Shiva Ayyadurai, who is campaigning for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts against incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Warren, used the n-word repeatedly on a podcast hosted by a white nationalist to describe voters he says are enslaved “on the white liberal deep state reservation.”
Ayyadurai pitches himself as the “real Indian” who “can defeat the fake Indian” Warren in 2018, despite the fact that polls earlier this year found that 85 percent of Massachusetts voters said they had never heard of him. Throughout his campaign, Ayyadurai has attempted to court the same fringes of right-wing politics that were highly energized for President Trump during the 2016 election.
This weekend, Ayyadurai defended himself against an article we published that highlighted yet another example of his open catering to the right-wing fringes by sitting down for an interview with the openly white nationalist podcast host Jean-Francois Gariepy. Patrick Little, a neo-Nazi Senate candidate in California, was also a guest on the same episode of Gariepy’s show.
On the show, Ayyadurai defended his “Groyper” campaign materials, which feature a symbol popularized in the deep reaches of the internet’s racist cesspools, by asserting that the cartoon toad was “pretty good artwork” and that it actually fit in line with his campaign initiative against agriculture company Monsanto because “frogs are a bellweather of nature.”
After we published our article, Ayyadurai was targeted by a Twitter user who used a slur at him to describe his appeals to the far-right reaches of the internet and he responded by claiming that “we are all niggers on the White Liberal Deep State Reservation.”
Let's be accurate, we are all niggers on the White Liberal Deep State Reservation! Only when we break free and be Independent of both Establishment parties, are we truly free. https://t.co/CMvyZuhHzJ
— Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai,PhD (M.I.T.) Inventor of Email (@va_shiva) May 25, 2018
Ayyadurai elaborated on that exchange during his appearance on Gariepy’s show. In an archived version of Gariepy’s original broadcast, which was removed and re-uploaded on the channel to censor Ayyadurai’s flagrant use of the n-word, Ayyadurai explained why he believed “we should all embrace and use” his talking point.
“Someone called me a curry nigger, OK? And I’m going to use that word. Let me tell you why I think he said, ‘This guy is a sellout curry Indian nigger.’ So, I tweeted back, ‘We’re all niggers on the white liberal deep state reservation,” he said.
Gariepy started laughing joyously.
“You see, what the white liberals have done is they have drawn a very nice bounded box of what is racism. So if you use the word ‘nigger’ or if you change the name so you don’t use that word, and if you change the names of things, suddenly you’ve solved racism. You see what I’m saying? And the truth is we’re all niggers on the white liberal deep state reservation,” Ayyadurai said.
He continued, “And that word, we should all embrace and use. And this is why I think we should embrace it, because it goes at the true heart of racism. Racism is not ceremonial things of stopping using words, changing names, it’s addressing the fundamental economic issues, which is we’re all on a plantation of white liberalism, of neo-liberalism, and the epicenter of that is Harvard University.”
