Cornel West on Lynching Tweet: ‘We Got to Hit the Streets, We’ve Got to Go to Jail’ to Fight Trump

On Tuesday night’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” Harvard professor Cornel West called for protests if President Donald Trump was not held accountable for things like referring to the impeachment inquiry as a “lynching” on social media.

 

Partial transcript as follows:

LEMON: Is there a difference Dr. West between Clarence Thomas making that sort of accusation vs. the president?

WEST: The difference is that Thomas and people who are beautifully black like him have been the victims disproportionately as opposed to a vanilla brother or a vanilla sister. But he’s still wrong. He’s still wrong. Because it allows the use of the term to become so normalized that you act as if it was not tied to crimes against humanity, forms of American terrorism and linked to slavery in that way.

The stress has to be to the response to it. We black folk have never looked white supremacy in the eye and didn’t come out fighting at our best. The question becomes how do we come out fighting now? We’ve got fascism running afoot. You’ve got disregard of rule of law. You’ve got the balkanization of the populous. You’ve got the devaluing and scapegoating of the weak, especially the Mexicans and Muslims and poor and black and brown. So the democracy is being imploded as it were. And you have to come up with ways of awakening moral, spiritual and political that allow for the democracy to go to move forward.

This is why if things don’t work the way the system is we got to hit the streets, we’ve got to go to jail. That’s exactly what Out Now is all about. Next Saturday, every Saturday it’s going to be like Puerto Rico. It’s going to like Hong Kong.

The people have to speak with their feet if the election political system is too weak. The Republicans are too cowardly; the Democrats not moving fast enough. And with Biden using the language he used, he disqualifies himself. Thank God for brother Bernie. You just disqualified yourself in having any moral authority when it comes to this crime against humanity.

(h/t RCP Video)

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

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