It is rare to hear a United States presidential candidate clearly and eloquently spell out the realities of the country — whether it’s the genocide in Gaza, rising economic inequality or the horrors of mass incarceration. Dr. Cornel West, renowned political activist, philosopher, public intellectual, author and now independent presidential candidate, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give an update on his campaign and to highlight the critical issues that define his fight for justice and equality.

West argues that the duopoly in the U.S. today often represents two sides of the same coin. On one hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans are a much more blatant example of the push towards fascism while Kamala Harris provides the American people a friendly face who in reality will defend the interests of the country’s most powerful elites. These forces, West says, embody the core features of the American political class, which are “conformity, complacency and cowardliness and being well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference, it wants people to only see your success and not the underside.”

While West’s campaign has tried to address the most pressing issues facing Americans, he explains the system is set up to disenfranchise movements like his. He states, “The lies are so thick, people are so gullible, and every empire we know undergoes, for the most part, implosion based on outreach, military outreach.”

West invites people to view themselves as part of this bigger picture of what America represents, both domestically and globally. When people view themselves as innocent or removed from the crimes of the American empire, West argues, they absolve themselves of the responsibility to confront and correct these injustices. The various forms of hatred that brew within the U.S. — racism, classism or any other type of discrimination — are, according to West, “ideological forms that hide and conceal the deeper crimes that are tied, in the end, to predatory capitalist processes that will do anything for short term profit.”