Is Cornel West, the academic and philosopher who recently announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election via the People’s Party, a “spoiler candidate”?
Joan Walsh, neoliberal darling, now of The Nation, thinks so. She has been dispatched to assassinate his character — perhaps the first attempt of the season but certainly not the last.
Via The Nation:
Cornel West has no business running for president, from the left, right, or center.
I loved early Democratic Socialists of America leader Cornel West. I loved author of the 1993 book Race Matters West. I loved everything about West until he supported spoiler Ralph Nader against then–Vice President Al Gore in 2000.
A lot of my political friends supported Ralph Nader back then. And a lot of them have since apologized. Even Michael Moore. The Iraqi people, and the people of the entire globe, are so much the worse since Gore, the climate-change believer and war skeptic, was defeated by George W. Bush that year, with an assist from the Supreme Court. And Nader’s Green Party.
West never apologized. He didn’t see a third party playing a spoiler role to Democrats as bad—obviously, since he’s about to do it again.
Let’s be clear: Running for president, Cornel West will only take votes away from Biden and help elect a Republican.https://t.co/roOQIFOCSs
— The Nation (@thenation) June 8, 2023
I encourage you to read the entire article. Each paragraph is more unhinged than the last. Here Walsh implies that West, a black man, is racist for running against the Brandon entity, a white man, because black people have been successfully hoodwinked through relentless racist propaganda and fearmongering into voting for the Democrat Party at a rate north of 90%.
“Now West wants to challenge Joe Biden, who is indeed a white president, who nonetheless won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 thanks to overwhelming Black support,” she writes. “Which he will have again.”
An MSNBC columnist with a vaguely ethnic name, Ja’han Jones, is of the same (hive)mind: Cornel West is a racist “right-wing extremist.”
Via MSNBC:
Ostensibly leftist academic Cornel West launched his third-party presidential campaign the way any true progressive would — by promoting it on a podcast known to spread right-wing extremist conspiracy theories, hosted on a video platform popular among right-wing extremists, just weeks after having praised Florida’s right-wing extremist governor, Ron DeSantis…
And I haven’t even delved into West’s tendency to target and publicly malign Black public figures who’ve eclipsed him in popularity (under the guise of political purity, of course). If you like Donald Trump’s petty digs at people he thinks have slighted him, you’ll love Cornel West.
There’s a lot to be said about allegedly ardent supporters of Democracy™ smearing a sincere leftist like West as a “right-winger” simply for participating in electoral politics in order to protect the Brandon entity.
But let’s start with this truism, which I’ve written about previously in the context of similar attacks on Republican candidate Tim Scott: the liberal establishment hates blacks who stray off the Democrat Party plantation perhaps more than even the phantom White Supremacists™ its acolytes are always on about.
They are particularly panicked by West because, since he’s running outside of the two-party system, he may very well peel off enough black Biden voters to make a meaningful difference for RFK Jr., who in turn would have a fighter’s chance at getting the nomination, supposing they don’t do the 2016 routine and just outright rig the primaries to keep him out, which they almost certainly will.
But good on West for at least throwing a monkey wrench into the machine and hopefully driving people like Joan Walsh to the psychiatric ward in the process.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Cornel West’s name. We apologize to our readers for this error.
