Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed deleted YouTube videos in which he urged Americans to ditch Fourth of July fireworks and floated replacing the Second Amendment with a constitutional right to health care, adding to a growing pattern of scrubbed posts that contradict his campaign messaging.
CNN reported Tuesday that El-Sayed, who defeated establishment Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens in last week's primary, once asked his YouTube viewers whether Americans could "PLEASE" find another way to celebrate the Fourth of July, promising four reasons "why fireworks suck." The since-removed video, originally posted in July 2024, included a chapter titled "Fireworks just aren't worth it: hear us out" and cited Detroit's post-fireworks air quality, the chemicals used in fireworks, the potential to trigger PTSD in veterans, and risks to children and pets.
But the fireworks clip was not the only video that disappeared. CNN also found that other deleted clips showed El-Sayed arguing the southern border was not among Americans' five biggest concerns, and criticizing Republicans for focusing on it. In yet another removed video, he floated scrapping the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms and replacing it with a constitutional right to health care, Breitbart News reported.
The videos were set to private or deleted before El-Sayed launched his Senate campaign. CNN described them as "another example of how El-Sayed's years as a prolific podcaster, commentator and social-media user have left behind an extensive record, some of it subsequently deleted, that Republicans could use to portray him as both ideologically left-wing and culturally out of step with swing-state voters."
The fireworks and Second Amendment videos are far from the first posts El-Sayed has quietly removed. Fox News reported that El-Sayed deleted multiple social media posts from 2020 and 2021 supporting the "defund the police" movement before launching his Senate bid. One June 2020 post declared that "most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty" and backed the #Defund movement. He also scrubbed a Thanksgiving post calling for Indigenous reparations.
When CNN confronted him about the defund-the-police posts, El-Sayed dodged. "Well, at that time I was a professor. I was teaching at the edge of criminal justice and public health. At this point, I'm running for U.S. Senate," he said, declining to answer whether he still held those views.
That evasion ran headlong into the recorded evidence. The Washington Examiner reported that CNN's KFile uncovered multiple 2020 media appearances in which El-Sayed explicitly defended defunding the police. In a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio, he said plainly:
"I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets."
So the candidate who now says he never supported defunding police recorded himself saying exactly that, then deleted the posts and hoped nobody would check. The pattern is consistent: say something radical, scrub it, deny it, and count on a friendly media environment not to press the point.
El-Sayed's history of controversial remarks extends well beyond policing. Resurfaced audio captured him downplaying a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue, raising further questions about his judgment on matters of public safety and extremism.
El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, wasted no time after the primary. In a statement, Rogers called the contrast stark.
"Abdul isn't just another liberal. He's an extremist. He wants to empty prisons and put murderers and sex offenders back on our streets. He pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood and campaigns with people who refuse to condemn terrorism. And he advocated for the largest tax hike in American history, costing families already struggling to make ends meet over $3,000 more per year."
Rogers added that El-Sayed's agenda "would make our communities less safe and our state less affordable" and called it "a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism." The National Republican Senatorial Committee published its own press release on August 11 highlighting the CNN findings.
Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas also weighed in, urging Michigan voters to oppose El-Sayed on election day. Cotton called him a "true radical who has palled around with people that said America had 9/11 coming."
"He wants to abolish ICE. He wants to stop border enforcement. He wants confiscatory levels of taxation for hardworking Americans."
Cotton's reference to 9/11 associations tracks with El-Sayed's continued campaign appearances alongside commentator Hasan Piker, whose remarks about the September 11 attacks El-Sayed himself called "indefensible", yet never led him to cut ties.
While Republicans lined up against El-Sayed, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party embraced him. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recently said El-Sayed "represents the politics of the future" for America. That endorsement tells voters exactly where El-Sayed sits on the ideological spectrum, not in the center of a purple state, but on the far-left flank of a party that has struggled to hold Michigan's working-class voters.
El-Sayed won the primary over Rep. Haley Stevens, an establishment Democrat who had accused El-Sayed during the campaign of scapegoating Jewish Americans. His victory signals that the activist base of Michigan's Democratic Party has moved decisively leftward, and that the November contest against Rogers will test whether the state's general-election voters agree.
El-Sayed's broader record continues to surface. He previously argued that "toxic masculinity" governed American football, and audio emerged contradicting his claim that he never backed defunding police. Questions have also been raised about his use of the title "physician" without a valid medical license, and a former campaign staffer was charged in an alleged pro-Hamas vandalism conspiracy.
The emerging picture is of a candidate who spent years building a public record as a left-wing commentator, on policing, on immigration, on gun rights, on patriotic traditions, and then systematically erased that record before asking swing-state voters for a Senate seat. The fireworks video, the border clips, the Second Amendment proposal, the defund-the-police posts: all deleted. All discovered anyway.
CNN's own framing acknowledged the political problem. El-Sayed's prolific output as a podcaster and social media figure left behind an "extensive record" that Republicans can mine to paint him as ideologically extreme and culturally disconnected from the voters he needs in November. The deletions suggest El-Sayed, or his campaign, recognized that problem, too.
What remains unanswered is whether El-Sayed has actually changed any of the positions he scrubbed, or whether the deletions were purely cosmetic. He has not directly addressed the fireworks video, the Second Amendment proposal, or the border clips. His response to the defund-the-police revelations amounted to saying he had a different job at the time, not that he had changed his mind.
Michigan voters heading into November will have to decide whether a candidate who deletes his own words deserves to be trusted with theirs.
