‘Fireworks suck,’ removed El-Sayed videos urged getting rid of the 4th of July tradition, raised replacing 2nd Amendment
Andrew Kaczynski
CNN
August 11, 2026
Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed once asked his YouTube viewers whether Americans could “PLEASE” find another way to celebrate the Fourth of July, in a video promising four reasons “why fireworks suck.”
The since-removed video from 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, their potential to trigger PTSD in veterans, and the risks they pose to children and pets.
The video is one of several examples of El-Sayed removing past online content as he seeks elected office. As CNN’s KFile previously reported, he also deleted social media posts supporting the “defund the police” movement.
In other since-removed clips, El-Sayed argued that the southern border was not among Americans’ five biggest concerns and lambasted Republicans for focusing on it. In another he floated replacing the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms with a constitutional right to health care.
Not all of El-Sayed’s commentary has disappeared: In one episode that remains online, he questioned whether football could be “ethical” or “safe” and linked the sport’s “ethos” to narratives used to justify slavery and westward expansion.
El-Sayed’s narrow victory last Tuesday over moderate Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens set up a general-election showdown with Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in a high-stakes race that will help determine control of the US Senate.
The YouTube videos, at least 100 of which appear to have been made private, are 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.
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Many of the removed videos on YouTube, where El-Sayed at the time had more than 17,000 subscribers, are not publicly available anymore, but CNN reviewed transcripts archived before the videos were made private.
El-Sayed’s fireworks video was briefly interrupted by a message noting that it was sponsored in part by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. In reading ads for the foundation on his “America Dissected” podcast, he highlighted what he called its “cutting-edge areas of scholarship,” including “feminist prison abolition.”
Prison abolition is a movement that seeks to reduce and ultimately replace prisons, jails, and other punitive systems with approaches intended to address the social conditions linked to harm, including investments in housing, healthcare, education, community-based safety, and restorative or transformative justice. Feminist prison abolitionists argue that incarceration and policing can fail to prevent gender-based violence and may disproportionately harm women and marginalized communities.
The removals were not limited to videos containing potentially damaging political remarks. Lighter material — including a video about plastics and testicles — was also taken down, as was a November 2024 video in which El-Sayed passionately urged viewers to vote for Kamala Harris.
El-Sayed’s past support for the “defund the police” movement has already drawn scrutiny. In 2020 interviews, he said “we do need to defund the police” and described that approach as investing less in policing and more in schools, social services and anti-poverty programs…
But his remarks on policing represent only one part of a far larger archive.
In a non-deleted episode of his podcast from February 2023, El-Sayed questioned whether any version of football could be “ethical” or “safe” and said narratives that had justified slavery, westward expansion and other forms of oppression were “echoed in the ethos of football.”
In another since-removed video from September 2022, El-Sayed dismissed the southern border as an issue Republicans “love to flog,” saying it “doesn’t even make the top five among issues that people in the United States actually care about that affect their lives.”
He later said Republican voters had been told to care more about the border than inflation, gas prices and pandemics. El-Sayed slammed southern governors like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who had flown or bussed migrants to other states, comparing it to his own parents who came to the United States as immigrants.
“It’s crazy to me that the party that says that they’re the party of family values can’t understand when people will make decisions for their families — because that’s exactly what these migrants are doing,” El-Sayed said.
In another since-removed video from April 2023, El-Sayed floated replacing the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms with a constitutional right to health care.
Speaking after a school shooting in Tennessee and as millions of Americans faced losing Medicaid coverage, he asked: “What if we tweaked the Constitution, amended the amendment, and instead of the right to bear arms, we change it to the right to have health care?”
El-Sayed argued that the change would result in “fewer people dying by gun and more people living because they have health care.”
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