My Encounter With the Fantasy-Industrial Complex
In an alternate universe, I run a sprawling cabal. Its goal, according to the contrarian newsletters, crank blogs, and breathless podcasts where the fantasy plays out—is to silence right-wing populists on behalf of the deep state.
Each morning, Google Alerts arrive in my inbox detailing the adventures of a fictional character bearing my name. Last month she starred in an article about “A Global Censorship Prison Built by the Women of the CIA.” In a Substack article headlined “Media Ruled by Robust PsyOp Alliance,” later posted on Infowars, an anti-vaccine propagandist implicated my alter ego in a plot to bring about a “One World Government.” A blog post titled “When Military Rule Supplants Democracy” quoted commentators who lumped her in with the “color revolution blob”—a reference to popular revolts against Russian-backed governments—and the perpetrators of “dirty tricks” overseas. You get the idea. Somewhat flatteringly, the commentators who make up these stories portray me as highly competent; one post on X credited the imaginary me with “brainwashing all of the local elections officials” to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
The plotlines in this cinematic universe go back to the so-called Twitter Files—internal documents released to a group of writers after Elon Musk bought the social-media platform. Some of those writers have posited the existence of a staggering “Censorship Industrial Complex,” of which I am supposedly a leader. In written testimony for a March 2023 hearing of Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Substack writer Michael Shellenberger claimed that my cohorts and I “censored 22 million tweets” during the 2020 election. It also insinuated that I have CIA ties that I’ve kept “hidden from public view.” The crank theory that I am some kind of secret agent caught on. X users with follower counts in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands started referring to me as “CIA Renee.” The mere mention of the character’s name—as with Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Lex Luthor in the DC Extended Universe—became enough to establish villainy.
