Cornel West announces 2024 run for president as People’s Party candidate

Progressive activist Cornel West announced his 2024 campaign for president with the People’s Party on Monday

“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 a video announcement on Twitter launching the third-party presidential bid. 

“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, a philosophy professor and longtime vocal progressive advocate, said his campaign would focus on health care, living wages, housing, reproductive rights and “deescalating the destruction of the planet, the destruction of American democracy.”

In the campaign video, West included a clip in which he referred to President Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal” and referred to former President Trump as a “neofascist.” He explained his decision to run as a third-party candidate, saying, “neither political party wants to tell the truth about Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech.”

“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,” he said.

The People’s Party was founded in 2017 by Nick Brana, a former campaign staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for the purpose of “building a major new progressive populist party in America.”