Cornel West is tossing his name in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. West announced his decision on 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,” the 70-year-old scholar said in a video message. “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, a former educator at Harvard University and professor emeritus at Princeton University, vowed to care about people more than other candidates. 

“I come from a tradition where I care about you,” he said. “I care about the quality of your life.”

The historian also bashed the Democratic and Republican Parties for failing to tell the truth about “Wall Street, about Ukraine, about the Pentagon, about big tech.”

According to Politico, West first left his teaching job at Harvard University in 2002 after a dispute with Lawrence Summers, who was president of the institution at that time. West returned to Harvard years later but left in 2021 after another administrator conflict. The scholar-activist is now teaching philosophy at Union Theological Seminary, NBC News reported.

In his message on Monday, West said he cares about ensuring people have “a job with a living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, health care for all, de-escalating the destruction of the planet.”

West included images of himself at political rallies and social justice demonstrations. He also inserted a clip of an interview in which he referred to Donald Trump as a “neo-fascist” and President Joe Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

West, a longtime critic of the two-party system, is now running as part of the party founded by Nick Brana, a former staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Brana founded the People’s Party in 2017, aiming to build “a major new progressive populist party in America,” The Hill reported.

“Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” West said, concluding his video message on Monday. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.”