Ron Johnson’s Great Depression conspiracy theory is the weirdest thing we’ve heard all year.

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become. Ron Johnson, when asked about the national debt on a conservative radio show in early September At this point, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s assertion that Joe Biden got dementia from the COVID vaccine, and Donald Trump’s careless promotion of QAnon, it’s tempting to think that many of our government officials have had their brains completely addled by internet conspiracy theories. It seems that Johnson is implying that a sinister cabal of “big money men” planned the Great Depression for their own personal gain, but it’s not entirely clear. As a conspiracy theory, “The Great Depression was an inside job” doesn’t seem to be a particularly common one; one researcher Slate reached out to said he had “never seen it put exactly that way.” But he agreed that the general tone of what Johnson said did appear to fit with a more well-known body of conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, and of supposed communist infiltration of the banking system more generally. Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, said he had been surprised to hear Johnson reference the title, calling it an “infamous far-right conspiracy-theory book” and “not a remotely reputable source.” And yet, the tradition of anti-Fed conspiracy theories is a robust one.