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.
