A Streamer Predicted He Could Kill a Black Person and Get Away With It. Thousands Watched. When He Shot Someone, the Real Story Began.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Charlie Cy and courtesy of Carolyn Smith. Copy Link Share Share Comment Gift Story Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. 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.