The Embodiment of Rage Bait

A white nationalist streamer shot a black man in public. How did we get here?

White nationalist livestreamer Dalton Eatherly, who goes by ‘ChudTheBuilder’ online, was arrested yesterday and charged with attempted murder¹ after allegedly shooting a man near the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee.

The best description of Eatherly, and the one surest to piss him off, is that he’s essentially a neo-Nazi knock-off of Johnny Somali. Somali made his name by traveling the world and trying to enrage the locals, pulling stunts like mocking Hiroshima in Japan, putting images of Jeffrey Epstein on the Wailing Wall in Israel, and performing lap dances on a statue honoring sex slaves in Korea. His antics in Korea earned him a jail sentence of six months hard labor earlier this year. Eatherly has the same instincts as Somali - film yourself violating social norms in the most egregious and offensive ways possible to impress a large crowd of hateful idiots on the internet.

ChudTheBuilder’s particular schtick as a streamer is to walk around in public, find black people, and start calling them racial slurs in the hopes of provoking a confrontation. He’ll drop the hard-r a bunch of times, then if anyone gets upset he’ll put on a shit-eating grin and ask them if they’re going to ‘chimp out’. He’s awful enough that he streams from something called Pump.fun - a crypto site that appears to be an even worse version of Kick - after getting banned from Kick, which proudly hosts a variety of other racists.

Yesterday he got his wish, which was to shoot a black person. You don’t have to take my word for it - he’s been very clear about what his ultimate goal was:

The constitutional freedom referenced here is yelling n****r at black people in public

This post was one week ago today.

There’s a lot we should say here. What happens legally will depend on the specifics of the case - but the police certainly didn’t waste any time charging him, so things look grim for Eatherly’s case. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t deliberately provoke confrontations while planning to escalate them to the level of deadly force. If I was a prosecutor, the posts above would be Exhibits A, B, and C in establishing what kind of person we’re dealing with here. And I’d very much like to see someone pick apart the phrase “premeditated self-defense” in a courtroom.

Chud is obviously a vile racist, one of the worst people on the internet. We should also note that Chud is just kind of a sad excuse of a person in general. He’s faced drug charges before, he was arrested recently for theft, was arrested late last year on harassment charges, and was near the Montgomery County Courthouse yesterday because he’s being sued over unpaid debts. He also managed to shoot himself in the arm during the incident, so, you know, silver linings.

When it comes to Chud specifically, this outcome seems like it was inevitable. But how did we get to the point where this happens?

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The performance of edgy, shocking material isn’t new. The art world has a habit of making provocateurs like Duchamp, Pollock, and Warhol famous. Lenny Bruce was repeatedly arrested for his obscene and shocking stand-up comedy. Howard Stern and other shock jocks offended our sensibilities over the airwaves, and the boys who made up the Jackass crew made a living doing stupid stuff in public.

I’m being extraordinarily generous to even mention ragebait streamers in the same breath as artists like Warhol or Lenny Bruce. But if you squint at the history of provocative artists and shock entertainers, you can trace a line from those who were relatively more tame and enmeshed within institutions to those without any boundaries whatsoever. Duchamp’s stunt with a urinal was shocking, but not nearly as shocking as Lenny Bruce. And Bruce’s standup was vulgar, but people like Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay were even more vulgar.

As much as I have a soft spot for them in my millennial heart, Jackass is probably the dividing line between the old school shock entertainers and artists and the new school. The specific innovation of Jackass was that much of it took place in public - they’d have a grandpa shoplift, or stage a boxing match in a department store. Whereas previous provocateurs stayed within specific arenas - art galleries, radio broadcasts, or comedy clubs - Jackass made the unwilling public a part of the spectacle. What used to be confined to a stage is now everywhere, with an entire generation of Jackass copycats doing ‘pranks’ on YouTube. Everything idiots like Johnny Somali or ChudTheBuilder do is downstream of blowing air horns on a golf course.

Tracing the line of shock performers through history, what’s been happening is that the line between performance and reality has totally collapsed. Chud is not an artist trying to make controversial art. He’s just a racist who realized he can make money from racism. And while the good lord above knows that isn’t unique to the modern world either, the particular set of incentives provided by social media are.

What Somali and Chud have in common is that they’re both engaging in rage bait. They provoke the maximal emotional response they can, hoping this will drive engagement, making you mad and them famous. But where we’ve traditionally understood ragebait to be a digital tactic, something you do in replies and comment sections, they’re doing it in real life. They are the embodiment of rage bait in the original meaning of the term embodied - physically present in a space with real, non-online people.

The vast majority of people want nothing to do with this, but in the modern digital environment it’s algorithms and not people that make celebrities. Conflict leads to engagement. Even being humiliated just means more virality and more eyeballs on you, as long as you’re brash enough to never back down afterwards. Perhaps the worst lesson that Donald Trump taught us about society is that there’s really no need to ever apologize - shame is an outdated concept. Instead of backing down, double down on whatever horrible thing you did. Triple down. Proclaim how proud you are of the terrible thing. Laugh at the people who get mad at it, as if their anger was proof of weakness. What would have been a career-ending scandal in a previous era is now just another reason for your fans to rally around you.

Because even people like Chud have fans. In one day, he’s raised around $50,000 for his legal defense fund.² You can’t discuss his case on X without a legion of racists jumping in your replies to defend him. He’s essentially Nick Fuentes but stupider, if it were possible for that to be a thing. His innovation from previous prank YouTubers is that where they would do something awful and then run away screaming “It was just a prank bro”, Chud does the awful thing and says with his whole chest how much he believes the awful thing. In the era of livestreaming and clipping, all it takes is an oversized amount of bravado, some form of extremist ideology or behavior, and a devil-may-care attitude towards authority, and the views and fans are almost guaranteed to come pouring in.

Chud is the culmination of several trends - the surge of white nationalism, the performance of hyper-masculinity, rage bait engagement tactics, a post-modern form of politics drenched in irony and obsessed with aesthetics, and livestreaming creating a world where society itself is just more fodder for content. We built a society where attention is economically valuable, it’s easier than ever for extremists to gain a large platform, and where there’s no downside to bad behavior. I’m not sure why we’d be surprised that enterprising shitheads have figured out how to industrialize the production of antisocial content.

This shooting incident may actually end up being a relatively good outcome, all things considered. Dalton Eatherly shot someone, but at least the victim seems to have survived and Eatherly seems likely to get a lengthy prison sentence. I had an eerie feeling of relief when news of Eatherly’s arrest broke, the feeling you get looking at a fiasco while knowing it could have been a catastrophe. So here’s a grim prediction: Eatherly is not the culmination of this trend. Nothing in the underlying media or political environment has changed. The incentives that lead to the embodiment of rage bait are all still in place, and we’re going to see things get significantly worse before they get better.

1. He is also facing charges of employing a firearm during dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon

2. This fundraiser existed before the shooting, but has grown by about $50,000 as of time of publication.