Bored Ape Yacht Club Racist Symbolism Theory

Overview

In early 2022, at the absolute zenith of NFT mania — when a cartoon ape in a sailor hat could sell for more than a house in the Hamptons — an artist named Ryder Ripps published one of the strangest conspiracy theories of the crypto era. His claim: the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the most famous NFT collection on the planet, was a secret vehicle for Nazi and white supremacist symbolism. The company name, the logo, the ape imagery itself — all of it, Ripps argued, was a carefully encoded message to those who knew where to look.

It was a theory that had everything the internet loves: hidden symbols, celebrity dupes, sinister corporate architects, and the intoxicating suggestion that millions of people had been conned into wearing a swastika without knowing it. It spread like wildfire across Twitter, YouTube, and crypto forums. It was covered by Buzzfeed, Vice, and dozens of other outlets. And for a brief, disorienting moment in 2022, it seemed like it might actually stick.

It didn’t. The theory collapsed under scrutiny, debunked by journalists, undermined by the revelation that the founders of Yuga Labs were Jewish, and ultimately buried under a $9 million lawsuit judgment against Ripps himself. But the story of how a conspiracy theory about cartoon apes became a federal court case — and what it reveals about pattern-matching, internet culture, and the strange politics of the NFT boom — is worth telling in full.

The Rise of the Apes

To understand the Ripps theory, you first have to understand just how massive the Bored Ape Yacht Club became, and how quickly.

BAYC launched on April 23, 2021, as a collection of 10,000 unique cartoon apes — each generated algorithmically from a combination of traits including fur color, clothing, headwear, accessories, and expressions. The initial mint price was 0.08 ETH, roughly $190 at the time. All 10,000 sold out within twelve hours.

What happened next was the kind of speculative mania that would have seemed surreal even by the standards of the dot-com bubble. Within months, the cheapest Bored Ape on the market — the “floor price” — climbed past $100,000. By January 2022, the floor price exceeded $300,000. Some rare apes with desirable trait combinations sold for over a million dollars. Bored Ape #8817 fetched $3.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

The collection became a status symbol for a new digital aristocracy. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. Eminem paid $462,000. Steph Curry’s purchase made headlines. Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon compared their apes on The Tonight Show in a segment so painfully awkward it became a meme in its own right. Madonna, Serena Williams, Neymar, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg — the celebrity buyer list read like a tabloid masthead.

Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, was founded by four pseudonymous individuals: Gordon Goner, Gargamel, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and Sass. Their real identities were unknown. They operated behind handles and avatars, which was standard practice in the crypto world but would become a central element of the conspiracy theory that followed.

By early 2022, Yuga Labs had raised $450 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the company at $4 billion. They acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits — two other blue-chip NFT collections — from Larva Labs. They announced the Otherside, a metaverse gaming project. The Bored Ape Yacht Club wasn’t just a collection of JPEGs. It was the flagship brand of a speculative ecosystem worth billions.

And then Ryder Ripps lit a match.

The Ryder Ripps Theory

Ryder Ripps was not some anonymous Twitter troll. He was an established figure in the art and advertising world — a creative director who had worked with Red Bull, Soylent, and Grimes, among others. He ran an agency called OKFocus. He was known for provocative conceptual art projects that blurred the line between commentary and stunt. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of person who could give a conspiracy theory intellectual credibility.

In January 2022, Ripps began publishing his claims on a dedicated website called gordongoner.com (named after one of the Yuga Labs founders’ pseudonyms). The site was meticulously constructed — a dense, obsessively detailed argument that BAYC was riddled with hidden Nazi and white supremacist symbolism. The claims fell into several categories.

The “Yuga” Connection

Ripps’s first and most prominent claim centered on the company name. “Yuga,” he argued, was a reference to the Hindu concept of Kali Yuga — the final and darkest age in Hindu cyclical cosmology, a period of strife, degradation, and civilizational collapse before renewal. In isolation, this is an unremarkable observation. Kali Yuga is a mainstream concept in Hindu philosophy.

But Ripps drew a second connection: the term “Kali Yuga” had been adopted by neo-Nazi accelerationist groups as a coded term for their desired collapse of Western civilization. The far-right esoteric tradition — the world of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, and the “Traditionalist” school of fascism — had indeed appropriated Kali Yuga as a symbol. Ripps argued that Yuga Labs’ name was a deliberate nod to this usage.

The problem with this argument is that Kali Yuga is a concept with a three-thousand-year history and billions of adherents in mainstream Hinduism. The neo-Nazi appropriation is a fringe phenomenon involving a tiny number of ideologues. Claiming that anyone who references “Yuga” must be signaling to fascists is like claiming that anyone who uses a swastika must be a Nazi — ignoring that the symbol has been sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism for millennia. The claim required you to assume the most obscure possible interpretation and treat it as the obvious one.

The Skull and Bones Logo

BAYC’s secondary logo features an ape skull over crossed bones, a riff on the pirate Jolly Roger. Ripps claimed this image resembled the Totenkopf — the “death’s head” symbol used by the SS in Nazi Germany. The Totenkopf is indeed a skull and crossbones, and it is indeed a Nazi symbol.

It is also, of course, a symbol that predates the Nazis by centuries. Skull and crossbones imagery has been used by pirates, poison labels, college fraternities (Yale’s Skull and Bones society dates to 1832), military units across dozens of countries, the Grateful Dead, punk rock bands, and roughly half the t-shirts sold at Hot Topic. To single out the BAYC logo as specifically referencing the Totenkopf rather than any of the hundreds of other skull-and-bones traditions required the kind of motivated reasoning that conspiracy theories thrive on.

Ape Imagery as Racial Caricature

This was, arguably, the most culturally potent strand of Ripps’s argument — and the one that contained the most legitimate kernel of truth, even as it was buried under layers of conspiratorial overreach.

Ripps pointed to the long, ugly history of simianization — the racist practice of comparing Black people to apes and monkeys. This is real history, documented extensively by scholars. From nineteenth-century scientific racism to twentieth-century caricature to contemporary hate speech, the ape comparison has been one of the most persistent and dehumanizing tropes in the racist playbook.

Ripps argued that the “Bored Ape” concept itself was a form of simianization — that a collection of apes used as profile pictures and social status markers was, intentionally or not, trafficking in racist imagery. He pointed to specific trait combinations on individual apes that he claimed encoded racist caricatures: apes with gold teeth, apes with certain clothing combinations, apes with visual traits that could be read as referencing stereotypes.

This argument operated on two levels. On one level, there is a worthwhile conversation to be had about the carelessness with which ape imagery circulates in a culture that has a deep history of using apes to dehumanize Black people. On another level, Ripps wasn’t making a cultural criticism — he was making a conspiracy claim. He wasn’t saying the founders were culturally insensitive. He was saying they were deliberately encoding racist messages. And that is a very different claim, requiring very different evidence.

The Founders’ Pseudonyms

Ripps devoted considerable attention to the pseudonyms used by the four Yuga Labs founders. “Gordon Goner” allegedly contained references that could be tortured into hidden meanings. “Gargamel” — the villain from the Smurfs — was claimed to be an antisemitic caricature (a claim with its own complicated history, since the character’s creator, Peyo, has been both accused and defended on this point). “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” was the name of a Stereolab album. Ripps found ways to connect each pseudonym to some dark implication.

This strand of the theory exemplified the fundamental problem with conspiratorial pattern-matching: if you are sufficiently determined and sufficiently creative, you can find sinister connections in anything. Every word has an etymology. Every name has a history. Every cultural reference contains other cultural references. The question is not whether connections can be drawn — they always can — but whether the connections are meaningful, whether they are intentional, and whether the simplest explanation is the sinister one.

The Bathroom Swastika

Perhaps the weakest claim in Ripps’s arsenal concerned the “Bathroom” — an interactive feature on the BAYC website where ape holders could draw on a shared digital canvas. Ripps claimed that the layout or design of the bathroom feature resembled a swastika.

It did not. Or rather, it did only if you squinted hard enough, tilted your head, and really wanted to see one. This was the moment where even sympathetic observers began to suspect that Ripps had crossed the line from cultural criticism into full-blown pareidolia — the human tendency to see meaningful patterns in random noise. It’s the same cognitive phenomenon that makes people see the Virgin Mary in toast or a face on Mars. When you’re looking for swastikas, you will find swastikas. They’re just four lines with right angles. They’re everywhere if you want them to be.

The RR/BAYC Project

Ripps didn’t just write about his theory. He created art about it — or, depending on your perspective, he committed trademark infringement about it.

In mid-2022, Ripps launched “RR/BAYC,” a mirror NFT collection that copied every single Bored Ape image one-to-one. The collection was minted on the Ethereum blockchain and sold as a “protest” and “conceptual art project” designed to expose the alleged racist symbolism. Ripps framed it as appropriation art in the tradition of Andy Warhol and Richard Prince — using the enemy’s images against them.

The collection generated approximately $5 million in sales. Ripps insisted the proceeds would fund further research and awareness campaigns about BAYC’s alleged symbolism. Critics pointed out that Ripps was quite literally profiting from someone else’s artwork while calling them Nazis — a combination of moral crusade and financial self-interest that struck many observers as, at minimum, convenient.

The RR/BAYC project crossed a line that the original theory hadn’t. Publishing a conspiracy theory about a company is, generally, protected speech. Copying their entire visual catalog and selling it? That’s the kind of thing intellectual property lawyers dream about.

The Evidence, Assessed

The most important thing to understand about Ripps’s theory is not what he claimed but how he claimed it. The methodology was a masterclass in conspiratorial reasoning — a form of argument that is nearly impossible to refute because it doesn’t play by the rules of evidence.

Ripps presented dozens of individual “connections.” Each one, taken in isolation, was weak — circumstantial at best, ridiculous at worst. But layered together, they created an overwhelming sense of something being wrong. This is the hallmark of conspiracy thinking: the accumulation of individually unpersuasive data points into a mass that feels persuasive through sheer volume.

The skull logo looks like the Totenkopf. (It also looks like every other skull and crossbones.) The name “Yuga” connects to Kali Yuga. (It also connects to mainstream Hinduism.) Ape imagery has racist connotations. (It also has no racial connotations in most contexts.) Each claim, challenged on its own, was easily deflected. But Ripps’s argument was not about any single claim. It was about the pattern. And once you believed the pattern was real, every new data point confirmed it, and every objection became evidence of how cleverly the symbolism had been hidden.

This is how conspiracy theories always work. The theory generates its own evidence. The absence of proof becomes proof of concealment. The weakness of individual claims becomes evidence of sophistication. You can’t argue someone out of a conspiracy theory using logic, because the theory has already accounted for logic and filed it under “that’s what they want you to think.”

Independent journalists and fact-checkers examined Ripps’s claims in detail. Buzzfeed News, Vice, The Verge, and multiple crypto-focused outlets ran investigations. The consensus was consistent: the evidence didn’t hold up. The connections were too tenuous, the leaps too large, the alternative explanations too obvious. The theory was, in the assessment of nearly everyone who examined it rigorously, an elaborate exercise in apophenia — the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.

The Debunking

The theory’s collapse came from multiple directions simultaneously.

The Founders’ Identities

In February 2022, a Buzzfeed News investigation by journalist Katie Notopoulos revealed the real identities of the two primary Yuga Labs founders. “Gordon Goner” was Greg Solano, a writer and editor from Miami. “Gargamel” was Wylie Aronow, also from Miami. Both men were in their early thirties. Both were Jewish.

This last detail was devastating to the theory. Ripps had spent months arguing that BAYC was a vehicle for neo-Nazi symbolism — and the people behind it turned out to be Jewish. It didn’t make the theory impossible (people can theoretically work against their own ethnic interests), but it made it extraordinarily implausible. The notion that two Jewish men had founded a billion-dollar company as a covert neo-Nazi art project was, to put it charitably, a stretch.

Solano and Aronow were not skinheads or extremists. They were literary nerds. Solano had an MFA and had published fiction. Their pseudonyms, far from being coded white supremacist signals, turned out to be exactly what they appeared to be: fun internet handles chosen by guys who grew up on the internet. “Gargamel” was a cartoon villain. “Gordon Goner” was an alliterative joke. “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” was, as mentioned, a Stereolab album. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The Kali Yuga Counterargument

The “Yuga” connection — which was the strongest pillar of Ripps’s theory — faced a simple and insurmountable objection: Kali Yuga is a mainstream religious concept with billions of adherents. It appears in the Mahabharata, one of the most widely read texts in human history. It is referenced in popular culture constantly — in video games, novels, music, and art — without any neo-Nazi implication. To claim that “Yuga” in a company name must reference the far-right appropriation of the term, rather than the vastly more common usage, required ignoring the most basic principle of Occam’s razor.

Furthermore, the neo-Nazi “accelerationist” use of Kali Yuga is an extremely niche phenomenon, known primarily to specialists in extremism research. The idea that two thirty-something tech bros from Miami chose their company name to signal to a readership of maybe a few thousand online neo-Nazis — while simultaneously building a billion-dollar public-facing brand — was, to put it mildly, not the simplest explanation.

The Pattern-Matching Problem

Journalist and tech critic Molly White, among others, pointed out that Ripps’s methodology could be applied to virtually any brand to “discover” hidden symbolism. If you’re looking for Nazi connections, you will find them — because the Nazis appropriated symbols from so many cultures and traditions that almost any visual or linguistic element can be traced back to something the Third Reich used. Skulls, eagles, lightning bolts, runes, colors, numbers, geometric shapes — the Nazis touched all of it. A sufficiently determined investigator could connect Pepsi to the SS.

The point is not that symbolism doesn’t matter. It does. The point is that the mere existence of a visual similarity between a brand element and a Nazi symbol does not constitute evidence of intent. Intent matters. Context matters. And in the case of BAYC, neither the intent nor the context supported the theory.

The Lawsuit: Yuga Labs v. Ryder Ripps

In June 2022, Yuga Labs filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Ryder Ripps in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint alleged that Ripps had created his RR/BAYC collection to “scam consumers into purchasing fake Bored Ape NFTs” while using the racism accusations as a smokescreen.

Ripps countered that his work was protected speech — a form of artistic commentary and satire aimed at exposing what he genuinely believed to be racist symbolism. He argued that RR/BAYC was appropriation art, no different from Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans or Sherrie Levine’s rephotographs.

The court was not persuaded. In April 2023, a federal judge ruled in favor of Yuga Labs, finding that Ripps had infringed on BAYC trademarks and engaged in “false association” and “false designation of origin.” The court found that consumers were likely to be confused by the RR/BAYC collection — that buyers might reasonably believe they were purchasing official Bored Ape NFTs rather than Ripps’s protest copies.

In November 2023, Ripps was ordered to pay approximately $9 million in damages — including the roughly $5 million in sales revenue from the RR/BAYC collection plus additional damages. The judgment was later reduced on appeal, but the financial and legal defeat was comprehensive.

The lawsuit established an important precedent in the nascent legal landscape of NFTs. It clarified that copying another party’s NFT collection wholesale, even under the banner of artistic commentary, could constitute trademark infringement. And it effectively ended Ripps’s campaign against BAYC — not because the court ruled on the truth or falsity of the racist symbolism theory, but because it ruled that Ripps’s chosen method of protest was illegal.

It was, in a sense, the most fitting possible ending. A conspiracy theory about hidden symbols in digital art was killed not by a debunking but by a trademark dispute. Not with a bang but with a legal filing.

The Legitimate Conversation

Here’s the thing, though. Buried under the conspiratorial overreach, the wild leaps of logic, and the swastika-shaped bathroom that wasn’t — there was a real conversation trying to happen. Ripps was wrong about the specifics, but the questions he raised about ape imagery and race in tech culture were not entirely frivolous.

The tech industry has a well-documented blind spot when it comes to racial sensitivity. The history of AI bias, of social media algorithms that amplify racist content, of Silicon Valley’s overwhelming whiteness — all of it speaks to a culture that regularly fails to consider how its products interact with racial dynamics in America.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by people who, by all available evidence, had no racist intent whatsoever. But the collection did traffic in ape imagery in a culture where ape imagery carries specific racial baggage. The fact that the founders apparently never considered this — never paused to wonder whether “Bored Apes” as high-status profile pictures might land differently in a country with a long history of simianization — says something about the insularity of crypto culture.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a criticism. And it’s a valid one, even if Ripps wrapped it in so much conspiratorial nonsense that the valid part got lost.

The broader NFT boom shared this blind spot. CryptoPunks, another blue-chip collection, featured pixel-art characters with varying skin tones — but the overwhelming majority of high-value sales were of lighter-skinned punks. The crypto world’s relationship with race was, at best, unexamined. The Bored Ape controversy, stripped of its conspiratorial framing, was really about whether tech culture could reckon with that examination or would dismiss it entirely.

It dismissed it entirely. But the dismissal was made easier by the fact that the person forcing the conversation had wrapped it in tinfoil.

The NFT Market Crash

The irony of the BAYC racist symbolism theory is that the real threat to the Bored Ape Yacht Club wasn’t hidden Nazi codes — it was basic market gravity.

By mid-2022, the NFT market was already showing signs of the crash that would eventually obliterate it. The broader crypto winter, triggered in part by the Terra/LUNA collapse in May 2022 and the FTX implosion in November 2022, dragged NFT valuations down with it. BAYC floor prices fell from their January 2022 peak of roughly 128 ETH (approximately $400,000) to under 30 ETH by the end of 2023. By mid-2024, floor prices had dropped below 10 ETH — a decline of more than 90% from the peak.

The celebrities who had purchased apes at peak mania were suddenly holding assets worth a fraction of what they’d paid. Justin Bieber’s $1.3 million ape was worth less than $70,000. The digital yacht club was taking on water.

The racist symbolism theory didn’t cause the crash. The crash was driven by macroeconomic forces, the evaporation of speculative mania, and the dawning realization that digital pictures of cartoon animals might not, in fact, be worth as much as real estate. But the theory contributed to a general atmosphere of negativity around BAYC during the decline. It gave people who had already soured on NFTs another reason to mock the collection. It added cultural baggage to a brand that was already struggling under the weight of its own hype.

In the end, the thing that killed the Bored Ape Yacht Club wasn’t Ryder Ripps or Nazi accusations. It was the thing that kills every speculative bubble: reality.

Counter-Arguments and Ongoing Debate

Despite the debunking, the BAYC racist symbolism theory retains adherents — as all good conspiracy theories do. The counter-arguments generally take several forms.

“The founders being Jewish doesn’t prove anything.” This is technically true. Jewish identity does not immunize a person against all accusations of misconduct, and there are historical examples of individuals acting against their own ethnic group’s interests. However, the claim is not merely that BAYC contains some culturally insensitive imagery — it’s that the founders deliberately encoded neo-Nazi symbolism into a billion-dollar brand. The founders’ Jewish identity doesn’t prove the theory false, but it makes the already implausible claim dramatically more so.

“There are too many coincidences to be coincidental.” This is the most common defense of any conspiracy theory, and the least persuasive. When you have a company with a name, a logo, a product, a set of employees, a website, and thousands of individual assets — each with multiple traits — the number of potential “connections” to any given framework is essentially infinite. The coincidences are not evidence of intent. They’re evidence that the world is large and complicated and full of overlapping symbols.

“The lawsuit doesn’t prove the theory wrong.” This is correct. The lawsuit was about trademark infringement, not about whether BAYC contained racist symbolism. Yuga Labs won on intellectual property grounds. The court did not rule on the truth of Ripps’s claims. But the lawsuit’s outcome — and the court’s characterization of Ripps’s project as commercially motivated rather than purely artistic — did undermine the narrative that Ripps was a selfless truth-teller sacrificing himself to expose corruption.

“You’re carrying water for Yuga Labs.” A common response to debunking efforts in any conspiracy community. The person explaining why the evidence doesn’t hold up is reframed as complicit in the cover-up. This is not an argument. It’s a rhetorical trick designed to make the act of critical thinking look suspicious.

What It Says About Conspiracy Culture

The BAYC racist symbolism theory is a near-perfect case study in how modern conspiracy theories operate. It had all the ingredients: a suspicious target (an anonymous, enormously wealthy tech company), a charismatic proponent (an established artist with a platform), a kernel of legitimate concern (the racial history of ape imagery), an overwhelming volume of “evidence” (dozens of individual claims that collectively created an illusion of proof), and a built-in defense against debunking (anyone who disagreed was naive or complicit).

It also demonstrated the power and danger of pattern-matching as a mode of thinking. Pattern recognition is one of humanity’s most valuable cognitive tools — it’s how we learn language, navigate the physical world, and identify threats. But pattern recognition without epistemological discipline is just pareidolia with a politics degree. It’s seeing the Virgin Mary in toast and calling it a papal conspiracy.

The Ripps theory found an audience not because the evidence was strong but because the audience was primed. By early 2022, NFT skepticism was growing. The cultural backlash against crypto excess was intensifying. People who had watched from the sidelines as cartoon apes sold for millions were looking for reasons to say “I told you so.” The racist symbolism theory gave them a reason that felt righteous — not just “this is financially stupid” but “this is morally evil.”

That’s a much better story. Financial stupidity is boring. Hidden Nazi codes are exciting. And on the internet, the exciting story always wins, at least for a while.

Timeline

• April 23, 2021: Bored Ape Yacht Club launches; 10,000 apes sell out at 0.08 ETH ($190) each within 12 hours
• Summer-Fall 2021: BAYC floor prices climb past $100,000; celebrity purchases generate massive media coverage
• January 2022: BAYC floor prices peak above 128 ETH (~$400,000); Yuga Labs valued at $4 billion
• January-February 2022: Ryder Ripps publishes racist symbolism theory on gordongoner.com
• February 2022: Buzzfeed News reveals founders’ real identities — Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, both Jewish
• March 2022: Yuga Labs raises $450 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz
• May 2022: Terra/LUNA collapse triggers broader crypto winter; NFT prices begin falling
• Mid-2022: Ripps launches RR/BAYC mirror NFT collection; generates ~$5 million in sales
• June 2022: Yuga Labs files trademark infringement lawsuit against Ripps in U.S. federal court
• November 2022: FTX collapses, accelerating crypto/NFT market decline
• April 2023: Federal judge rules in favor of Yuga Labs; finds Ripps infringed on trademarks
• November 2023: Ripps ordered to pay approximately $9 million in damages
• 2023-2024: BAYC floor prices decline over 90% from peak amid broader NFT market collapse
• 2024-2025: Theory largely fades from public discourse; NFT market remains depressed

Sources & Further Reading

• Buzzfeed News: “We Found the Real Names of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders” by Katie Notopoulos (February 2022)
• Vice: “The Bored Ape Yacht Club Racism Controversy, Explained” (2022)
• The Verge: “An Artist Accused Bored Ape Yacht Club of Being Racist. Now He Owes $9 Million” (November 2023)
• Web3 Is Going Just Great (Molly White): Analysis of BAYC symbolism claims
• gordongoner.com: Ryder Ripps’s original theory (archived)
• Yuga Labs, Inc. v. Ripps et al., Case No. 2:22-cv-04355 (C.D. Cal.)
• Court Order on Damages, November 2023
• CoinDesk: “Bored Ape Floor Price Falls Below 10 ETH” (2024)
• The New York Times: “How the Bored Ape Yacht Club Became a $4 Billion Brand” (2022)
• Anti-Defamation League: Report on extremist appropriation of religious and cultural symbols
• Financial Times: “The Rise and Fall of NFTs” (2023)
• Artnet: “Who Is Ryder Ripps? The Controversial Artist Behind the BAYC Racism Theory” (2022)

Related Theories

• $TRUMP Meme Coin Conspiracy — another case of crypto culture colliding with public controversy and accusations of hidden agendas
• FTX Collapse — Political Money Laundering — the broader crypto industry’s reckoning with fraud and deception
• Tether (USDT) Fraud / Bitcoin Price Manipulation — structural manipulation allegations in the crypto ecosystem
• Bitcoin: CIA/Government Creation Theory — conspiracy theories about the origins and purposes of cryptocurrency
• Big Tech Censorship — debates over who controls narratives in digital spaces
• Social Media Algorithm Addiction — how platforms amplify controversial content and conspiracy theories