Joshua Fox put it to me plainly: “I just don’t wanna be known as the Black guy Chud the Builder shot.”

His point is easy to empathize with. It’s also hard to honor, considering the nature of my work. The reason I was talking to him was because he’d been shot by Chud the Builder. But, at a time when Fox is the subject of an online demonization campaign by Chud’s defenders, I wanted to hear his side of the story. That, as you’ll learn, was difficult to do.

But before I spoke with Fox—the victim and protagonist in this terrifying saga who is just now breaking his silence—I spent months tracking his would-be shooter online: a depraved, attention-seeking opportunist who coveted the infamy of killing a Black man. Over the past two years, Dalton Levi Eatherly, a 29-year-old contractor turned ragebait streamer, concocted a digital persona known as “Chud the Builder,” now notorious in far-right circles for producing N-word outrage-porn rooted in crude free-speech absolutism that contends that if Black people can say the N-word, so can we, because this is America, goddamnit! Chud’s money-making blueprint involved filming himself hunting down Black strangers on the streets of Tennessee towns while yelling racist phrases like “Chimping out” to provoke a reaction he could monetize.

Often duded up in a cowboy hat and suspenders, Eatherly had a knack for marketing and proved to be an exceptional conman. Using his handsome hillbilly looks and intimate understanding of Black vernacular, he would often coax his targets with disarming banter before dropping the N-bombs. Once he got a rise out of his subject, Chud would flash his gun, coyly grin, and dare them to cower or physically respond, while filming in a red state with proactive “stand your ground” laws and a blood-soaked history of racial violence and subjugation.

This history of lynching and bondage and rape and second-class citizenship has since given rise to a pernicious albeit far more subtle prejudice, a disdain that failed to collapse despite Appomattox and Brown v. Board and the “post-racial” Obama era.

Eatherly understood this. His entire charade was a dangerous double-bind ambush, engineered to emasculate or incite violence. And as a source of income, it was also one of the newest iterations of the American dream, reliant on one of our oldest tropes.

All of which is disturbing enough, if not surprising. But that is not all Eatherly did. We are here because Eatherly went well beyond brandishing a loaded epithet. We are here because one spring day in May, Joshua Fox, a 31-year-old Black disabled veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a checkered past, stood up and stress-tested Eatherly’s business model.

Chud’s grievance-fueled “work” was premised on the notion of superiority. But under his facade of online success was a life in disarray: He’d lost his construction job. He’d tarnished his reputation in his hometown. He was living in an overgrown and ramshackle double-wide trailer (from which he’s now allegedly being evicted), and was busy panhandling on GiveSendGo, the Christian-right knockoff of GoFundMe, while out on two separate bonds for harassment and theft in two different jurisdictions.

Then, at 9 a.m. on May 13, Eatherly was scheduled to appear before Judge H. Reid Poland III’s General Sessions Court in the Montgomery County courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee. He was being summoned because he was being sued by Midland Credit Management for $3,466.63 in defaulted credit card debt. But like so many high-born Anglo-Saxons before him, Eatherly chose to no-show to court. Accordingly, Judge Poland entered a default judgment into the record, which gave Midland Credit Management the right to tread on his bank account and garnish his wages.

Nevertheless, for reasons still not understood, four hours later Eatherly did make an appearance at the courthouse. Well, outside of the courthouse: At roughly 1:15 p.m., dressed in a blazer and Oxford shirt, with selfie stick in hand and a gun in his jacket pocket, Eatherly strolled into the municipal plaza and pinpointed the lone Black couple sitting on the concrete planters.

Shaniqua and Joshua Fox were there for a 1:30 p.m. child custody hearing. Chud was there to instigate trouble.

What happened next is already being fought over on the internet and soon will be adjudicated in court. What is clear from the audio-less courthouse CCTV footage that captured the event is that Eatherly approached the couple. Words were exchanged between unarmed Joshua Fox and armed Dalton Eatherly. Eatherly walked away. Then Fox got up, approached Eatherly and made gestures toward him. Eatherly switched the selfie stick to his left hand and put his right hand in his jacket pocket. Fox walked away and then came back again. Then, according to both the lead investigator in the case, Detective Michael Weber, and the text of the arrest warrant, Eatherly “turned his body in a bladed stance” while reaching for his gun. “Thereafter,” the warrant states, “a physical altercation ensued.” Fox punched Eatherly, and the men wrestled to the ground. Seven shots were fired in rapid succession. Eatherly shot himself in the arm and shot Fox five times at point-blank range. Fox was airlifted to Vanderbilt Hospital—and ultimately survived.

Two days later, Judge Poland the III and Dalton Eatherly the Chud would get another chance to meet. Eatherly shuffled into Poland’s courtroom on May 15 in a dark-blue jumpsuit “reserved for high-risk inmates,” facing four charges, all far different from failing to pay back a loan: attempted first degree murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment.

Due to the gravity of the offenses, the location where they were perpetrated, and the fact that he was already out on two separate bonds, Poland initially set his new bond at $1.25 million. (It would later be reduced to a still-formidable $1 million.) Upon hearing Poland’s order, Eatherly closed his eyes in a look of utter devastation. Just as his digital persona reached its apex, his real-world life was locked in a cage.

Once I got word of the shooting, and learned Joshua Fox was alive and Dalton Eatherly was at the mercy of the county jail, I got to work. As a freelance writer based in the South, I immediately realized I needed to become obsessed with the details of this case and start reporting.

I’d been following Eatherly’s vile commentary on the cesspool that is X, formerly known as Twitter, for longer than I care to admit, thanks in part to Elon Musk’s warped hard-right algorithms. Chud’s MO was pitiful and enraging—a surefire way to trigger the primordial parts of one’s brain. But from a purely free-market, late-stage-capitalist perspective, it was also wickedly effective. Like many others, I too had clicked. Took the bait. And became a node in Chud’s attention-farming funding scheme. Mainly because I was appalled. After all, the Ku Klux Klan needed to wear hoods to mask their identities a century ago. Now, Eatherly’s ilk gloats about verbally terrorizing American citizens going about their day-to-day lives on American streets and beams this content around the globe for money.

Either you rallied behind Chud or you rooted for his demise; either way, he got paid.It was a sick new business model and digital pathogen. As his footprint grew, he became a “cause célèbre” for other white supremacists, and worse yet, he was making these interactions, filled with primitive displays of dominance, in front of impressionable youths suction-cupped to their phones.

But Eatherly was so extreme, he made even his idols blush. When speaking about Chud’s tactics about a week before the shooting, Nick Fuentes, the vocal America First white nationalist, said, “to me, it’s not nice.” Not only was it not nice, it was clear to anyone paying attention that it was just a matter of time before Chud got himself—or someone else—killed. All it would take was mouthing off to the wrong person. Evidently.

From my outpost in Louisville, Kentucky, a town no stranger to armed xenophobic maniacs, I made four trips to Tennessee to report. At Eatherly’s May 21 bond hearing in Clarksville, I witnessed, firsthand, the spectacle of Chud’s white supremacist circus colliding with the........

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