Presidential candidate Cornel West has left the Green Party and is now running as an independent.
This is the second time that West has changed parties during his campaign. He was originally running under the liberal People’s Party before joining the Green Party.
“People are hungry for change. They want good policies over partisan politics. We need to break the grip of the duopoly and give power to the people,” West wrote Thursday on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. People are hungry for change. They want good policies over partisan politics. We need to break the grip of the duopoly and give power to the people. I'm running as an Independent candidate for President of the United States to end the iron grip of the ruling class and ensure true… pic.twitter.com/34FFQARTEe
— Cornel West (@CornelWest) October 5, 2023
West added, “I'm running as an Independent candidate for President of the United States to end the iron grip of the ruling class and ensure true democracy!
"We need you to be part and parcel of wrestling with this corporate duopoly, this two-party system that impedes," West said in a video attached to his post. "It gets in the way of the unleashing of the kind of policies of abolishing poverty and homelessness, of dealing with working wages, cutting back on militarism, and most importantly, trying to ensure that the best of who we are as a people can be more manifest — can be more concrete, because the crisis is real, and these catastrophes are bombarding us."
West's video concluded, "Please come join us."
The candidate is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. He was previously a professor at Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
West is a Socialist who is best known for his activism on race and social justice. He was also a surrogate for Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he said that they "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."
He was arrested twice while protesting the death of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri.
