“I mean, this is all bullshit,” Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. “But the ‘great replacement’ theory requires a means of payment.” Goldbug ideology has received an intellectual sheen from places like George Mason University, a libertarian stronghold, where the Koch brothers have invested millions of dollars into research, including on gold and cryptocurrency. Today’s goldbugs commune at the annual FreedomFest conference, in Las Vegas, which offers such panels as “Bitcoin vs. Gold.”
When Trump was running for President in 2016, he told GQ, “Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful.” That is unlikely to happen, but Trump’s erratic policymaking and trade wars have given gold a different kind of currency. Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto,” said that central banks in developing countries tend to buy gold when they lose confidence in the U.S. dollar: “They’re questioning whether the U.S. is a reliable economic, political, financial partner.” But that wasn’t enough, he cautioned, to explain gold’s stratospheric rise. “I would say no one knows why the price of gold has gone up by as much as it has in the past two years, but people tell stories,” he said.
Trump’s allies on the political right, here and abroad, have profited from the story of gold as a safe haven in a world threatened by currency-printing globalists. In the United Kingdom, attendees at last year’s conference of the Reform Party were greeted by a cardboard cutout of the Party’s leader, Nigel Farage, holding up a gold coin as a spokesperson for the precious-metal dealer Direct Bullion. Stateside, Donald Trump, Jr., a First Son and the host of the podcast “Triggered,” has partnered with a company called Birch Gold Group, which helps you “convert your 401(k) into gold.” It sells a gold bar engraved with a picture of a miner in overalls panning in a river; on the back, it reads “Credit Suisse.”
Other than branding, what does a gold bar today have to do with the California gold rush? I couldn’t imagine that any of these people, let alone someone whose diapers were probably changed on a golden changing table, knew what a sluice box was. But the Old West provides what the Harvard scholar Svetlana Boym has referred to as a “usable past.” Boym, who was born in Russia, argued that Vladimir Putin and his political allies came to power by fostering nostalgia for an orderly Soviet superstate after the economic turbulence of the nineties. The forty-niners are elemental to our identity as a nation of brave, rugged individualists. Even Luke Skywalker dons a pair of beige Levi’s—transformed from a miner’s uniform into a symbol of rebellious cool by the likes of James Dean—to blend in with the desert sands of Tatooine, a former mining outpost. Slobodian told me that twenty-first-century goldbugs, who mingle with tech founders and bitcoin barons, “fetishize the idea of the supposedly lawless West”—a place without pesky government regulation. The amateur miners I spoke to also romanticized the Old West, but they saw in its lack of rules a chance to upend the status quo. Johnson, of 530 Mining, said he believed that the gold rush was the “first time in human history that ordinary people could touch gold. Before then, it was only for kings.” Industrial gold mining, a forty-three-billion-dollar market in North America, has also realized the power of nostalgia. This year, three mining corporations looking to expand their operations sponsored, for the first time, Calico California Days, a festival at Calico Ghost Town with pretend panning and gun-drawing contests.
This isn’t a history that everyone is nostalgic for. In 2022, a pair of Levi’s from the eighteen-eighties, discovered in a mine shaft in New Mexico, were auctioned off; a label inside read “the only kind made by white labor.” During the gold rush, politicians stoked xenophobia and pitted workers against workers, leading to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively barred immigration to the United States from China for sixty-one years. The James Marshall monument was built at the urging of Native Sons of the Golden West, a fraternal organization devoted to preserving California’s settler past; members had to be white men born in the state.
