With even Fox News and senior Republican figures admitting that Vice President Kamala Harris won Tuesday night’s presidential debate, some supporters of former president Donald Trump are desperately seeking crumbs of comfort. Cue the predictable conspiracy theories. A frequent refrain that has emerged from conservatives (but curiously, not Democrats) over the last decade or so is that their guy’s opponent was wearing an earpiece during debates. These baseless accusations were slung at President Joe Biden in 2020, at Hillary Clinton in 2016, and at Barack Obama in 2012. The theory was debunked on each occasion. In Harris’ case, conspiracy theorists have claimed on X and other social media platforms that her earrings had earpieces built-in. In search of an earpiece that resembles pearl studs, these sore losers declared Harris was using Nova’s H1 Audio Earrings, which are said to have directional sound that remains audible only to the wearer. However, the Nova H1 Audio Earrings barely exist, as Newsweek pointed out, and the device was part of a Kickstarter project that faded into the ether. Both Icebach and Nova’s websites list their domain registrar as one Stephan Berendsen of BBG Entertainment GmbH, an apparent mobile games developer based in Germany. In any case, this seems like another straightforward job for Occam’s razor. Harris almost certainly did not wear an earpiece because the earrings she wore look noticeably different and the product she’s accused of wearing doesn’t exist. By the same token, it’s simply more plausible a seasoned politician can win a debate being extremely well-prepared and ready to throw an opponent with a notoriously fragile ego off their game without requiring a team to feed them information via an earpiece. The Nova H1 Audio Earrings show all the classic signs of being vaporware, right down to being shown off for the first time at CES 2023, though perhaps we’ll see a new version under different branding somewhere on the show floor in January.
