitize people to the evil they do.
Yep, So yeah, I would agree there. This is a distraction. You know, we're talking about this right now. There's so many other things that we could be talking about that are just a disaster, right, but we're talking about this, and rightfully so these people shouldn't be targeted. But you know, distraction after distraction, we keep getting faced with the most just asinine views and attempts. And I want to leave it there, but uh not without giving aj about a
minute or so to close us out. So what are your thoughts, aj.
I think empathy. Empathy is what we need. You know, earlier you mentioned about living without one of your senses and what that feels like. And I know what that feels like. Every single day I wake up and I you know, I got a bed, and I take off my implant and I'm completely tough, and I put it on in the morning, and it's like an influx of sounds, and sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming, and it's like getting used to that and then back to taking it off when I have to do something that
you know, requires me to take it off. And it's like if people were to put themselves in my shoes for a moment, maybe they wouldn't think about these things. I take the way that I communicate with them.
Yeah. Well, you know, when these religious and fascist demagogues are up on their high horse, they are far away from people who face the ailments and face the real challenges in life that we all face. To a certain degree, they can remove themselves from the needy and from the people that need support, need and demonize them instead. And that's what we're looking at. And you know what their religion, their god it's not helping. It's just a tool for control.
It's a tool for dehumanization, demonization, and it really gets us nowhere. And we've got a lot of things like that to talk about