(Editor’s note: This is part of our continuing series for all the presidential candidates for the 2024 election—No endorsement for any candidate is made)
Presidential Profile: 3rd Party Candidate– Green/People’s Party
Cornel West is running in the 2024 Presidential Election, and Democrats are fuming mad.
Not because he has a chance of winning but because he might siphon votes away from Biden and help the Republican nominee win.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of West’s announcement:
“I think he [West] has a very long record of service and academic thought leadership … I think just right now, given the Electoral College, it’s very difficult to square the very real threat of a Republican presidency … [with] the risk of giving up the very small margin of electoral votes needed to ensure that President Biden wins.”
Democrat Rep. Jim McGovern said:
“The stakes are too high this year, especially if Trump is the nominee,” he told the Hill. “I think everybody, including the most progressive elements of our country, needs to protect our democracy by stopping Donald Trump and supporting Joe Biden.”
But Who is Cornel West, and what does he stand for?
Cornel West is a radical/Socialist college professor. He is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, a former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He also served as honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—an organization he said was “the first multiracial, socialist organization close enough to my politics that I could join.”
In addition to being a radical socialist, West is also steps into racism, aligning himself with the likes of Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan.
West refers to the U.S. as a “racist, patriarchal nation where white supremacy continues to define everyday life.”
When speaking about Biden, he often mentions the Biden-sponsored Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. West said, “Well, I think Joe Biden contributed to a crime against humanity when he became the architect of the mass incarceration regime in the 1990s.”
“Black folks are a low priority” to Biden, West said. “The President was much better at window dressing ‘black faces in high places’ than substantive change.”
He often criticizes President Biden’s record on race issues and the Democrats saying, “Democrat’s history with black Americans is nothing short of a “crime against humanity.”
West is not one to shy away from very controversial issues. For example, West misguidedly compared the 9/11 attacks to slavery, saying, “It [9/11] gave white Americans a glimpse of what it means to be a black person in the United States,” feeling “unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence, and hatred for who they are.”
When he’s not blaming the United States for institutional racial discrimination, he’s attacking capitalism and corporate greed, wealth redistribution, and for the rich “pay their fair share” and the implementation of a wealth tax.
However, it seems West hasn’t paid his fair share regarding taxes.
Recently uncovered documents showed West has $543,778.78 in tax liens dating back to 2005.
West is also a radical political activist. He’s been arrested several times, including on October 13, 2014, while protesting the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, and on August 10, 2015, while demonstrating outside a courthouse in St. Louis on the one-year anniversary of Brown’s death.
As for his Christian beliefs, he says that Marxism doesn’t correlate well with Christianity, but he believes that Socialism and Christianity can co-exist if it’s “Democratic Socialism.”
In a recent interview, he claimed that Christianity had been taken over by “Christian Nationalism.”
“Christian Nationalists,” he explained, “Are those Christians who have accommodated themselves to empire or accommodated themselves to the status quo, became Constantinian Christians. I mean, my fellow Christians who are Christian nationalists, white supremacist Christians, male supremacist Christians, anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, and so forth, they’re contemporary extensions of Constantinian Christianity—the dominant form of Christianity since 312. That’s just how fallen we are.
In some ways, we should never be surprised because it’s always a critical minority who constitute the prophetic ones, who want to be genuine disciples of Jesus—I mean, look what happened to him.”
He continues, “Jesus says, ‘Come and die.’ Doctor King used to say, ‘The cross is not something that you talk about; it’s something that you die on.”
So that’s what Christian discipleship is, if you really want to follow this Palestinian Jew named Jesus, in all of our fallibility, all of our finitude, all of our fallenness, then you got to really look good on wood. Which is to say, you got to be able to know there’s a cross for you to bear.
We must heal our ‘sick society’ and fix the struggles against American apartheid in the South, with Jim Crow, or the patriarchy—these days, especially, not losing sight of the precious humanity of our trans and gay and lesbian fellow human beings.”
West’s criticism of the Democrat party also extends to former President Obama, whom he supported, but now attacks.
“Obama would give one of the most lovely speeches in the world about peace and have 6 wars going on at the same time, killing innocent people. Those are war crimes. You see, you can’t give a pretty speech about peace and commit war crimes and expect anybody to say you’re continuing the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a lie. It’s just not true. Obama and the Democratic Party, these folks are tied to militarism; they’re tied to Wall Street. You have a choice of bailing Wall Street out or bailing out homeowners, you go automatically to Wall Street.”
So, what kind of government does West see for the United States in the Future?
Democratic Socialism.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have evolved, said West. “The impact of DSA, the influence of DSA, can take on some very, very important religious socialist forms. There’s no doubt about it. We might not even call it socialism in the end. The word socialism might be too scary for people. But that’s what we’d be doing. Just call it intense democracy or whatever.”
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