Tuesday night during the presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the fact-checks were flying, but only in one direction. As expected, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were criminally biased, making the debate effectively three-on-one against Trump and practically amounting to an in-kind donation to the Harris campaign.

The lying and gaslighting were so brazen from Harris, and the “fact-checking” from Muir and Davis so lop-sided (they failed even once to push back or correct any of Harris’ obvious falsehoods), that the entire spectacle eventually took on an air of unreality. It was bizarre to see it happening live on the air. By the end, my main takeaway was that the purpose of these debates, besides the media’s obvious goal of boosting Harris and hurting Trump, is to confuse and demoralize the American people by distorting reality and flooding the internet with lies, making it impossible to know what’s true and what’s not.

At one point, Harris recited a litany of the most obvious, thoroughly debunked lies about Trump, from the “fine people on both sides” comment on Charlottesville, to the “bloodbath” remark about the auto industry, to claiming he “incited” the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. Anyone can go online and check for themselves that these things are all hoaxes; they never happened. But the moderators said nothing.

They again said nothing when Harris lied about her views on fracking, gun control, and defunding the police. Nor did they say anything when she erroneously claimed there are no American troops in combat zones (three U.S. soldiers were killed in a drone attack in Jordan earlier this year, and seven were injured in a raid against ISIS in Iraq last month), that police officers died on Jan. 6, that third-trimester abortions never happen, or that the Trump tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy. On and on, lie after lie.

With Trump, it was of course much different. Muir and Davis routinely inserted themselves into the debate under the guise of “fact-checking” the former president, even on trivial matters, to the point that at times it devolved into a side debate between Trump and the moderators.

But again, media bias is baked in, and wasn’t a surprise. As Megyn Kelly noted, “The person who runs ABC News,” Dana Walden, “is a close personal friend of Kamala Harris,” and the moderators “did exactly what their bosses wanted them to do.” We’ve known all along that Trump isn’t just running against Harris and the DNC; he’s running against a machine that includes the entire corporate press, the administrative state, the intelligence agencies, Big Tech, and even Taylor Swift.

What was different about this debate, though, was how brazen the bias was, how unconcerned ABC seemed to be even with presenting the appearance of journalistic integrity or fairness. It was shocking to see it. And the effect of it isn’t necessarily to move the needle on the election one way or the other. It’s unlikely that anyone, whatever his views, will be persuaded by anything that was said or done during this farce of a debate.

No, the real effect is to erode our ability to function as a coherent polity, to maintain a democratic form of government or anything close to self-government. You can’t do it like this, especially not in our digital era. The lies and distortions and undisguised bias get fed directly into social media, which instantly becomes a feeding frenzy of claim and counterclaim, replete with clips and commentaries that serve only to compound the distorting effect of the debate itself. 

That’s what happened Tuesday night. Corporate media commentators like Chris Hayes of MSNBC declared Harris was “cleaning his clock.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom later used the exact same phrase. Meanwhile, commentators on the right were apoplectic about the bias from ABC and the dishonesty from Harris, and they furiously posted evidence debunking her lies and omissions.

You can’t engage in meaningful debate this way. You need a bare minimum of shared reality for that. The conduct of ABC and the rest of the corporate press is making it impossible, which is why we would be better off without these presidential debates.

If they’re going to be like this, then they’re just contributing to the disintegration of our polity by distorting reality and making political discourse impossible. Instead of a necessary and salutary part of our national elections, they are poison in the bloodstream of our national life. Trump, at least, should refuse to take part in them going forward, and the rest of us should refuse to watch if he does.