Appearing Friday on CNN, far-left activist and professor Cornel West reacted to the ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd, stating, “thank God we have people in the streets,” and judging the United States is a “failed social experiment.”
A partial transcript is as follows:
DR. CORNEL WEST: With George, it is so clear it was a lynching at the highest level. Nobody can deny it, and I thank God we have people in the streets. Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent, don’t care — people don’t care?
[…]
The system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried black faces in high places. Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.
And what happens is we have a neofascist gangster in the White House who doesn’t care for the most part. You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver’s seat with the collapse of brother Bernie, and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces — show more black faces. But oftentimes those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary], and they couldn’t deliver.
[…]
White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long time. Don’t be surprised when this happens again. Try again, fail again, fail better. That’s the blues line of our Irish brothers. But the question is we must fight. Even in the moment where we have a failed social experiment, we must fight. We must have an antifascist coalition against the White House-Republican party. We have to tell the truth about the milquetoast cowardly activity too often we see too often in the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party.