Running as third-party candidate, in ‘People’s Party’
Forget about all the noise of candidate this and candidate that joining the race for President of the United States in the Republican Party; a well-respected Black man with eons of experience fighting for the truth and justice has announced his candidacy for president.
The New Pittsburgh Courier has learned that Dr. Cornel West, current professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary and who formerly taught at Yale, Princeton and Harvard universities, is running for president. He made the announcement on Monday, June 5. He said he’s running as a third-party candidate, for the “People’s Party,” which was founded by Nick Brana. Brana worked on Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
Dr. West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in just three years, and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D., in Philosophy at Princeton. He earned his doctorate degree in 1980. Dr. West was born in 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Dr. West, who at times has been a critic of Democrats including former president Barack Obama, announced his candidacy with a campaign video on Twitter.
“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,” Dr. West said in the video. “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.”
Dr. West’s candidacy comes at a time where uncertainty is the best way to describe who will sit in the country’s top chair in January 2025. The current president, Joe Biden, a Democrat, saw his approval rating dip down to 36 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released in May. The poll also found that 56 percent of people “disapprove” of the job Biden has done so far, and 58 percent of the Democrats surveyed said they would rather have another nominee on the Democratic side for the 2024 presidential run.
On the Republican side, sure, former president Donald Trump has a big edge, say the poll numbers. But that didn’t stop Florida governor Ron DeSantis from jumping in for the Republican nomination, and others like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (who is Black) and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley have also thrown their hat in the race. Then there’s Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, who announced earlier this week that he’s a candidate.
The race for the next U.S. president is wide open, and Dr. Cornel West believes he has as good a shot as anyone to be the last man standing.
In his video, Dr. West said he comes from a tradition “where I care about you, I care about the quality of your life, I care about whether you have access to a job or living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, health care for all…”
The video also showed previous clips of Dr. West calling Trump a “neo-fascist” and President Biden a “milquetoast liberal.”
Lupe Fiasco, a longtime Hip-Hop artist, said on Twitter that he’s supporting Dr. West: “This will be the first and last time I vote,” Fiasco said, ending with a smiley face emoji.
Dr. West said in his video that his candidacy is about love, not hate, but that he’s fighting for “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.”
Dr. West concluded: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see. But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.”
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