Since scholar and activist Cornel West announced his third party bid for the 2024 presidential election, West has not shied away from criticizing the establishment on a whirlwind press tour.
On Monday, the Green Party candidate and former Princeton and Harvard professor told Fox News his candidacy was as “serious as a heart attack.” West is just as outspoken about the Democratic party as he is of the GOP.
Here’s some of his most passionate takes:
1. West believes that both sides of the aisle are associated with corruption and “big money.”
“This is true for Republicans, is true for Democrats. [I’m] talking about Brother Trump himself – and Biden’s connection to Stennis, Biden’s connection to [ex-South Carolina Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Strom] Thurmond. We know Brother Trump’s own father’s been tied to the Klan and of Trump’s language about Black people,” stated West.
“For my White House – and I’ve told my people, I’m not even going to the White House until every American citizen has a house – I want to abolish poverty, abolish homelessness. I want jobs with a living wage,” continued West.
2. West pushes back on being criticized for potentially “taking votes away” from Democrats.
“A part of it is that nearly 40 percent of our precious citizens every two and four years decide not to vote at all,” West shared with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And we know that the so-called spoilers, which is a category you can imagine I don’t accept at all, it was two-thirds of those who voted– it could be a Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, brother Ralph Nader, whoever — people say they would never vote for the two parties,” stated West.
“And I can understand those two parties become too corrupt. Their politicians are too conformist, too many of the policies themselves are just cowardly, will just say anything. What about truth? What about justice? Truth and justice is bigger than all of us, bigger than every party, every race, every person. If you’re concerned about truth and justice, then you can’t be cowardly, complacent or conformist,” continued West.
“And especially if you’re looking at the world through the lens of those who are incarcerated, those who are in ghettos and hoods and barrios. Brother David Axelrod, he looks at the world through the lens of the establishment. Well, of course, from the lens of the establishment, he is concerned about reproducing the establishment. My God. My God. There is no doubt about that. In the 1850s, both parties supported slavery, like he does with the Labor Department,” West added.
West even called out Cooper, saying “You’re very much part of the Democratic Party establishment.”
3. West continues to be outspoken against mass incarceration, one of the points on his platform.
West called mass incarceration in the U.S. “a crime against humanity.” As he shared, “I’ve taught in prison for 41 years. I’ve stayed in contact with the rich humanity of my brothers and sisters who have been incarcerated and many have done things they didn’t and shouldn’t have done. Many are there because they’re innocent.”
“We ought to be ashamed to live in a country when you look at the conditions of our brothers and sisters who are incarcerated. It is not just the 1994 crime bill. You can go back to the Biden-Thurmond bills of ’84 and 86, and ’91, and then ’94…So it’s just a matter of trying to be truthful,” said West.
“I’m not trying to trash brother Biden, I am really not. I’m trying to make him accountable for his actions in light of how the wretched of the earth are treated in this nation and around the world. And that’s true for any politician, be it Obama, Biden, Clinton, Bush, Trump –all of them have to be measured by the same standard of truth and justice,” West pointed out.
