I speak with a computerized voice. Republicans used it to put words in my mouth to attack Biden (interview, speech)

[beb0p]

First, they picked on a person with disability.

Second, they purposely created something completely fake and passed it off as real.

Third, they never even had the decency to apologize to the person they harmed.

Deplorable.

I speak with a computerized voice. Republicans used it to put words in my mouth.

I speak with a computerized voice — think Stephen Hawking. It’s a result of ALS, the neurological disease I’ve had since 2016. And of all the painful parts of this entire ordeal, which has now almost completely paralyzed me, one of the worst is the way the disease has robbed me of my natural voice. Last week, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tried to use my computer-assisted voice to rob me of my agency, too. In a video aimed at Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, shared his team’s manipulated footage of an interview I conducted with Biden to make it appear I had said words that I never uttered, in an effort to distort Biden’s views and harm his electoral prospects.

Now, I am of course grateful I can still speak, even if very slowly, using eye-gaze technology: A camera tracks the movements of my eyes on a screen-based keyboard, and then the resulting text is converted into speech by a synthetic voice generator. But because of my Hawking-esque voice, it’s particularly easy for others to manipulate what I say. Scalise’s team just went the extra mile in seeming to find the exact voice generator I use when they whipped up the extra words meant to damn Biden.

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