The Bored Ape Yacht Club series of NFTs has become an internet phenomena, with a market cap that has exceeded Billions of US Dollars. The company behind the project, Yuga labs is now being managed by U2 and Madonna's manager. What psychology was used to generate such massive financial success? Do you even know who created BAYC? A new documentary tries to answer these questions and adds disturbing evidence that the underlying message and intent behind BAYC is an anti-human one that even makes use of Nazi symbols and ideology. The weird nature of this investigation means the absolute truth might be evasive, but as rabbit holes go it's one of the more interesting I know of!
The documentary, titled 'BORED APE NAZI CLUB' has already received 220k views on Youtube within a few hours of being published and it is easy to understand why. Despite the hour long video inserting some dubious dot connecting and even trying to launch a copycat NFT bored ape series at the end, there are still many interesting facts highlighted about BAYC that deserve answers.
Some of the information in the documentary was sourced from a now disabled website created by Ryder Ripps called gordongoner.com. An archive of the site can be found here. This page provided an introduction into the peculiar symbology and even racist/nazi ideology that appears to be found in BAYC. As the researchers point out early on, the symbology is always wrapped up in 'plausible deniability', meaning that anyone who points it out could be ridiculed because there is no solid proof of the connection between the use of the symbols and the ideologies that the symbols suggest.
The researchers themselves question whether the BAYC team are actually followers of Nazi ideas or whether they are effectively 'nihilists' acting out a kind of hatred of humanity and themselves that leads them to lead others into dead ends, while mercilessly manipulating them like toys for their own gain. I will add an extra possibility here, that their own peculiar sense of twisted humor may have led them to 'ironically' encode connections to Nazism into their products as a way to generally trigger interest and controversy in the deepest possible ways. In any case, it's a weird way to try to sell some jpeg images.
Overview
The gist of the exposure is that the documentary maker claims that the BAYC project:
- Is highly esoteric and is, by design, only intended to be understood by a select group of people.
- Combines 4Chan trolling, racist imagery & white supremacy 'dog whistles'.
- Makes a mockery of the entire world.
- Pulls the strings of the global 'elite'.
On first hearing this, I assumed that the evidence would be flimsy or ridiculous, but while the big picture being presented seems likely to be not entirely accurate due to biases or intentions to stir up controversy, there are also legitimately odd patterns and symbolism in the BAYC project that do seem to tie it in to Nazism and perhaps Neo Nazism.
Interestingly, the documentary highlights the names of the people behind BAYC and exposes their interests in Nazi topics and authors. At the same time, the CEO
As reported here by the Sun, the identities of Greg Solano & Wylie Aronow were 'exposed' a few months ago. Kerem Atalay and Zeshan Ali are another two members of the team.
The CEO of Yuga Labs (not currently listed on the Yuga Labs website) is Nicole Muniz, who features in the documentary from a previous interview. She is even asked about the 'racist tropes' that appear in the BAYC series and deflects by highlighting that the team are non-white. In a recent article on Decrypt she claimed that the public identification of the Yuga labs team was 'very dangerous' for them.
Guy Oseary is their PR manager and also the manager of big music acts like Madonna and U2.
They also have relatively high profile support from known names in the legacy media who have helped their project to explode.
Stormtrooper Apes
The first point made in the documentary that really grabbed my attention is that the BAYC logo is pretty clearly based on the German Nazi SS Military logo from the World War 2 era. The rough edges of the circle, the number of teeth of the skull, it's orientation and the general appearance of the logo are different enough to not automatically lead everyone to see the connection, but when put side by side it is hard to deny their similarity.
BAYC was launched on April 30th, the same day that Adolf Hitler died.
Both the SS logo and the BAYC logo have 18 teeth and as is pointed out in the documentary, 18 has long been used by neo Nazi groups as a reference to Adolf Hitler since A=1 and H=8 in the alphanumeric system of gematria.
The company 'Yuga labs' had publicly mentioned a Swiss company called Suum Cuique Labs and actually used their same terms of service on their website. The German translation of this phrase (Which means 'to each what he deserves' in English) was above one of the gates of the slave labor camps in Nazi Germany that saw so many tortured and killed. This same phrase appeared on some Prussian military helmets - the same type of helmet that appears on some of the BAYC NFTs.
Is this just an intellectual and 'arty' way of trying to promote elitist thinking in order to sell more NFTs? Or is there something else going on?
The phrase 'Surf the Kali Yuga' became a meme after it was said on 4Chan, resulting in it being put on merchandise (along with a skull and bones) and even used by 'alt-right' politicians. A Yuga is a time period in Hindu cosmology and the Kali Yuga refers to an age of destruction, so the meme is essentially advising us to learn to benefit from destruction. So this phrase is in some ways similar to the 'Order out of chaos' motto of Skull & Bones fraternity members and world domination fans who are collectively sometimes known as 'The New World Order'.
A telegram group was founded in 2019 called 'Kali Yuga Surfing Club' which contains Nazi type memes and other alt-right topics. Clearly this name is reminiscent of 'Bored Ape Yacht Club' - or perhaps it should be 'Board Apes' as in 'Chatboard Users' on 4Chan.
The documentary goes into some detail to highlight how two of the designers of the BAYC project had a longstanding interest in Nazism, writing surrounding the events of Nazism in Germany and also HP Lovecraft, a probable freemason and white power author.
There are numerous other ties to Nazism highlighted in the documentary, with one interesting one being that the BAYC 'metaverse' project called 'the other side', which is styled around an afterlife theme - was launched on the same days as Adolf Hitler died.
Watch
The full documentary is below and the original tweet thread for the video is under the video:
Conclusions?
Given that the documentary maker is promoting an NFT series that aims to profit off of the BAYC project, it is easy to discredit the documentary here as being a scam in itself, designed to throw mud and make money. At the same time, there are enough interesting threads highlighted that just like the claim being made that BAYC is an internet troll's wet dream, this documentary could be said to have been designed to be a 'conspiracy theorist wet dream'.
The reality of ingrained racism and plans to manipulate the minds of the people for personal gain have been with us a long time and in a world where this has become obvious it is to be expected that people will unite to try to protect each other from such abuse. The fightback online has taken the form of strange sub cultures forming to try to defend ideas and 'traditions' that often don't make much sense or that can even be identified due to the fuzziness of their design.
Whether BAYC has been created by people who are part of one of these 'sides' in an ongoing culture war or whether they have just taken inspiration from the war in order to generate intrigue and personal profit - is open to debate.
What do you make of this?
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