The situation has only gotten worse for Dalton Eatherly, the race-baiting online pest better known as “Chud the Builder.” Earlier this spring, Eatherly was out on bond after being arrested in Nashville on theft, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest charges after allegedly walking out of a restaurant on an almost $400 tab. Days later, prosecutors say he went on to do something far more serious: allegedly shooting and nearly killing a man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee.
On Wednesday, a Davidson County judge revoked his bond after reviewing his conduct and new evidence surrounding the shooting.
“It sounds premeditative, like he’s going to kill somebody,” one Montgomery County investigator said at the hearing, pointing to Eatherly’s videos and social media posts.
There’s no mystery about what drives Eatherly, who livestreamed his violent, racist goals to thousands of supporters every step of the way.
In an age where racist rhetoric can not only be mainstreamed but can also be monetized, Dalton Eatherly represents its newest and lowest violent common denominator. He’s part of a new wave of right-wing streamers who profit by coaxing donations to push out racist hate speech via social media.
But Chud has taken the gambit even further than his counterparts. He’d carry out his antics in public, streaming himself hurling the N-word at minorities while armed with a pistol and pepper spray. His videos show him threatening to blow his targets’ “brains out,” often fantasizing that his escalation would end in violence, legal impunity, and the start of a race war. “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” he wrote in a now-deleted X post on May 7.
A week later, he’d be strapped to a gurney after allegedly shooting a Black man, as well as himself, during the courthouse altercation.
Both men survived, but Eatherly now faces a torrent of charges, including attempted murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, and employing a firearm during a dangerous felony. He also faces up to 60 years in prison.
Eatherly’s online notoriety has also translated into real-world support. In the weeks since the shooting, supporters descended on Tennessee courtrooms, turning routine hearings into spectacles. At one appearance, Jake Lang, the Trump-pardoned January 6 rioter and far-right activist, was removed by bailiffs after disrupting the court proceedings. (He received a 10-day jail sentence for contempt, the maximum sentence under state law.)
All this attention has done little to improve Eatherly’s legal position. A judge set Eatherly’s bond at $1 million in the Montgomery County shooting case. While supporters raised more than $300,000 for his defense, judges repeatedly rejected efforts to leverage that support into his release before his bail was revoked.
Part of Chud’s online appeal rests in how this new generation of white supremacists have morphed into online personalities to reach new followers. The far-right internet has spent the last decade learning how to refine the raw materials of extremism into entertainment.
Trump institutionalized hate speech into a legit political currency, but the new brand of online white supremacy often eschews institutions or electoral politics completely. Instead of espousing militant insular doctrine, figures like Nick Fuentes have used social media to soften their appeal to a broad group of nihilistic young men.
Young conservatives came of age during a period of collapsing institutional trust. Surveys from Gallup, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins have found young Americans increasingly distrust government, media, political parties, and other traditional institutions. For a segment of the online right, that disillusionment has curdled into political alienation — a belief that the system is not merely failing, but fundamentally incapable of delivering the future they were promised. Figures like Chud offer them convenient explanations for why those promises have been broken by pointing to anyone who isn’t a white American.
The far-right internet has spent the last decade learning how to refine the raw materials of extremism into entertainment.
They have also seized on this edgelord disillusionment for their own personal gain and notoriety. Envisioning an America that isn’t white or right fast enough. Often wrapping their rhetoric in a plausible deniability of shock content and prank. In this era, online racist rhetoric did not simply become more visible, it became more permissible, migrating from the internet’s fringe communities into mainstream political and social media culture.
Chud frequently targeted Black neighborhoods in his livestreaming, constantly hurling racial epithets and labeling his enemies “chimps” while framing these racist stunts as renegade expressions of “free speech.” In one video, he’d antagonized a pedestrian before pepper-spraying him and a crowd of onlookers.
In the initial Nashville incident, Chud livestreamed himself hurling racist insults at a restaurant before staff kicked him out. Police later arrested him for allegedly leaving without paying his sizable bill.
Eatherly’s story is less remarkable than many would like to believe.
The internet is now littered with young men and women chasing some version of the same racist, rage baiting, and accelerationist fantasy. Chasing hate can now yield significant online clout and even revenue. Researchers who study online hate have found social media’s reward systems can reinforce and escalate extremist behavior, with an audience’s approval often encouraging users to produce more hateful content.
Federal prosecutors have spent the last several years prosecuting people who moved beyond posting. In September 2025, prosecutors charged organizers of “Terrorgram,” a white supremacist online group, with soliciting hate crimes and soliciting the murder of public officials. Authorities have subsequently linked recent racially motivated shooters in San Diego and Buffalo as adherents of the online extremist ecosphere.
Fortunately, Chud the Builder was blunted before any stunt went too far off the rails.
In this era, online racist rhetoric did not simply become more visible, it became more permissible, migrating from the internet’s fringe communities into mainstream political and social media culture.
Now, instead of broadcasting from a sidewalk, Eatherly sits in custody facing charges that could keep him behind bars for decades. He didn’t start the “race war” he framed as inevitable, and the legal immunity he joked about has yet to materialize. What remains is a criminal case and a growing pile of evidence documenting months of public provocation.
Eatherly’s days of online shock content may be over, at least for now, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others ready and willing to step up to fill the void. We exist in a social media-driven world that rewards the Chuds of the world, and where, at a moment’s notice, you too could be unwillingly cast as the subject of someone’s livestreamed hate stunt.
The result is a generation of online personalities chasing attention through violent escalation, with each trying to outdo the last for their chance at virality. Most will never pull a trigger. But as Eatherly’s case demonstrates, when your audience rewards and even craves confrontation, eventually someone will try to turn the fantasy into reality.
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