How Many Deaf People are There, Actually?

At Joe Biden’s big speech claiming that Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters are actually supporters of Donald Trump, we again had 35% of the total screen space of the speech removed in order to accommodate the sign linguist.

This is some new thing, this Democrat project of “signers everywhere.” I’ve only seen Democrats do it in America.

The first time I remember thinking about it was when Barack Obama gave a speech in 2013 in South Africa and the black signer was doing fake sign language.

It’s only started happening on a large scale in the last 2-3 years, and it is only recently ubiquitous.

Actually, ubiquitous.

As in, if you type “governor newsom speech” into Google, the first result has the signer box.

Another top result has the signer literally on stage with him.

Local county governments in liberal areas have them up on stage for every speech, and we wonder how much this project costs the American taxpayer annually.

How many deaf people are there? Are there more than there were a few years ago?

I looked it up, and only 0.22% of the population of the United States is deaf. That’s about 2 of every 1,000 people.

It is ridiculous to force all of us to be constantly exposed to these weird motions for the sake of such a small group of people, who were apparently getting on fine reading the transcript afterwards. Furthermore, these people can read lips. Furthermore, subtitles can be computer generated in real time now.

Remember when TV used to say “close captioned for the hearing impaired”? Why is it that with technology to help these people having advanced so much in the last couple of decades, we’re promoting primitive methods?

It’s not practical for politicians to be making a huge thing out of such a small group of people, who are probably not particularly influential, and probably do not care very much about having a special signer on stage when they’ve lived their lives being accustomed to reading subtitles and transcripts.

It could be that the Democrats figure that this is a solid group of .22% of the population they can gobble up as voters by pandering. But it’s more likely that these signers are meant to send a message to people with hearing.

The positive message is that the Democrats are soft and caring people, who worried about those poor, pathetic deaf folks. The inverse of that, the negative message, is that normal people have to be forced to undergo difficulties for the sake of a small minority of people with a very specific problem. These signers are totally distracting. I believe they must be distracting to the politicians giving speeches as well.