Cornel West Faces Coordinated Attacks in Green Party Run

ABC News was the latest to highlight a recent Daily Beast Investigation into the tax records of Green Party Candidate Cornel West.

“Veteran Ivy League professor and bestselling author Dr. Cornel West has long advocated for taxing the rich to provide more services to America’s lower classes. But the academic-turned-Green Party presidential candidate isn’t living up to those standards in his own life—as public records from New Jersey and California show, West owes the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes,” The Daily Beast said. 

The Daily Beast goes on to connect West to former PBS personality Tavis Smiley, who co-authored “The Rich and the Rest of Us” with West and was fired amid sexual misconduct allegations.

Smiley maintained his innocence and responded online saying "The PBS investigators refused to review any of my personal documentation, refused to provide me the names of any accusers, refused to speak to my current staff and refused to provide me any semblance of due process to defend myself against allegations from unknown sources. Their mind was made up.”

Smiley famously received backlash for his criticism of Presidential Candidate Barack Obama in the lead up to the 2008 election. 

The Daily Beast reports that West is a staunch supporter of higher taxation for the wealthy and that West criticized the Hunter Biden plea deal for back taxes. 

In the vicious condemnation, the Daily Beast goes on to say:

“New Jersey court records further indicate the Harvard- and Princeton-educated son of a Defense Department contractor is a deadbeat in more ways than one. A $49,500 child support judgment against him from 2003 remains open to this day.”

Prior to his presidential bid, West commonly appeared as a beloved intellectual of the progressive wing of the media, appearing on MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, Real Time with Bill Maher and others. 

Two weeks prior to the attacks from the Daily Beast, the Atlantic published an article about the potential trouble Biden faced in the 2024 elections with West running on a third party ticket. While West does not believe he will take away votes for Biden, Democratic strategists are worried his partnership with former Green Party candidate Jill Stein will make significant noise in battleground states. 

The Atlantic goes on to highlight West’s stance on the Ukraine Russia War and his criticism of  the White House, which allegedly provided cluster bombs to Ukrainian Forces. 

In an X post West states:

“Let us not be deceived: NATO is an expanding instrument of U.S. global power that provoked Russia into a criminal invasion and occupation of Ukraine. This proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation could lead to World War III. We must stop the war and war crimes (including cluster bombs used by all parties) and embark on diplomatic talks that should lead to a just peace. As the great W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1945 "I seem to see outlined a third World War based on the suppression of Asia and the strangling of Russia."  The Democratic Party is a party of war and Wall Street targeting Russia and China. Let us save our democracy and world by dismantling U.S. militarism at home (as in Cop Cities) and abroad - as Martin Luther King Jr. painfully reminded us!”

Brookings recently warned that it could be a repeat of the 1948 Presidential Election and that polling indicates West could take as much as 4% of the vote, making his impact larger than Stein in 2016.

Brookings states:

“Joe Biden’s room for maneuver is dangerously small. Even though Stein received just over 1% of the vote in 2016, her vote total was higher than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — with enough electoral votes to turn Hillary Clinton’s defeat into a narrow victory. Although we cannot say for sure that Stein cost Clinton the election, we cannot rule out the possibility that she did.”

The Hill reported that West could stand to garner more votes from democrat voters that have lost faith in Biden. 

“The anxiety around West is also illustrative of the broader concerns Democrats have about Biden. They understand that his approval rating isn’t where they’d like it to be, and that Trump still has a firm grip on the Republican Party. They also see poll after poll indicating that at least some percentage of voters want someone else as the Democratic nominee,” The Hill said. 

Weather it’s concerns over third party voters affecting battleground states, West’s stance on taxing the wealthy, West’s outspokenness on the War in Ukraine, or his decade old affiliation with Tavis Smiley, it’s apparent that magnifying glass of the political arena is on his campaign. It appears that coordinated media attacks are being released to discredit West’s Green Party run.