The Pattern
He won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on August 5. Eight days later, an account calling itself Trencher Broadcasting Company posted a video of him teaching children about “Israeli colonizers” alongside the children’s television host Ms. Rachel. Neither of them said any of it. Lead Stories ran the clip through the Hive Moderation detection tool and got a 100 percent synthetic-media score. The account’s own bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.”
It was not the first fabricated video of Abdul El-Sayed, and this site does not expect it to be the last. What follows is a dated record of what has run so far, so the next one has something to be measured against.
September 22, 2025
Kevin Kijewski, the Republican candidate for Michigan Attorney General, posted an AI-generated video titled “Lighting Fires and Walking Away.” It showed El-Sayed setting a chair on fire and walking off. The post came after El-Sayed condemned the killing of Charlie Kirk and called Kirk’s rhetoric “xenophobic, hateful, and inflammatory.” Asked about the video, El-Sayed did not treat it as a joke that landed wrong. “I don’t really know what that person’s intentions were,” he said. “I hope they were kidding around, but unfortunately, a lot of the time you’ve got folks who can’t necessarily tell what is real from what is not.”
August 5, 2026
El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, a result this site covered separately when it became the backdrop for a different fabrication two weeks later.
August 13, 2026
Trencher Broadcasting Company, an account describing itself as an AI media outlet, posted the Ms. Rachel video. It is the sharper fabrication of the two, because it does not invent a crime. It invents an alliance, between two public figures who have never appeared together, saying things designed to look like their own positions rather than an accusation against them. A viewer already inclined to believe El-Sayed holds those views is handed footage that appears to confirm it.
What connects them
Two different creators. Two different platforms. Two different registers: arson theater and children’s programming. What they share is a subject who keeps winning, and a genre that does not require a real event to produce a real reaction. Kijewski’s video answered a real thing El-Sayed said. Trencher’s answered nothing. It manufactured a thing for him to have said, out of nothing, eight days after the primary made him worth manufacturing something about. A week after that, a third attack skipped fabrication entirely and edited real footage instead. Fabrication is not required. It is only the fastest version.
Verdict: Both videos are Fabricated. Neither depicts an event that occurred. El-Sayed did not set a chair on fire. He did not appear alongside Ms. Rachel. Detection tooling scored the second video 100 percent synthetic; the first was never presented as anything but AI-generated by its own creator. The pattern, not any single video, is the story: a candidate who wins gets manufactured against, repeatedly, in whatever genre lands.
Image note: the scratch-to-reveal illustration above is AI-generated editorial art by Deceit, made for this piece. The figure is a composite; no real person is depicted. Not documentary evidence.
