The Phantom Earpiece Phenomenon: Why Presidential Candidates Are Consistently Accused of Cheating During Debates
When the other side pulls this out you know that your candidate did reasonably well against theirs.
The banner headline on the Drudge Report the morning after Wednesday’s presidential forum screamed “HILLARY AND THE EAR PEARL.” The story it linked to was from Infowars.com, the website of radio host Alex Jones, a crazy person who believes the government has a special tornado weapon and used it to attack Oklahoma in 2013. Citing a tweet from actor and right-wing troll James Woods, Infowars wondered if Clinton had been “wearing an earpiece during last night’s presidential forum,” as indicated by pictures that “appeared to show Hillary with some kind of flesh-colored device embedded inside her ear.”
So was it a flesh-colored earpiece as Infowars insisted? Or was it a pearl-colored earpiece as Drudge claimed? No one can say, but the ad hoc investigative group of conspiracy theorists and crackpot celebrities seems pretty convinced that Hillary Clinton had someone secretly feeding answers into her ear during the forum. The “evidence” was convincing enough that Donald Trump’s son — the elephant-butchering one, not the off-Broadway “American Psycho” one — tweeted out a link to the Infowars story.
So congratulations, everyone: we’ve officially reached the “Presidential Candidate Cheats Via Secret Radio Technology” stage of the 2016 election. It’s arrived a bit early this year, but this conspiratorial story line has become a recurring fixture of presidential campaigns thanks to the internet’s inexhaustible capacity to prey on gullibility and partisan reflexes.