A controversial progressive Democrat who has campaigned with high-profile socialists and is running to be the state’s next U.S. senator from Michigan responded after hidden videos on his YouTube channel trashing the Second Amendment resurfaced.
“Abdul respects the Second Amendment, and also believes that access to healthcare is a right,” Abdul El-Sayed spokeswoman Roxie Richner told Fox News Digital when reached for comment about comments made in the now-secret videos.
“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?” he said in a YouTube video posted on April 6, 2023.
He claimed altruism in the proposal, saying more people would live. In that video, El-Sayed said that stripping Second Amendment rights and implementing a right to healthcare policy would lead to “fewer people dying by gun and more people living because they have health care.”
YouTube offers a feature to hide videos previously posted publicly without deleting them.
Though the hidden videos can’t be viewed, rough transcripts can be found on an internet archive site first revealed by CNN in a Monday report. The outlet reports that El-Sayed hid about 100 videos before launching his Senate campaign.
In one video from May 26, 2022, the transcript of which was viewed by Fox News Digital, El-Sayed made the argument that the Second Amendment does not apply to individual Americans, and only applies to a regulated militia. He claimed that the stipulation written in the key constitutional right “couches the entire idea of not infringing on the right to bear arms in the idea of maintaining a well-regulated militia.”
He argued against individuals owning firearms, instead suggesting that only designated community based groups, like police forces, should be issued firearms. Paradoxically, El-Sayed has also argued in favor of defunding the police.
That argument against the Second Amendment was roundly rejected in a famous Supreme Court case from 2008, District of Columbia v. Heller.
“The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia,” the nation’s highest court decidedly held.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond when asked which, if any, of his views on the Second Amendment had changed since posting the 2022 and 2023 videos.
Among the many other hidden videos, El-Sayed also raged against President Donald Trump’s closed borders policies, argued against the use of fireworks and compared the “ethos” of football to slavery.
The Democrat candidate has campaigned with socialist darling streamer Hasan Piker, known for saying “America deserved 9/11,” praising Mao Zedong and Communist China, arguing that capitalists should be murdered in the streets and spewing a litany of antisemitic bile.
The two palled around at a pre-primary election day party earlier this month.