I watched the presidential and vice presidential debates this year. I usually watch them, along with the State of the Union addresses, not because I want to but because I want to know what they are saying. What always strikes me after these viewings is just how detached every mainstream political conversation is from reality.

The TV stations always say that their viewers are most concerned about the issues they ask about. But, still, there is no reality being addressed at all. Instead, every single debrief and commentary only speaks to how these people read to viewers watching television.

What are the facts? What is the reality? Why is there no assessment of reality while these people are speaking?

Take the issue of gun violence as an example. Every candidate is pro gun but they use some rhetoric to blame mental illness or immigrants or whatever. They use the issue to scapegoat and to blame. That doesn’t even matter to me. Do you know why? Because the way they are speaking about gun violence means absolutely nothing when you take a moment to assess the reality of the situation.

Every time politicians debate gun violence, they should first start with an assessment of how many guns exist in the US and how many hands are available to shoot the guns. After all, that’s what it means to be armed—firearms attached to arms. You need both guns and hands to fire a weapon. There are 398.5 million guns in the United States. There are only 333.3 million people in total in the US and 258.3 million of those people are 18 years or older. What does this mean? This means that there are already enough guns floating around that every single adult and child could potentially shoot a gun at the same time with still around 65 million guns leftover. If we only armed the adult population, then every single adult could shoot a gun at the same time and half of us could even shoot two guns using both of our hands at the same time.

Neither candidate is advocating for removing any guns. They are elusive about controlling how many more guns can be sold and to whom and use the discussion to blame the mentally ill or immigrants. I’m even not saying that any guns should be confiscated at all but this is not a serious discussion by any means.

The debate over gun violence is always designed to make people feel like all of their guns could be taken away for some reason. Should we protect guns or not? Everyone feels like we don’t have enough guns. I’m not sure why. There are more guns floating around than there are people. There are more than enough guns! If they started the debate with even just a basic assessment of how many arms we are dealing with, I think we would have a potentially different conversation about what it means to be armed here.

And I’m not even talking about reckoning with what the mass production of guns means in a settler colony yet. I’m just talking about counting the current number of guns and hands at play.

Let’s look at the debate about immigration, abortion, and the economy next. They always start these debates by letting the politicians know that viewers are very concerned about the border or inflation or healthcare. To the politicians, all three questions have to do with the simple problem of population growth and GDP. They only really care about the number of bodies that are working and how to maintain that number. That’s why they always talk about the same thing whenever they are asked about any of these three questions: immigrants taking jobs away from hard working Americans who just want to start a family.

Instead of spinning a narrative about some imagined and symbolic family and some devilishly opportunistic immigrant, they need to start with just a basic assessment of the population. The US population grew .5% in 2023 and .53% in 2024. 81% of that growth came from immigration. Immigration contributed around .2% growth to the US GDP which grows just above 2% year by year. Immigration slowed down during 2020 and 2021, causing an inflationary period due to lack of labor. More migrants coming in after 2022, who are mostly working age and do not need as many resources as newborns, have alleviated this issue somewhat but, if the US wants to continue its capitalist economy, it still needs to increase immigration by 37% to avoid socioeconomic decline.

Meanwhile, the US infant mortality is increasing. The US has the highest infant mortality rate of all developed countries. Much of this high infant mortality rate is due to Black and native babies dying at such high rates. Right now, the average American woman gives birth to 1.66 babies but they need to birth 2.1 babies to keep this capitalist system going.

How much money the US spends on immigration also has no correlation or causation with the number of births. The US also does not give money directly to new immigrants. It earmarks money for border police and for regulating whether immigrants can come in. None of that spending has any impact on infant mortality or whether people will give birth.

This is a very basic picture of some things that are happening. Now, we can debate whether GDP is a good measure of the economy, whether capitalism is the solution at all, and whether we prefer to force more births out of people who can give birth or design an economy that supports the option for the population to not just grow forever but to sometimes decline.

But first, just a basic picture. If they want to talk about the population, then they need to start their debates with some very basic facts about what is even happening here.

And don’t get me started on the weapons industry. They use all this rhetoric to talk about allies and enemies. No. Start with a basic assessment of how the United States spends more money on its military than all social services including healthcare, education, and social security combined. It spends more on its military than any other nation-state in the world. The United States accounts for 40% of global military spending. It spent $887 billion on the military in 2023 and all of this money goes towards private contractors or weapons manufacturers who send their lobbyists to Congress.

After they paint this very basic picture of just how much money is used to buy weapons, they need to then account for who the weapons we are funding will actually be used on. This is very basic. We need to hear directly from people who have been subject to US weaponry—the weaponry that we are paying for. If we are paying to develop weapons, then should we not at the very least look the people we are shooting at in the face? Should each politician not at least look at the people who they are choosing to kill in the face?

They need to start with that basic assessment and then make a case for whatever they want to say about geopolitics. Again, I’m just talking about a basic assessment of what we are paying for when we pay for the military. Why should we spend so much money killing people? Every politician who supports funding the military more needs to account for this very basic question. People who support the military always say that people who do not are overly naive but these pro-military politicians are so spineless they don’t even face the people whose slaughter they fund. It’s like they don’t even understand death as a reality.

For every budget bill that is signed, let’s make our politicians account for the number of weapons and how many people each weapon is designed to kill. Because, yes, weapons are not neutral pieces of technology. They are designed for one purpose: murder. If these people want to make us buy weapons, they should at least admit that they are killing people using these weapons.

And then every politician who supports fracking and other environmentally devastating industries needs to come face to face with the number of people who will die as a result of their policies. They need to calculate that number and put it in front of each person’s face—just a basic death toll please.

There is no basic assessment of anyone’s reality happening in these mainstream political conversations. There is no talk of the very basic question of life or death. Instead, we have these conspiracy theories about cats. We have these random people spinning these personal anecdotes about nebulous friends they lost, about how their own mothers failed them, about how they love their beautiful children, or whether they were in Hong Kong in 1989.

What the hell? Sorry—who are these people and why would we care?

No one cares about how JD Vance reads to viewers of television. This is a man who has learned his whole persona from television. He’s an actor. He cares about spinning stories based on the popular assumptions that we make about people based on representation and caricatures. There is no reality in the sentences that he is speaking.

And he speaks to all of these very sheltered suburban men who also have no read on the basic facts of reality. They care about blaming women and immigrants in a sort of nebulous rage baited way but they don’t actually participate in realities where they are speaking to women or anyone. None of these people understand life or death.

And the commentaries don’t address reality either. Oh, the debate was civil. Oh, their microphones were cut because they went over their one minute time limit. Oh, this guy was eloquent and this other guy got flustered.

What do those things even matter when even a basic read on reality is not being addressed or talked about at all in these talks? There is no measure of what has been happening. There is no accounting for life and death. These are not serious people.

They need to print out some basic facts. They need to find the number for the amount of people who will die based on every single policy these politicians think up and then they need to put those numbers up in front of these people so that they can’t talk around reality. Want to defund healthcare and fund cops? Answer this question first: how many people will die? Want to ignore a pandemic or the climate collapse? How many people will die? Want to increase military spending? How many more people will die?

I’m only just talking about the amount of death that the scientists can assess right now. I’m not even getting into how science doesn’t really know how to measure climate collapse because it collapses as an institution when it has to face problems that it has never encountered before. I’m not even talking about how death is incalculable because every death represents grief for a whole community.

They need to put a simplified and basic assessment of what is at stake in front of these people’s faces because, right now, everyone is delulu. These politicians are not just detached. They’re literally not living on Earth. They are not acknowledging death. Let’s at least give them a Sparknotes reality check.