Socialist academic and activist Cornel West has announced his intention to run for president as a candidate representing the People’s Party.
West made the announcement with a video posted to Twitter, revealing he has decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People’s Party.” He explained, “I enter for the quest for truth. I enter for the quest of justice. And the presidency is just one vehicle we pursue that truth and justice.”
West, a former professor at Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University, highlighted his disagreements with both mainstream political parties in his announcement.
“Neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech,” West asserted. “Do we have what it takes? We shall see.”
I am running for truth and justice as a presidential candidate for the People’s Party to reintroduce America to the best of itself – fighting to end poverty, mass incarceration, ending wars and ecological collapse, guaranteeing housing, health care, education and living wages for… pic.twitter.com/u3NYGUbG1S
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) June 5, 2023
An early supporter of former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, West broke with the 44th president as early as 2009, first questioning Obama’s decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Ahead of Obama’s reelection, West would lambast him as a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface.” After his second victory, West described him as a “counterfeit” and his administration as a “Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.”
In 2016 and in 2020, West supported the presidential bids of Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. He voiced his ardent 2020 support in a lengthy interview with The Intercept.
“I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother,” said West in 2020 as he endorsed his second presidential bid. He extolled Sanders’ anti-racist tendencies, declaring the endorsement “has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth.”
Known for his academic activism, West’s new affiliation with The People’s Party will likely signal the left wing progressive’s staunch opposition to U.S. funding of the war in Ukraine.
The People’s Party has distinguished itself among left wing causes through its opposition to the war, and was among the bipartisan organizers of the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally held in Washington, D.C. in February of this year.
Conservative readers may be interested in reading about West’s travels in Africa with Tucker Carlson, who once embedded himself with a group of African-American religious figures, academics, and activists in failed a bid to restore order to war torn Liberia.
