It’s a good sign that J.D. Vance knows what he’s getting into. He sent out a pair of campaign emails at the start of the week acknowledging that the debate Tuesday night between himself and Tim Walz is predictably rigged and that it’s destined to be a three-against-one affair.

“The biased moderators will tee up softball questions for Tim,” Vance wrote in one of them Monday. “I’m going to be AMBUSHED by the Fake News Media and hit with bogus ‘fact-checks,’ but don’t worry, I’ve been preparing for weeks.”

If that’s true, then this shouldn’t be a repeat of the most recent debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, in which the former president was uncharacteristically passive as the two Democrat moderators, ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis, inserted their opinions (falsely described by the news media as “fact-checks”) and graciously teed up cotton candy questions for Kamala (“Vice President Harris, he says you hate Israel”).

To take on three ogres at once is admittedly easier said than done, but those are the terms of these debates, and Trump and Vance have agreed. It’s not to say the event should be a two-hour pissing match between the outnumbered candidate and the moderators, but less engaged voters who may be finally channeling in to the election by way of these debates deserve to know exactly what’s happening in real time — a sham debate in which the deceitful media continue to aid and abet Kamala’s campaign.

At the presidential debate last month, Muir and Davis worked aggressively on Kamala’s behalf, rebutting and quibbling with Trump’s answers nearly a half-dozen times. When the vice president demonstrably lied, they said nothing and instead soft-served her another question like, “Do you think Trump is trying to suppress votes?” Muir literally quoted one of Kamala’s own aides accusing Trump of voter suppression and then invited her to expand on the defamatory claim.

You say this man is a pervert and a fiend. Great, why don’t you go ahead and tell us more about that.

That conduct is unacceptable to Trump and Vance’s supporters, and it demands a confrontation. Call it out. Let the voters know what they’re witnessing. Tell them that you know what the media are doing — they’re pressing down on the scale for Kamala and Walz because they are the media’s preferred candidates. State the obvious — that the “moderators” aren’t there to ensure an informative discussion; they’re there to serve as a crutch for Walz and assist in his performance.

The two Democrats chosen to “moderate” the Vance-Walz debate are CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, both of whom are well-documented Trump haters. After Trump was nearly assassinated again, O’Donnell blamed him for “increasing the threat of political violence …” After Trump called Kamala a “communist” for literally proposing government price setting on groceries, Brennan called the charge “false” and “wrong.”

There will reportedly be no “fact-checking” from moderators at the Vance-Walz debate, and the mics of the two candidates are to be left on for the duration of the event, but that doesn’t mean anything. Everything will be stacked against Vance. The questions for Walz will be about his plans and his intentions as vice president. The questions directed at Vance will be about trifling controversies that O’Donnell and Brennan hope will make him unattractive to female voters. And those questions will go on and on.

Walz has plenty of controversies he should be forced to address. He lies about his military service record. He lies about his travels to communist China. He lies about his record in office as governor of Minnesota. If he’ll be asked about any of it at the debate, it will be to simply get it out of the way.

Vance says he knows this is what’s waiting for him. I hope so.