Prominent civil rights activist and former Harvard Divinity School philosophy professor Cornel West is running for president, he announced in a social media post Monday.
West is running as a presidential candidate not under the Democrat party but the People’s Party, which describes itself as a “major new independent party that will guarantee health care, housing, quality education, and peace to all.”
“In these times, I have 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,” West said in an announcement video posted to social media, explaining that the presidency is “one vehicle to pursuit a truth and justice.”
WATCH:
“I come from a tradition where I care about you,” West said, listing off some of his positions such as free health care to access to abortion.
“I care about the quality of your life. I care about whether you have access to a job whether living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, health care for all, the escalating the destruction of the planet, the destruction of American democracy,” he said. “Democracy creates disruption.”
West explained that he is not talking about “hating” anybody but “loving” and “affirming” and “empowering” those who “have been pushed to the margins, because neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about Big Tech.”
WATCH: Cornel West: Obama “Didn’t Have the Courage, Didn’t Have to Willingness to Fight That Biden Does”:
The video cut to a clip of West speaking to Bill Maher, where West presented Trump as a “neo-fascist” and President Biden as a “milquetoast neo-liberal.”
“Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he added.
The announcement comes nearly two years after West resigned from Harvard University’s Divinity School, citing “decline and decay,” and asserting that he was working in “the shadow of Jim Crow,” which “was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity.”
The high-profile leftist is no stranger to criticizing not only Republicans but President Biden, asserting in 2021 that the president had “blood on his hands.”
“[Biden’s] done some wonderful things in terms of relief deals and infrastructure and Yemen and Afghanistan, but you know he’s got blood on his hands when it comes to being one of the architects of mass incarceration,” he said.
“It was his rhetoric November 18th, 1994, when he said people who look like me, people who look like George Floyd, he said ‘he’s a predator’; ‘they’re beyond, beyond reform’; ‘throw them in jail and throw the keys away,’” he continued.
“Well, you see that cheapened black life,” he added. “That has contributed to the attitude of some of the police.”
WATCH: Cornel West: American Police “Have Been Out of Control Since the Slave Patrol” — Black People Are “Traumatized”: