In a corporate purge worthy of a dystopian novel, ABC has decided to fire its entire staff after the network found itself at the center of a post-debate backlash tsunami. From seasoned anchors to cafeteria workers, no one was safe from the network’s hasty response to the uproar that followed its now-infamous Trump vs. Harris debate. Critics from both sides of the political aisle have made it clear: no one should expect to leave the office alive after fact-checking a political debate in 2024.

Following an eventful 90 minutes during which ABC moderators tried their best to fact-check Donald Trump’s array of colorful claims in real-time, the network was hit with a public outcry so severe that even their carefully planned PR strategy crumbled faster than a debate about healthcare policy. Between accusations of bias from Trump supporters and complaints from others about excessive moderation, ABC’s top brass apparently decided that the only way to solve their image problem was to fire everyone.

“We thought fact-checking would be appreciated,” a network executive reportedly said as they cleared out their office, “but, well, turns out we were dead wrong. In retrospect, we should have just let them yell at each other uninterrupted. The American people love a good fight. Who knew?”

It all started with what was supposed to be the political showdown of the century: the much-hyped Trump vs. Harris debate. Hosted by ABC, the event promised to deliver the kind of high-stakes drama that America had come to expect from the 2024 election cycle. What viewers got, however, was something entirely different—a fact-checking marathon that made the moderators seem more like exhausted referees in a wrestling match than neutral mediators of a civil discourse.

As Trump went off-script, launching into his usual claims that Democrats were planning to “execute babies after birth” and that Ohio immigrants were engaged in a “pet barbecue” ring, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did their best to keep the debate grounded in reality. They corrected Trump on everything from immigration policies to economics, but the constant interruptions began to resemble a parental scolding session more than a presidential debate.

By the time Harris managed to get a word in edgewise—though noticeably less fact-checked herself—it was already clear that the night was veering off the rails.