If you read through alt-right Web sites, one metaphor that comes up again and again is that of the “red pill,” taken from the movie The Matrix, in which those who take the blue pill live a sweet lie and those who take the red pill wake up to harsh reality. It’s a vivid comparison, but it gets you only so far. What follows the red pill? In the movie, those who take the red pill all see the same thing. In real life, that doesn’t happen. Taking the red pill might cause you to reject the blue-pill consensus, but you’re on your own from there. There’s no single red-pill reality. Everyone is left groping for his or her own alternative. It creates a thousand new possible narratives for everything, and whichever one you pick is almost certainly wrong. Thus, crackpots are born.

One of them is Donald Trump. As his final shoot-out unfolds, nothing has dismayed commentators as much as his contention that the presidential election will be “rigged.” The outrage is understandable: peaceful transfers of power are a precious and fragile tradition. But Trump seems to be earnest about his allegations—hell, he even thinks the Emmy Awards are rigged—as do many of his supporters. Conspiracy theorizing has long been part of Trump’s outlook, whether it’s about the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or the idea that global warming is a hoax. Some have gotten tired of it all and just started calling Trump supporters “insane.” But crazy theories can come from non-crazy people, and it’s unlikely that 40 percent of Americans are lunatics. We’re seeing something else, and more of us are part of the problem than we’d like to admit.

While paranoia is often identified as an American political tradition, it’s a worldwide one. Conspiracy theorizing is a staple of conversation in China, in Russia, and across the Arab world. Unsurprisingly, social scientists have found it to be strongly correlated with lack of trust in societal institutions. But the distrust is probably also causation. If you were a Soviet-era Muscovite and your only news source was Pravda, would you believe it? Wouldn’t you be likely to read a story about a sudden death or retirement and ask, “What’s really going on?” It’s not always a sign of lunacy that people place no faith in official institutions and news outlets. Nor is it crazy that they try to piece together alternative stories even when the official one is perfectly sound. One of the tragedies of trust being lost is that you don’t just reject the lies; you also reject the truth.

Here in the United States, trust has been in dramatic decline for more than 50 years. In 1964, as NPR has noted, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted their government. Today, 19 percent do. In the 1950s and 60s, about two-thirds of Americans thought that broadcast news and newspapers were generally fair. Today, confidence in the press is, according to some surveys, as low as 20 percent. The distrust is even greater among Republicans, and, as a result, many live entirely within a non-mainstream media ecosystem.

Those on the left might argue that the distrust has been fostered by Republicans and right-wing news outlets, and certainly organizations like Fox News have run a disproportionate share of nonsense over the years. But an alternative explanation is that the distrust comes from untrustworthiness. The press has felt freer and freer to indulge its biases, often making it look partisan. Academics and media critics are less likely than ever to complain about this, for fear, perhaps, of seeming to buy into a naïve “myth of objectivity.” The result is that even the ideal of “balance” is viewed as simplistic. Because the mainstream press leans left in its worldview (albeit never far from the center, as Bernie Sanders supporters have noticed), and feels less and less inclined to hide this tendency, Republicans have fled in much larger numbers.