The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone

There’s a truly villainous new livestreamer who’s become a cause célèbre on the right—a guy so bad he makes Clavicular’s videos about drug overdoses and the Israeli mafia look like an episode of Bluey.

Meet “Chud the Builder,” a mustachioed, cowboy hat–wearing 28-year-old Tennessee man whose real name is Dalton Eatherly. His internet alias combines the insult “chud”—basically slang for a low-brow right-winger—and a play on both Eatherly’s profession as a construction worker and the children’s show Bob the Builder.

Eatherly’s gimmick is that he films himself walking around calling black people the n-word or accusing them of “chimping out”—a racial slur comparing black people to monkeys. When the people he’s accosting get understandably mad, he encourages them to attack him so he’ll have an excuse to defend himself with mace or a gun.

You can probably guess where this is headed. On Wednesday, Eatherly shot someone in the Nashville suburb of Clarksville, according to police, apparently after the man punched him. Eatherly also shot himself during the incident, sustaining a minor injury. Eatherly has been charged with attempted murder by the Montgomery County district attorney.

Clearly, Eatherly is acting in this vile way for attention. He’s been on my radar for a few months, but his shtick is so depressing I was reluctant to give it any more coverage. At the point where a rising online star is shooting people, though, I think it’s worth considering how the economics of livestreaming and the right’s embrace of even the most despicable people could allow a figure like “Chud the Builder” to exist, let alone get a serious following.

Eatherly’s rise has been fueled by “clipping” accounts on social media, which take the hours of streaming he produces and repackage his most incendiary moments into shorter videos. He’s appeared on InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s online show to make his case that he’s defending free speech by trying to reclaim the n-word for white people. His videos have also, understandably, been heavily commented on by black YouTubers, some of whom have raised the specter of violently confronting him.

“Somebody might have to just do it,” hip-hop podcaster DJ Akademiks said recently, calling for Eatherly to be assassinated in the same way Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was.

This sort of boomerang effect—in which Eatherly says the most provocative thing possible to get attention, which, in turn, gets a provocative response that also gets attention—is the fuel of the modern internet. And it’s lucrative.

The videos have made Eatherly a notorious figure in Clarksville, where he lives. He’s also raised $65,000 in a crowdfunding campaign, and sells a memecoin called, naturally, “$CHUD.”

Eatherly’s journey into commercialized racism began sometime in 2024 or early 2025, when he got into a road rage incident with a black woman. The woman’s daughter posted a picture of him, claiming he had called her family the n-word, which set off a series of events Eatherly claims lost him his job in construction. In response, Eatherly began filming himself berating black people in public.

It’s a strange way to make a living, even in 2026. But it’s not unique to Eatherly. Last year, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix made more than $800,000 from a crowdfunding campaign after she was filmed calling a five-year-old boy the n-word. Hendrix wasn’t a livestreamer, just an organic racist. But Chud’s obnoxious, confrontational style has been echoed by other livestreamers, like an American internet personality named Johnny Somali, who was just sentenced to six months in a South Korean labor prison for harassing Koreans as part of his content creation strategy.

Intriguingly, the FBI appears to have shown interest in Eatherly and his associates even before Wednesday’s shooting. Last week, Eatherly was arrested in an unrelated case for allegedly refusing to pay his bill at a restaurant after being kicked out for livestreaming and making racial attacks. While in custody, Eatherly claimed, he was interviewed by an FBI counterterrorism agent about any ties he could have to an extremist antisemitic group called the Goyim Defense League.

This all seems to have taken a bit of a toll on Eatherly’s private life. Shortly before this week’s shooting, he claimed that his son’s mother was changing their child’s name so the boy wouldn’t be associated with his racist father.

Whatever’s going on in Eatherly’s personal life, it’s indisputable that his public profile has only grown. His racist content is, unfortunately, the perfect type of ammunition for the online culture war. While the image-conscious white nationalist Nick Fuentes has rejected Eatherly’s tactics of “antagonizing people in public,” the former-ESPN personality turned conservative sports figure Jason Whitlock said the black men Eatherly targets need to behave better themselves.

“Chud the Builder’s rise is a sign of weakness among black men,” Whitlock, who is himself black, wrote on X last month.

The dissection of Eatherly’s content has continued even after he shot someone. Eatherly’s defenders have argued that the shooting should be legal, assuming he was physically attacked first. Yet Eatherly’s defense will almost certainly be undermined by the fact that, before the shooting, he sent numerous violent, racist tweets laying out how he planned to provoke a black person into attacking him so that he could shoot him, a plan he hoped would ratchet up racial tension nationally.

It might be hard to muster up a self-defense argument with a social media trail like that. As of the publishing of this newsletter, Eatherly’s lawyer has not commented publicly on the case.

But in an ominous sign about the economics of the worst corners of the livestreaming world, the price of the $CHUD memecoin shot to a new level in the immediate aftermath of the shooting—with buyers appearing to bet that all the controversy about “Chud the Builder” would turn into a windfall.