Cornel West says he wouldn’t accept position in Harris administration: No compromise with ‘genocide’

CHICAGO — Presidential candidate Cornel West said he wouldn’t accept a position in a hypothetical Harris administration, adding that there can be no compromise with “genocide.”

West spoke with the Washington Examiner’s Christian Datoc at the Abandon Biden convention, hosted down the street from the Democratic National Convention. He denied in strong terms that he had ever been a fan of “top cop” Vice President Kamala Harris and accused her of complicity in genocide.

“No way,” he responded, laughing when Datoc asked if he would accept a position in the administration to enact change from the inside.

“You’ve got to have a social movement on the outside that generates leaders who have a history of being anti-genocide,” he continued. “You can’t have leaders who’ve been tied to genocide most of their career and act as if they’re going to make a promise and then try to bring you in. You get co-opted, and you end up selling out, and they turn away from their prompt what they’ve done all the time, but they can’t meet the promise of dealing with poverty, wealth inequality, mass incarceration, that one isolated politician who’s been tied to say all this time is going to do that. No, no, not at all.”

“Now, if you had a wave of new voices and figures who were trying to change, that is a different thing,” West said.

West expressed disappointment in nearly everyone in Congress, singling out “dear brother” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who “failed the test.”

“He failed the test. Called for the ceasefire too late. Strong critique of Netanyahu, still too late,” he said, adding that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was a rare exception of someone who had handled the situation well.

West compared the conflict in Gaza to the situation of slavery, where both sides were evil for partaking in it, and neither could be joined by people of good conscience.

“If you can’t create revolution in a deep moral, political, and economic sense, then you create conflict and dissensus within the elites themselves,” he said. “So you bring the power and pressure to bear from below, and you create these fissures and forms of conflict, moral appeals, political pressure, that can generate some policy change, but you can … change the policy and still reproduce the same corrupt system.”

West’s long-shot bid for president is polling at around 1%, but he hasn’t shown signs of dropping out anytime soon. The Democratic Party has brushed him off.

“I don’t fear them. There’s that saying you either run unopposed or you run scared,” Daniele Monroe-Moreno, chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party, said of West and other third-party challengers, on Tuesday. “And it’s our job as a party, and our volunteers and my team just get the vote out and tell our story about the work that we have been doing, both at the national level and the state level, to make sure that people understand how they’re voting and what that vote means.”