Abdul El-Sayed Likened Bacon To Plutonium

Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once compared bacon to plutonium, arguing that the nuclear material and popular breakfast meat were closely linked to cancer.

El-Sayed made the comparison in a now-private YouTube video, lamenting that bacon, salami, and baloney were “class 1 carcinogens” and comparable to plutonium, a radioactive element. The video was scrubbed from YouTube as part of a recent purge by El-Sayed, in which he privatized content advocating for leftist views. 

“You know what else is a class 1 carcinogen? Plutonium. That’s right. The stuff that we make nuclear weapons out of. Yeah, that’s also a carcinogen,” El-Sayed said, according to a transcript of the scrubbed July 2023 video viewed by the Washington Free Beacon. 

“Now, how come bacon and plutonium are in the same class?” he added. “Well, because it just comes down to the quality of evidence. Research has demonstrated that both of these things, bacon and plutonium, are definitively linked in well-designed, well-executed population studies with cancer.”

El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate to replace outgoing Senator Gary Peters, has faced controversy in recent days over the video purge. In the videos, El-Sayed argued that the Second Amendment should be replaced with the “right to have health care” and said that “fireworks suck.” Other videos circulated online showing El-Sayed ripping into the popular Michigan tourist destination of Mackinac Island and arguing that football was tainted by “toxic masculinity.” 

The Michigan Democrat also deleted numerous calls to defund the police and a post from Thanksgiving Day in 2019 in which he argued that the holiday was a “Time for Reparations.” 

“Just a reminder this #Thanksgiving. This country was built on the systematic annihilation of Indigenous Peoples, whose ancestors suffer some of the highest rates of homelessness, joblessness, and mortality today,” he posted. “We owe so much more than ‘thanks.’ Time for Reparations.”

Republicans have highlighted El-Sayed’s comments to argue that he is out of touch with everyday Michigan voters. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could prove pivotal for control of the Senate. Cook Political Report currently rates the race as a toss-up. 

While El-Sayed distances himself from some of his past advocacy, his platform includes abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and taking “public control” of artificial intelligence companies.