Live UpdateFrom the Liveblog of Monday, June 5, 2023

Activist Cornel West says he will run for US president in 2024 as 3rd-party candidate

By AP 5 June 2023, 9:02 pm 1 Edit

Then-Harvard professor Cornel West speaks at a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at the Whittemore Center Arena at the University of New Hampshire, February 10, 2020, in Durham, NH. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Scholar and progressive activist Cornel West announces he is running for US 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 says 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 says. “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.