That One Thing In Shiva Ayyadurai’s Agenda That I Support

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I am fascinated by Shiva Ayyadurai, a Mumbai-born American, who is running for President as an independent candidate.

Ayyadurai is an extremely interesting person. Though running as an independent and claiming to serve America beyond the “left” and “right”, he seems to be very much right-wing. Currently, Ayyadurai is the Founder and CEO of CytoSolve, Inc, which is discovering cures for major diseases from pancreatic cancer to Alzheimer's. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayyadurai ran a social media COVID-19 disinformation campaign which spread conspiracy theories about the cause of COVID-19 and promoted unfounded COVID-19 treatments. Ayyadurai even campaigned to fire Anthony Fauci for allegedly being a deep state actor.

In 2015, Ayyadurai questioned the safety of genetically modified food. Apparently, his studies had found that genetically modified soya bean plants had less capacity to get rid of toxins such as formaldehyde compared to non-GM counterparts. He bet a building worth USD10 million on his claim. Did he end up losing that building, I wonder?

In 2011, Ayyadurai claimed to have invented email, as a teenager in August 1982. Not just that, Ayyadurai sued Gawker Media and Techdirt for defamation for disputing his account of inventing email. Both lawsuits were settled out of court.

Now comes the most interesting part. Shiva Ayyadurai is not a natural-born-citizen. He was born in Mumbai, the city I currently live in and hence, from what little I know of US law, ineligible to run for President on account of the ‘natural-born citizen’ clause in the US constitution. Status as a natural-born citizen of the United States is one of the eligibility requirements established in the United States Constitution for holding the office of president or vice president. This requirement was built into the US constitution to protect the young nation from foreign influences. Ayyadurai has been claiming that as a ‘naturalised American’ he ought to be eligible to run for President and that the ‘natural-born citizen’ clause in the US constitution is unconstitutional. Now, I don’t know how far this argument will take Ayyadurai, but as someone who plans to go to the US for my undergraduate education and eventually live and work in the US, I whole-heartedly support this argument.

I don’t really want Ayyadurai to become the next US president. Actually, I want him to lose, but I do hope that Ayyadurai prevails on the natural-born-citizen issue.

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