Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democrat Senate primary last week and started deleting his past before the votes were certified.
What he spent years saying on YouTube before deciding to run is something he clearly hoped Michigan would never hear.
He erased more than 100 videos before his campaign launched – and voters have no idea what else is gone.
El-Sayed Said Bacon Causes Cancer Like Plutonium While His Sharia Law Obligation Forbids Pork
Abdul El-Sayed just won the Michigan Democrat Senate primary, backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, and is now trying to reinvent himself for the general election by scrubbing his radical past from the internet.
One of the videos he didn't want Michigan voters to find was recorded in July 2023.
In the video, El-Sayed ranked bacon alongside plutonium – "the stuff we make nuclear weapons out of" – as a "class 1" carcinogen.
"Now, how come bacon and plutonium are in the same class?" he asked, before explaining that both were "definitively linked" to cancer in population studies.
The Washington Free Beacon reviewed an archived transcript of the deleted video.
El-Sayed's contempt for American food didn't stop there.
In other erased videos, he declared that fireworks "suck" and questioned whether football could be "ethical" – arguing that the culture around the game echoed the logic used to justify slavery.
Eighty percent of American consumers report liking or loving bacon, according to food research firm Datassential.
Seventy-five percent of U.S. adults say they like fireworks, per YouGov.
Football has been the top sport in Gallup polling since 1972.
El-Sayed is running to represent Michigan – a state that bleeds college football on Saturdays and feeds the world bacon on Sunday mornings.
There is one more detail the bacon video never mentioned.
The consumption of pork is prohibited by Sharia law – the same law El-Sayed has called an "obligation" he intends to follow until the day he dies, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
A man bound by a religious tradition that forbids him from touching pork spent years on YouTube telling Michigan voters their breakfast was as deadly as nuclear weapons material.
Abdul El-Sayed Deleted 100 YouTube Videos Hiding Radical Views Before Michigan Senate Race
El-Sayed systematically deleted more than 100 YouTube videos before announcing his Senate campaign, according to a CNN KFile investigation.
The purge covered videos in which he floated replacing the Second Amendment with a constitutional right to health care, dismissed border security as a Republican obsession, and championed the "defund the police" movement – describing law enforcement as "standing armies" deployed against the American people.
His campaign's response: the old clips "don't reflect his beliefs today."
That answer only sharpens the question Michigan voters deserve answered.
If the views were harmless old news, why delete them before voters could see them?
Republican nominee Mike Rogers went straight at the record.
"Abdul isn't just another liberal. He's an extremist," Rogers told Breitbart News after El-Sayed won the Democrat primary last week.
"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."
Michigan voters agree with Rogers.
A new Fox News poll shows Rogers leading El-Sayed 51 to 47 percent among registered voters – with 54 percent of Michiganders saying El-Sayed is too extreme for the state.
El-Sayed's unfavorable rating already sits at 54 percent before the general election has even begun.
He is losing women, suburban voters, and black voters – and Democrats who want nothing to do with the Democratic Socialists of America are backing him at only 69 percent.
That is not a coalition.
El-Sayed spent years building a media empire from his YouTube channel and podcast, reporting nearly $300,000 in additional income in 2025 from those ventures alone.
He then deleted the record of what he actually said and asked Michigan voters to trust his word about who he is now.
The man running for Senate in one of the most bacon-loving, fireworks-celebrating, football-obsessed states in America spent years on video telling voters those things were dangerous, offensive, or unethical – and then hid the evidence before anyone could hold him accountable for it.
Sources:
- Alana Goodman and Collin Anderson, "Don't Bring Home the Bacon? Abdul El-Sayed Compared Beloved Breakfast Meat to Plutonium," Washington Free Beacon, August 13, 2026.
- Cristina Laila, "Michigan's Far-Left Democrat Senate Nominee Abdul El-Sayed Deletes More Than 100 YouTube Videos," The Gateway Pundit, August 11, 2026.
- "Michigan's Leftist U.S. Senate Nominee Abdul El-Sayed Attacked Fourth of July Fireworks and Second Amendment in Deleted Videos," Breitbart, August 11, 2026.
- "Michigan Poll Shows Rogers, Benson Leading as Democrats Gain Enthusiasm," Fox News, August 14, 2026.
- Rachel Wolf, "Dem Senate Candidate Takes Swipe at Joe Rogan After Refusing to Disavow Hasan Piker's Past Comments," Fox News, April 8, 2026.