Frank M. Anderson's Writing

Radical Honesty – On Politics and Fascism

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I’ve been thinking a lot about honesty lately — not the polite, softened kind, but the real kind. The kind that risks making people uncomfortable. The kind that might cost you friends, but leaves you knowing you said what you actually meant.

That’s the thread I’ve been pulling with these Radical Honesty pieces. It’s part writing experiment, part personal philosophy. I believe that if we’re going to have any chance at understanding each other — or ourselves — we have to be willing to say the things we usually swallow. That means admitting when we’ve failed, when we’ve been hypocritical, and when the truth doesn’t make us look good.

It also means talking about politics without hiding behind the usual disclaimers. Because politics isn’t an abstract arena — it’s where empathy either survives or gets legislated out of existence. It’s where the powerful decide whose lives matter and whose don’t.

That’s why I keep coming back to Brad. He’s not just a person I pass on the sidewalk. He’s a mirror for how we value — or don’t value — each other. Writing about him isn’t comfortable, but neither is the truth about where we are as a country right now. And if Radical Honesty means anything, it means being willing to say so.

Let’s Talk About Brad—OnPolitics

I haven’t kept up with the “What About Brad” series the way I wanted to. Life’s been loud. I moved stores. There’s been personal drama. And somewhere in there, checking in on Brad — the man with the coffee cup and the quick smile — shifted from a public conversation to a private one in my head.

But Brad’s still out there. And right now, his story feels heavier than when I first started writing about him. Because what’s happening in this country — in Washington D.C., in Greenville, in statehouses and city councils — is no longer the slow creep toward authoritarianism. It’s the thing itself, walking right out into daylight.

The Trump Plan for D.C.

Donald Trump has decided to seize control of D.C.’s response to homelessness and crime. On paper, it’s “law and order.” In practice, it’s a federal takeover of a city that didn’t ask for it, targeting the most vulnerable people and treating them as threats. He’s hiring ICE agents with no college degree, no police background — people now tasked with rounding up immigrants and clearing out homeless encampments. This isn’t just posturing. It’s policy. And it’s dangerous.

Greenville’s Brush With the Same Playbook

If you think this logic only lives at the national level, look at Greenville. Our city council floated an ordinance to make sleeping in public for more than two hours a fineable, even jailable, offense. The plan would have empowered the city to remove people from public property — “connecting them to services” in theory, but without enough shelter beds or outreach staff to make that more than a talking point.

The pushback was fierce. Service providers, advocates, and everyday residents packed the council meeting, calling the ordinance exactly what it was: criminalizing poverty. They pointed out that Greenville Together, the city’s $500,000 homelessness initiative, hasn’t even started in earnest. After an hour of public outrage, the council postponed the vote until August. A small victory, but the fact that we even had to fight off this idea says something about where we are.

Hypocrisy in Power

And while local leaders debate whether a man like Brad deserves a bench to sleep on, here’s the other headline: South Carolina conservative lawmaker RJ May is sitting in jail under a federal indictment for ten counts of distributing child sexual abuse materials. This is a man whose party has made “protecting children” a centerpiece of its culture war — banning books, censoring art, and targeting LGBTQ people under the guise of moral decency. The hypocrisy isn’t new, but it’s as corrosive as ever: the ones shouting loudest about morality are often the ones hiding the darkest crimes.

We’ve Been Here Before — Sort Of

I can’t help but think back to the 1990s. Little Richard sitting on The Arsenio Hall Show, defending the right to be free from moral policing. Back then, the “culture wars” were about record labels, explicit lyrics, and whether music was corrupting America’s youth. Republicans wrapped themselves in the language of freedom — even as they fought to control what we could say, hear, and see. Democrats, for their part, were already practicing the art of conceding ground in the name of bipartisanship.

The 90s: When the Culture War Had a Soundtrack

In the 1990s, the battle over freedom of expression had a very specific soundtrack. It wasn’t abstract — it was loud, distorted, and carried on cassette tapes with “Parental Advisory” stickers.

The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) had won their fight in the late 80s to put content labels on albums. What started as a moral panic over Prince, Madonna, and heavy metal morphed into a full-blown political spectacle. Senate hearings featured the likes of Dee Snider from Twisted Sister and Frank Zappa defending the right to sing about whatever they damn well pleased.

By the time Little Richard appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show, the front lines had shifted to hip-hop and grunge. N.W.A., Ice-T, and 2 Live Crew were under fire. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were “corrupting youth.” Politicians framed these musicians not as artists but as public enemies, and the news ate it up.

Little Richard’s monologue — warning about hypocrisy, defending the right to say, sing, or buy what you want — was part entertainment, part sermon. He understood what was at stake: not just music, but the cultural permission to be different, offensive, even wrong.

Back then, Republicans styled themselves as defenders of “American freedom” while working tirelessly to limit what counted as acceptable speech or art. Democrats, meanwhile, tried to straddle the line — offering half-hearted defenses of artists while agreeing to “reasonable” censorship to avoid looking soft on crime or morality.

Sound familiar?

The difference is that in the 90s, the fights were mostly symbolic — album stickers, public outrage, maybe a police raid on a record store. Now, the same moral-policing instinct is paired with the machinery of state power: federal takeovers of cities, ICE raids, and laws designed to criminalize homelessness itself. The tactics have escalated. The target list has grown. And the people in power have learned that the quickest way to dismantle rights is to frame empathy as weakness and difference as danger.

The Balance We’ve Lost

I believe in capitalism. I believe in rewarding people who work hard and create value. But the system we have now doesn’t reward work — it rewards consolidation, exploitation, and inheritance. Some degree of socialism — yes, socialism — is part of the answer. Not to replace markets, but to make them work for more than the people already at the top. That sentence alone will make some folks lose their minds. But if we can’t say the truth out loud anymore, maybe Little Richard was right: our freedoms are already under siege.

The Attack on Empathy

I keep thinking about Brad, and how his existence on the sidewalk is a quiet rebuke to the way we’re told to see the world now. Empathy is out of fashion. It’s being painted as a liability — even a flaw. Elon Musk has said outright that empathy is a “bug” in Western civilization, a kind of civilizational weakness. He frames compassion as something that will destroy us if we indulge it.

That’s the attitude running through so much of our politics now. We’ve built a culture where caring for strangers is suspect, where helping people who are struggling is called “enabling,” and where the measure of your worth is how profitably you can produce, not how deeply you can connect.

When I hand Brad a coffee, I’m not fixing homelessness. I’m not solving systemic poverty. But I’m refusing the idea that seeing another person’s humanity is something to be ashamed of. Empathy isn’t the bug in the system. It’s the whole reason the system is worth saving.

And maybe that’s why they want to strip it out of us — because empathy makes exploitation harder. It asks questions about why someone is on the sidewalk instead of in a home, why policy punishes them instead of helping. It complicates the easy stories politicians like to tell.

So I’ll keep coming back to Brad, because he’s not a policy debate or a culture war talking point. He’s a person. And if we can’t remember how to care about the person right in front of us, then no constitution, no free market, no ideology is going to save us.

Read: The Empathy War — Why Stories Are the Battleground

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