With his latest tweet about “Soros-funded” Kavanaugh protesters , President Trump was kicking it old school. After all, the George-Soros-as-most-evil-man-on-earth meme started in the early 1990s as one of the first disinformation campaigns of the post-Soviet empire. (Of course, it all goes back to Russia.)

If you’re not an expert in currency manipulation, the economic theory of dynamic disequilibrium, or East European pro-democracy movements, you may be forgiven for thinking that Soros is the devil, Beelzebub, a hidden all-powerful Nazi, the Prince of Darkness, or Sauron. (Heck, his name even echoes the mnemonic effect of the term for the creator of the One Ring.)

In actuality, Soros is a hedge fund billionaire who was born in Hungary (as a Jewish boy, he barely escaped the Holocaust) and has devoted decades of his life to non-violent democratic movements, helping influence the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. And that’s what first got him in trouble. The Russian regime and neighboring despots were so outraged at his support of its democratic opponents that it expelled some of the groups he funded in the region. (In 1997, the American head of a local office of Soros’s Open Society Institute was expelled from Belarus after being detained at the airport without food and not allowed to contact the U.S. Embassy.)

Around that time, due to currency manipulations that impacted economies around the world, Soros began to be targeted by critics on both the left (Paul Krugman) and the right (East European strongmen). Soon, the criticism spiraled out of control, prompting a million memes on Breitbart News and Infowars, to the point that his name has become synonymous with evil. (When he considered buying a minority share of the Washington Nationals in 2005, some Republican lawmakers called for revoking Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption.)

Here’s a timeline of some of the most outlandish comments and theories about Soros:

1992: Hungarian populist anti-Semitic leader Istvan Csurka calls Soros a “puppet of Jerusalem.”

1995: Slovakian president Jan Slota calls out Soros and others for bringing in “dirty money” to cause a parliamentary “coup d’etat.”