Most of this country’s popular conspiracy theories are focused on a specific incident, person, or place: JFK’s assassination, 9/11, vaccines. But conspiracy thinking can sometimes be harder to identify, more amorphous, thoroughly mixed in with the trappings of our daily lives, the TV we watch, the newspapers we read, the politics in which we engage. The discomfiting truth is that when history is still in the writing, it can be hard to distinguish between a theory and a genuine conspiracy and avoid falling for the one that is fake.

The first, chaotic year of the Trump presidency proved that notion in spades, and it started early. If you turned on MSNBC on the evening of January 12, 2017, you might have seen host Rachel Maddow take her viewers on a conspiracy-tinged tour of a power blackout.

Maddow, her usually quizzical dark eyebrows hiked up to her hairline, focused her show that night on the confirmation hearing of Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick at that time for CIA director. Pompeo had earlier appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, concluded his opening remarks by talking about Russia’s possible interference in the US elections. “As you know,” Warner told Pompeo, “Chairman Burr and I have committed to conduct a review of the intelligence supporting the intelligence committee’s assessment that Russia, at the direction—”

Warner was cut off. The committee’s hearing room was plunged into darkness: the horseshoe of senators, Pompeo at his table, the galleries full of people watching, reporters peering at their now-invisible notepads. A C-SPAN camera capturing the incident bobbled unsteadily.

“Okay,” Maddow said, exhaling in wonderment in her recap of the incident. “Yeah. Do not adjust your set. This is not going wrong right now. This is what happened today at the hearing for the new head of the CIA, right after the topic of Russian hacking was broached for the first time. This is what happened. This is what we all saw. What happened in the room was a complete power cut. All the lights in the room went out, without warning, in that room.”

Maddow was clearly shocked by the power outage—the “cut,” as she called it, implying a deliberate action. And she wasn’t alone in intimating that the timing was suspicious; Republican senator John Cornyn tweeted about it (“Lights suspiciously went off in hearing room for new CIA director, Mike Pompeo,” he wrote. “Hmmmm”). Chairman Burr joked that it was “a conspiracy” to draw attention to the sorry state of American infrastructure. But on her show, Maddow took it further, linking the power outage to another weird incident that had happened later the same day, when California representative Maxine Waters was testifying on the House floor.

At the time, Waters was speaking against a Republican-backed bill that she said would strip oversight of the SEC. “As President-elect Trump takes office next week, beginning what is the most conflicted administration in US history, I urge my colleagues to join me … in opposing H.R. 78,” she told the room. “To ensure that the actions of Trump’s SEC are in the interest of Americans’ economic stability, and not in Russia’s or Wall Street’s interests.”

Viewers in the House gallery would have seen nothing amiss. But anyone watching C-SPAN witnessed something legitimately strange. C-SPAN’s feed was bizarrely interrupted, and Waters’s remarks were replaced by a broadcast of Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed news organization accused of functioning as a mouthpiece for Putin’s government.

Maddow found the timing of both incidents darkly meaningful. “Welcome to your whole new world,” she told her viewers. “Who knows what any of that was about?” Waters herself found the incident “unusual and curious,” too. “Placed in the context of current events concerning cyberattacks and foreign interference in our elections,” she wrote in a statement, “it is very important that C-SPAN provide a clear and concise explanation for the interruption of its online broadcast before we can reach any conclusions or establish the basis for additional inquiry.”

Both incidents were rather quickly explained, in fact. The Pompeo hearing blackout was attributed to planned work an electrical company was doing in the neighborhood. C-SPAN stated definitively that the network wasn’t hacked but had suffered a malfunction while testing for the inauguration. “RT’s signal was mistakenly routed onto the primary encoder feeding C-SPAN1’s signal to the Internet, rather than to an unused backup,” a spokesman wrote.

Yet neither explanation got nearly as much attention as the incidents themselves. Maddow’s overheated reaction presaged a particular kind of Russia-centric paranoia, mostly visible among liberals and the left, which feared that the Kremlin’s spies and agents were everywhere, that the president himself was little more than a Creamsicle-hued puppet dancing to Vladimir Putin’s tune, and that anyone skeptical was probably in on the whole thing.

Often outlandish theories begin at the fringes and gradually work their way inward. But in the case of Russiagate—as the panic was inevitably called—within the first year of Trump’s presidency, both major political parties and the mainstream media embraced grand nationwide theories about how democracy had been undermined by the enemy. As if in response to Russia fever, right-wing media and politicians, first fed by conspiracy sites and quickly picking up their own speed, started to fret about the Deep State: a sinister cadre of unelected power brokers they claimed was buried within the federal government, working to bring the Trump administration down.

The speculation at the far edge of the right reached far more colorful proportions than anything the left could produce, with Alex Jones suggesting that government actors were spiking Trump’s drinks. “I’ve talked to people, multiple ones, and they believe that they are putting a slow sedative that they’re building up that’s also addictive in his Diet Cokes and in his iced tea,” Jones declared. “And that the president by six or seven at night is basically slurring his words and is drugged.”

Poisoned Cokes aside, Russiagate and the Deep State are new incarnations of an old, familiar fear: the suspicion that subversive, nefarious elites or foreign elements have seized the reins of power. Americans periodically believe that the federal government has been undermined by villains, what author and political journalist Jesse Walker calls the “Enemy Above” mode of conspiracy theory. Author Kathryn Olmsted points out that this type of suspicion has erupted regularly since the nineteenth century, intensifying as the size of the government has increased. In a way, it’s the most sympathetic, common, and understandable type of conspiracy theory. Who, after all, really trusts their government?

In this most recent eruption, the fear and suspicion closely reflect the real fragility of American democracy. Our system has shown itself to be profoundly vulnerable to outside influences: dark money, untraceable super PACs, gerrymandering, the persistent disenfranchisement of voters of color, and the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 presidential election spring to mind. There was fertile territory here, ready and waiting for Russiagate and the Deep State alike. As so often in American history, concrete conditions paved a wide, straight road for imagined ones, and real losses of power carved a path for the more fantastical scenarios that followed.

Sometimes paranoia around the government and the White House turns out to be well founded: Nixon and Watergate, for one, or Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal. Sometimes, not so much. As researcher Chip Berlet writes, Bill Clinton, it was claimed, “assisted drug smugglers, ran a hit squad that killed his political enemies, and covered up the assassination of his aide Vincent Foster.” The “Clinton body count” conspiracy, that Bill and Hillary kill their opponents, continues to this day.

This new set of conspiracy theories, founded and unfounded, around Russian interference in our elections and a Deep State campaign against Trump, mirroring each other across the aisle, involved one difference: one was real and the other was not. Despite much scoffing from the right, a persuasive case was made that the Russian government did meddle in the 2016 elections. The CIA, FBI, and NSA—not the most left-wing institutions, traditionally—jointly issued a report in January 2017 stating that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the meddling efforts to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and undermine American democratic processes.

The Kremlin has implied that all this is payback. In the mid-2000s, as a series of “color revolutions” against Russian influence swept across eastern Europe, the Russian government claimed they were funded by the United States. Putin has long maintained that Clinton, as secretary of state, was also responsible for protests in Moscow in 2011, in which thousands of demonstrators accused him of electoral fraud. So, according to the best US intelligence information, came a round of retributive meddling, which experts speculated is meant to not just disrupt the electoral process, but create a general climate of uncertainty and instability.

Inevitably, the fact of this meddling led directly to the question of Donald Trump’s role: Was he a hapless dupe? An enthusiastic participant? A blackmail victim working off his debt? The gravity of possible collusion by the Trump campaign with the Russian government led to the appointment of a special investigator under the Justice Department, former FBI director Robert Mueller. He soon began investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by firing FBI director James Comey and by his numerous tweets about the inquiry itself, in which he called on Congress, members of the administration, and law enforcement to end it.

At the very least, it was quickly established, the Russian government did indeed attempt to draw the Trump campaign into the meddling. We knew this because we had the deeply idiotic emails between Trump son-in-chief Donald Trump, Jr., and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin in which the latter bluntly offered the campaign dirt on Clinton. The lawyer said the documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” These would be “obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

“If it’s what you say,” Trump Jr. responded, with the irrepressible exuberance of a man with an excess of hair and a dearth of forethought, “I love it.”

In fact, well before a Trump son took an ill-advised, well-documented meeting with Kremlin lawyers, Russian-backed disinformation had already made itself felt in the United States. In 2010, there was evidence that Russian sources tried to create conspiracy theories around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a wellhead explosion in which eleven people died and nearly five million gallons of oil was dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. Kate Starbird, the researcher at the University of Washington who studies the way false flag stories and hoaxes spread online, noticed something odd. “Politically focused” Twitter accounts, as the Washington Post put it, aimed at sowing chaos and panic about the spill by tweeting a wave of links to articles detailing disastrous fake outcomes: a tsunami of oil washing ashore, the ocean floor collapsing. People who lived in the area were confused and scared, Starbird told the Post in 2017.

After the 2016 election, she became newly curious about how those tweets had spread. She realized that all the articles cited Russian scientists and had originated on what we might now call “alt-right” or far-right blogs. “At the time, I didn’t notice what was going on,” Starbird said. “But with the benefit of hindsight, you notice that this stuff was happening for a long time.”

During the 2016 election, journalist Adrian Chen noticed something new and bizarre. Some of the Russian-troll Twitter accounts he’d been following for years, ones tied to the Russian-based Internet Research Agency and dedicated to spreading disinformation and discontent, had shifted identities. They had “begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump.” Donald Trump himself resolutely denied any suggestion of Russian intervention on his behalf, dismissing the assertion that Russian-backed hackers were responsible for hacking into DNC emails and memorably proposing instead that the culprit could be China or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds, okay?”

There was conjecture that his family’s business interests in Russia lay behind Trump’s desire to brush off anything suspicious about Russian involvement in the elections. Or perhaps, as British ex-spy Christopher Steele suggested in a salacious dossier, the Russians held embarrassing material, including a tape of sex workers in Moscow urinating on a hotel bed for Trump’s pleasure.

The notion of collusion tapped into a real and receptive well of left-wing angst. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American author and political observer, wrote in the New York Review of Books that Russian fever stemmed from a desperate liberal fantasy of a speedy Trump impeachment. “The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him.”

Even before Trump took office, liberals sought to comfort themselves with paranoid imaginings of a swift downfall. There was the idea that “faithless electors” in the Electoral College would prevent him from being inaugurated by transferring their vote to someone else, a technically legal thing that has never happened in American history. (Seven faithless electors in the Electoral College did vote for people besides Trump, but not enough to overturn his election. Only two of them were pledged to vote for him in the first place; the rest had actually been pledged to vote for Clinton.) And Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein raised millions of dollars from desperate liberals for a recount effort, spurred by a conviction that the vote had been somehow, someway, rigged. It was a sad irony. People who the day before the election mocked Trump for his tweets decrying a rigged system were themselves claiming the same thing only twenty-four hours later.

Gessen was profoundly concerned by the Russiagate frenzy. If it should lead to impeachment, they wrote, that “will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.”

A “campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community”: that quickly became the right-wing cause. Russian meddling allegations were the result of intelligence agencies gone rogue, intent on devouring a legitimately elected president. At its core, the right’s preoccupation with the Deep State began as a defensive response to liberal claims of an illegitimate, enemy-backed government. But what exactly is the Deep State, and how did it come to be blamed for all the woes of the Trump administration?

The concept is not new, either in the United States or abroad; in some countries it is a very real phenomenon—a permanent ruling class within the military, the judiciary, and intelligence agencies that remains in power no matter which party is elected. In Turkey, the best-known example, the Deep State, which likely became active during the 1970s, might have had ties to organized crime and was willing to use violence and even extrajudicial killings to stay in control.

In the United States, the Deep State or “state within a state” concept sometimes refers to the extensive power of the military-industrial complex or to the nation’s sprawling national security bureaucracy. The term illustrates an unpleasant, intractable political and economic status quo, what Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer, has called “a casino with a tilted wheel,” where billion-dollar industries and the government agencies that regulate them are staffed by the same people in an endless revolving door, greased in dollar bills. The Deep State is where highly secretive agencies like the NSA function, with the cooperation of ethics-neutral Silicon Valley tech companies. It is where an electoral system is so awash in dark money that most Americans despair of ever truly fixing it.

The term can also refer to the government’s secret engagement in activities abroad that our elected officials publicly denounced: the CIA’s intervention to overthrow the democratically elected leaders of other countries and back opposition forces—Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1960, the Dominican Republic in 1961, South Vietnam in 1963, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1972. The list includes attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro with a series of increasingly absurd plots and devices. (One of Castro’s deputies estimated the number of US assassination attempts at six hundred thirty-four, which seems high but perhaps not wildly off base.)

The great power of the military-industrial complex, as President Dwight Eisenhower, who coined the term, argued, lay in the new conjunction of an “immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” which could be said to amount to a Deep State actor. “The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city,” Eisenhower said, “every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.” Americans had to guard, he said, against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

For these reasons, well before it became a fixture on far-right sites, the Deep State or “permanent state” was thus a subject of concern for both liberal and centrist writers and academics. In his book The Deep State, Mike Lofgren paints a picture of an army of federal agencies that have come to function more or less independently of who is in power, in a permanent, lusty liplock with such powerful private companies as Boeing and Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, all of which earn billions in government contracts every year, building the weapons that arm the United States, its allies, and often enough, its adversaries.

“It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies,” he told host Bill Moyers in a television appearance. “The Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions, and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.”

Echoing Lofgren, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Bill Arkin published “Top Secret America,” a four-part series in 2010 on the military intelligence community that had grown staggeringly since September 11. The reporters found that a mind-boggling number of Americans held high-level security clearances and that in general, the nation’s national security apparatus “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” The Post concluded that the system “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States,” a warren of agencies and programs shrouded from public view and public oversight.

Given those very real elements and their undeniable influence on American lives, Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept’s editor and frequent critic of government powers, expressed frustration that the notion of Deep State interference was dismissed so easily. “That the U.S. has a shadowy, secretive world of intelligence and military operatives who exercise great power outside of elections and democratic accountability is not some exotic, alt-right conspiracy theory,” he wrote. “It’s utterly elemental to understanding anything about how Washington works. It’s hard to believe that anyone on this side of a sixth-grade civics class would seek to deny that.”

Nonetheless in the Trump era, Deep State theorizing extended well beyond a sober assessment of extragovernmental power. Even outside of Alex Jones and his predictably absurd speculations about drugged sodas, the concept of the Deep State was weaponized by Trump partisans and right-wing politicians leaping from a little-used term to a ubiquitous one. (According to Google Trends, searches for the phrase spiked modestly around May 2017 and then extraordinarily in January 2018.)

Deep State paranoia was prefaced by a concern on the far right that President Obama had a sinister amount of power and would perhaps, when the time came, refuse to give it up. Obama rode out the last of his presidency on a tide of conspiratorial suspicions about his supposed iron grip. During the 2016 election’s campaign season, WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah found it highly suspect that Obama called Trump unfit for the presidency. He implied that Obama wouldn’t leave office if Trump were elected. “Should we not be concerned about what Obama might do?” he wrote. “Should he not be asked pointedly about the implications of his stunning statements?” Other sites were more explicit, claiming that Obama planned to declare martial law to block Trump.

But when Inauguration Day went off without incident—other than the fact of Donald Trump becoming president—the Deep State idea persisted. Obama was still held responsible. Dozens of far-right and conspiracy-leaning websites insisted that he had continued working as a “shadow president,” snarling the gears of the Trump White House, directing his minions to stand in its way, even perhaps directing the Russia-collusion inquiry. But that claim wasn’t just relegated to the fringes; it was espoused and repeated by elected officials and White House staffers on national TV.