ABC staged a debate this week.  A presidential debate.  Ostensibly between former president Donald J. Trump and former senator Kamala Harris, but in actuality between Trump and the partnership of Harris and ABC.

There is always media bias.  To some extent, unconscious media bias is unavoidable.  But we don’t expect it to be blatant; the viewer doesn’t expect antics like we saw this week, when the ABC moderators repeatedly declared Mr. Trump’s statements lies, and never called out Ms. Harris’s blatant lies. 

We call it “fact-checking” today, a term coined in social media for when our high-tech overlords punish a writer for stating something with which the gurus disagree.  But it’s not really fact-checking, is it?  It’s an invasion of a conversation, a denial of free speech, a thumb on the scale.  In the case of a presidential debate, it’s electioneering.

And it virtually invalidates the value of our constitutionally protected free press in this process.  ABC’s refusal even to try to act as an impartial host rendered this debate useless.

So let’s look instead at the other debates — millions of them — going on in America, both that day and every day in 2024.

Across the country, there are millions of families shopping in their local grocery store.  More of them must choose the discount grocery compared to five years ago; more must use coupons, or activate their store’s discount app on their cell phones today.

As they walk the aisles, their internal debate ought to be between the chicken and the beef.  Or between the pasta and the rice, or between serving green beans or broccoli as the evening’s vegetable side.  Instead, more working families than ever are having to choose the cheapest meals, having to forgo their preference for a complete, balanced food plan in favor of the least expensive option, because the food inflation of the Biden-Harris years has been devastating to the American consumer.

That’s not a debate anybody wants to have, but it’s all around us.

Then there’s the debate about extracurricular activities for our children.  There are families all over the country — probably even more in the blue states than in the red, but still, it’s happening everywhere — who used to let the kids choose their activity — theatre or baseball, band or Boy Scouts.  And now the debate is over which such programs they can afford — oh, not just the registration fee, mind you, but the materials and equipment have all gone up, too.

All over the country, there are working families who could afford — five years ago — to put their kids in programs that they just can’t afford today.  All too often, their kids don’t understand why this particular debate should be necessary at all.  “We could afford it five years ago.  Why not now?”

Then there’s the debate over repairing or replacing the big-ticket items in the household.  These things have always happened — nothing ever lasted forever — but the urgency today is different from what it used to be.

If the dryer or oven breaks, and costs a couple hundred to fix, versus two or three times that to replace, that was always a difficult debate, but we knew how to have it, how to weigh the pros and cons of getting a few more years out of it versus just getting a new one.  

But today, with the tyrannical climate hoax–based restrictions that the federal government has placed on household appliances, whole new issues, and incredibly higher costs, must be factored in. 

If your gas furnace or central air unit breaks today, there’s the one price to just repair it, which is higher every year, of course.  But now there’s something new: new refrigerant mandates, and the double phase furnace mandate about to kick in, mean that if you replace it today, it will cost a lot, but if you wait a couple years, the replacement will cost twice as much as that — because the Biden-Harris regime has banned the perfectly functional, affordable technologies that have worked well for decades, and mandated high-end versions instead, for both manufacture and sale. 

That’s another debate that the kids won’t understand at all.  Why would the government ban the manufacture of a furnace that works perfectly well, and mandate one that’s twice as expensive?

Why, indeed.

Shall we talk about the debates over where to go on vacation?  Five years ago, most American families didn’t have to factor in the cost of gasoline if they wanted to go on a long trip.  For a Chicagoan to take the family to the East Coast for a week means between 2,000 and 4,000 miles round trip.  In a minivan getting about 20 mpg, the difference between $2.00/gallon and $4.00 per gallon means another $200 to $400 of additional fuel cost alone, versus what that drive would have cost the family five years ago.  And this debate isn’t just about the fun of the vacation; it’s about whether this family can ever give their kids the kind of fun and educational childhood vacations — to historical sites and museums and natural wonders — that the parents and grandparents remember from when they were growing up.  These aren’t happy debates; these are tragic ones.

But we don’t just spend money on gasoline when we travel, do we?  It’s part of our daily lives — our commutes to work and school, to visit family and friends, to participate in activities.  To the talking heads of ABC and the bureaucrats of the Biden-Harris regime, these numbers may be pocket change, but it matters to the average American.  If you put 12,000 miles per year on your car, the difference in gasoline prices has likely cost you over a thousand dollars per year during the Biden-Harris mismanagement of the economy.  That’s at least $4,000 per car, all told, and a lot of families have more than one car.  (Some cars get better mileage, some get worse; some people’s commutes are longer, some are shorter.  We have to deal in rough averages here.)

There are many more such debates taking place across America, in the family car, over the kitchen table, or in the bedroom after the kids are asleep, as hardworking everyday American couples try to compromise on some way to get through these hellish years of Bidenflation.

It’s not one mistake, one policy choice, one single culprit.  It’s the entire Biden-Harris regime — their executive orders, their agency regulations, their foreign policy, and their general incredibly thoughtless wastefulness, in everything they touch and everything they do. 

Every American knows that the election of Kamala Harris would mean four more years of all this.

These are the debates that matter to the American public this week.

These personal, private, tragic debates — as the cost of living has gone up by three, four, five times as much as salaries have — are the debates on the minds of American working families, and small business owners, and retirees, and young adults desperately trying to look ahead to a future that can’t possibly seem promising.

Forget the debate that ABC ruined on Tuesday.

These other conversations, these other tough choices and compromises — these are the debates to which we should be paying attention.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker.  Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand-new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

Image: liz west via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.