Progressive activist and scholar Cornel West announced Monday that he is running for president as a third-party candidate.
West, a professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Princeton University, announced his campaign in a video posted to Twitter.
"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 the video. "I enter for the quest for truth. I enter for the quest of justice. And the presidency is just one vehicle we pursue that truth and justice."
West added: "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."
West criticized President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, in the video as a "milquetoast neo-liberal," and called former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, a "neo-fascist."
The People's Party was founded in 2016 by a former worker on the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., though Sanders declined to join the party when he ran for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020.