The association between racist populism and conspiratorial opposition to the Federal Reserve is no accident: they have been intertwined at least since the Fed was created. Berlet and Lyons (2000, 194) trace these origins back even further, at least to the demonetization of silver in 1873, supposedly orchestrated by a “cabal of English, Jewish, and Wall Street bankers”; in some ways it goes back to the founding of the republic (see, e.g., Brands 2006; Michaels 1988).
