{"id":622738,"date":"2026-05-04T10:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/622738\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T10:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:54:09","slug":"how-americans-caught-gold-fever-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/622738\/","title":{"rendered":"How Americans Caught Gold Fever Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI mean, this is all bullshit,\u201d Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. \u201cBut the \u2018great replacement\u2019 theory requires a means of payment.\u201d 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\u2019s goldbugs commune at the annual FreedomFest conference, in Las Vegas, which offers such panels as \u201cBitcoin vs. Gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Trump was running for President in 2016, he told GQ, \u201cBringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do, but boy, would it be wonderful.\u201d That is unlikely to happen, but Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cMoney Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto,\u201d said that central banks in developing countries tend to buy gold when they lose confidence in the U.S. dollar: \u201cThey\u2019re questioning whether the U.S. is a reliable economic, political, financial partner.\u201d But that wasn\u2019t enough, he cautioned, to explain gold\u2019s stratospheric rise. \u201cI 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s conference of the Reform Party were greeted by a cardboard cutout of the Party\u2019s 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 \u201cTriggered,\u201d has partnered with a company called Birch Gold Group, which helps you \u201cconvert your 401(k) into gold.\u201d It sells a gold bar engraved with a picture of a miner in overalls panning in a river; on the back, it reads \u201cCredit Suisse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other than branding, what does a gold bar today have to do with the California gold rush? I couldn\u2019t 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 \u201cusable past.\u201d 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\u2019s\u2014transformed from a miner\u2019s uniform into a symbol of rebellious cool by the likes of James Dean\u2014to 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, \u201cfetishize the idea of the supposedly lawless West\u201d\u2014a 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 \u201cfirst time in human history that ordinary people could touch gold. Before then, it was only for kings.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, I only asked you out because I panicked and forgot what to do when you encounter a bear on a trail.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Avi Steinberg<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a history that everyone is nostalgic for. In 2022, a pair of Levi\u2019s from the eighteen-eighties, discovered in a mine shaft in New Mexico, were auctioned off; a label inside read \u201cthe only kind made by white labor.\u201d 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\u2019s settler past; members had to be white men born in the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI mean, this is all bullshit,\u201d Slobodian, who teaches at Boston University, told me. \u201cBut the \u2018great replacement\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,62500,269820,1766,3,28946,62539,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-622738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-inverted","tag-letter-from-california","tag-magazine","tag-news","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}