WASHINGTON — Scholar and progressive activist Cornel West announced Monday he is running for president next year as a third-party candidate, saying he wants to empower people who have been “pushed to the margins.”
In a Twitter video, West said he will run as a member of The People’s Party. He criticized both major political parties and their standard bearers, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Both Biden and Trump are running again in 2024.
“In these bleak 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. “I enter in the quest for truth. I enter in the quest for justice, and the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice, what I’ve been trying to do all of my life.”
West is a well known Black scholar and author and a former professor at Harvard and Princeton universities. He criticized former President Barack Obama as a “war criminal,” and supported Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist, in his presidential bids in 2016 and 2020.