Just who the hell are you anyway?

I’m Carl Gibson, a freelance journalist and columnist with over a decade of professional experience published in CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, Al Jazeera, Barron’s, MarketWatch, The Independent, and NPR, among others.

Between 2017 and 2019, I was the assignment editor for Grit Post, which was a media company focused on providing a working-class angle to current events with roughly one million monthly readers. Our reporting was cited by 40+ prominent local and national publications, we had a higher NewsGuard rating than ABC News, we rated High in factual reporting by Media Bias Fact Check, and we earned multiple True ratings on content evaluated by Snopes. And according to NewsWhip, two of the top six most-read pharmaceutical-related articles of 2019 were Grit Post articles I wrote. Unfortunately, like many other and much larger publications, Grit Post had to shut down in 2019 due to Facebook and Google taking a bulk of ad revenue that used to go to publishers.

In 2011 I co-founded US Uncut — a nationwide grassroots movement protesting corporate tax avoidance and austerity that predated Occupy Wall Street. US Uncut was also featured in the award-winning documentary We’re Not Broke, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and streamed on Netflix.

Later, US Uncut became a social justice-oriented media company that specialized in making leftist memes and ideas go viral and influencing the national economic narrative. At its peak, USUncut.com was the #24 most popular mobile website in the US, attracted as many as 40 million monthly page views, and was cited by multiple local, national and international news outlets.

I’ve appeared on MSNBC, HuffPost Live, WNYC, WBUR, Public Radio International, SiriusXM radio, and multiple podcasts. I’ve also been interviewed and cited by multiple international news sources including The Guardian, Amnesty International Switzerland, Swiss public broadcaster SRF, Swiss newspapers La Liberte and Le Nouvelliste, Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, French newspaper Libération, Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Secolo XIX, Spanish newspaper El Diario, and Austrian public broadcasting network ORF, among others. If all those outlets trust me as a reliable source, you can too!

But war is bad! What’s the deal with advocating class war?

I wish there wasn’t a class war! But like Warren Buffett has already said, there’s been a class war going on, and his class is winning. To me, “class war” refers to the relentless campaign by corporations and the elected officials they purchase to strip the working class of dignity and quality of life.

There’s a century worth of labor history in which class war was fought by trade unionists with strikes, fists, bullets, and bombs in order to institute things we take for granted like the eight-hour workday, weekends, and child labor laws. But capital’s organized conquest of our government, the media, academia, and the courts was first outlined in The Powell Memo of 1971.

Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell felt that the decade of the 1960s tipped the scales in favor of civil rights activists and politicians with working-class values, and that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which exclusively represents multinational corporations, not mom-and-pop small business owners) needed to lead the charge for big business to slowly indoctrinate the masses toward their cause.

Sadly, Powell’s campaign has been largely realized. The US Chamber is currently the #1 all-time biggest spender among all lobbying organizations. The Koch family has successfully implemented pro-business fellowships, visiting professorships, and curriculum at dozens of leading public and private American universities. A small handful of huge multinational corporations control nearly all of the information you consume. Under Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, the US Supreme Court is the most business-friendly court since World War II.

Because they played the long game, so should we. We won’t roll back corporate control of society overnight, but equipping people with the information they need to protect themselves from the overreaches of capital is my way of fighting the class war.

I’m certainly not advocating for wealthy people to be dragged out of their enclaves by their heels and guillotined in public squares, as that would do nothing to change the fact that an absurd amount of wealth is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. That being said, it would greatly benefit them to read this publication if they want to learn how to make sure that won’t ever happen.

I love your work, but I’m cash-strapped! Are you going to paywall your content?

I’m going to do everything possible to keep all of my content free. But if you have money to spare and value the work I’m doing, please consider making a $7 monthly recurring contribution.

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Nichiren Buddhist, writer, drummer. Published in CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, Barron's, The Independent, and NPR, among others