For years, Dalton Eatherly built his entire online identity around the idea that nothing would catch up with him.
He walked into restaurants, public spaces, and street corners across the American South with a phone in one hand and a mouth full of racial slurs aimed at strangers who had done nothing to him. He called it free speech. To him, it was also content. On X, he described himself as a “free speech patriot” and told his 219,000 followers just weeks ago that he would “defend his life with lethal force.” He also posted videos of himself spraying what appeared to be a chemical agent at a Black man in the street. In other clips, he shouted slurs at people who could not get away fast enough while watching his follower count rise after every confrontation.
On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee, something caught up with him.
Eatherly — known to his audience as “Chud the Builder” — was involved in a shooting at approximately 1:20 PM local time. Both he and an unidentified man were struck by gunfire and transported to nearby hospitals, where both were in stable condition as of Wednesday evening. By that afternoon, Eatherly was in handcuffs. By Wednesday night, he was booked into the Montgomery County Jail on charges of attempted murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.
The internet responded in almost exactly the way you’d expect — except the response wasn’t sympathy.
Who Is ‘Chud the Builder’?
Eatherly built his audience through confrontational public content — unlike traditional creators who grow through gaming, commentary, or vlogs. His streams featured arguments, heated exchanges, and what critics called deliberate provocation. Over time, those clips spread far beyond any single platform.
The model is a well-worn one in the darker corners of internet content: find strangers in public, say the most offensive thing imaginable, film their reaction, post it before they can do anything about it, collect the views and the follows. The difference with Eatherly was the specific nature of what he was saying. His content was not edgy humor or provocative political commentary. It was, by any straightforward reading, targeted racial harassment — directed almost exclusively at Black people in public spaces, captured on video, and monetized.
He identifies himself as a “free speech patriot” on X, where he has more than 219,000 followers. His profile is littered with derogatory terms for minorities and videos of live confrontations. In a post on X late last month, he wrote: “It’s cute that people assume that someone who comes up to me threatening my life will walk away with theirs.” The week before the shooting, he added: “I will defend my life with lethal force. Do not approach me with intent to threaten bodily harm.”
Other videos Eatherly posted on social media show a history of using racial slurs and at least one instance of using force against a Black person. In one clip posted to X just last week, Eatherly could be seen spraying what appears to be a chemical agent at a Black man and repeatedly calling him a racial slur, after the man knocked the hat off his head.
The biggest blow to his online career before this week came when Kick banned him indefinitely. Initially, the platform reportedly handed him a short suspension. But after backlash intensified and more controversial clips resurfaced, Kick escalated the punishment into a permanent ban, fully demonetizing and removing verification from his account.
Four Days, Two Arrests:
Wednesday’s shooting does not exist in isolation. It was the second time in four days that Eatherly found himself in police custody — and the trajectory between the two incidents tells you something important about the direction things were heading.
On Saturday, May 9 — just four days before the shooting — police arrested Eatherly in Nashville after an incident at Bob’s Steak & Chop House on Broadway. According to police, staff warned Eatherly, who had previously filmed racially charged content on Nashville’s Broadway for social media, not to livestream or disrupt other diners while eating at the restaurant inside the Omni Nashville Hotel.
When the restaurant noticed he was livestreaming despite being asked not to, staff told him to stop. According to a probable cause affidavit, Eatherly became “disruptive and started making racial statements, yelling, screaming,” and causing a scene. He was arrested for allegedly refusing to pay for $371.55 in food and drink, according to court records.
Later, officers spotted him walking down a street and tried to place him in handcuffs, but he pulled his arm away before police took him into custody without further incident. Prosecutors charged him with theft of services, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Authorities later released him after he posted a $5,000 bond.
Four days later, he was outside a courthouse in Clarksville with a firearm.
The Shooting: What We Know
Dalton Eatherly appeared at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Tennessee on May 13, 2026, for a contract and debt case before a confrontation outside escalated into gunfire. Authorities said Eatherly and another man exchanged shots around 1:20 PM, leaving both injured. Law enforcement secured the courthouse, locked down the area, and took Eatherly into custody.
While lying on a stretcher after the shooting, Eatherly livestreamed his version of events, claiming a group of people mocked him before one man approached, threatened him, and allegedly assaulted him. Eatherly said he fired in self-defense and later told TMZ he may have accidentally shot himself during the confrontation.
Ni Fox identified the second man as her husband, saying the shooting struck him in the stomach and shoulder. Doctors hospitalized him in stable condition, while an online fundraiser for his medical expenses raised more than $7,000 within hours.
Investigators now face key questions surrounding Tennessee’s self-defense laws, including who initiated the confrontation, who drew a weapon first, and what events led to the shooting. Prosecutors and law enforcement have not publicly released full details, leaving the case likely headed for deeper legal scrutiny and potentially a jury trial.
The Charges and Where He Sits Tonight:
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office charged Eatherly with attempted murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon. He is being held in the Montgomery County Jail pending arraignment, at which time bond will be set.
Sheriff Fuson of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said in the press release: “It’s unfortunate that incidents like this are happening in our community. This kind of violence won’t be tolerated.”
Jacob Fendley, an attorney listed in court records as representing Eatherly in a separate harassment case from November, did not immediately return a phone message. As of Wednesday night, no attorney had made a public statement on his behalf.
Claire Martin, who works in an attorney’s office across the street from the courthouse, told reporters that Eatherly is “well known in Clarksville for antagonizing people to see what he can get them to do.” She said he “yells racial slurs” at people while filming them.
That last detail matters, because Clarksville is not an anonymous city to Eatherly. This was, by multiple accounts, familiar ground — a place where people knew his face and his behavior long before Wednesday.
The Internet Reacts: Very Little Sympathy
The online response to Wednesday’s shooting was swift, loud, and almost entirely lacking in the kind of supportive outrage Eatherly’s content usually generates from his follower base.
“Who didn’t see this coming? What a moron,” one person wrote in response to Eatherly’s mug shot. “Karma,” another added. The word “karma” appeared thousands of times across X, Reddit, and TikTok within hours of the story breaking. The GoFundMe for the man Eatherly shot — a stranger who, by his wife’s account, was simply in the wrong place — crossed $7,000 while Eatherly was still in the emergency room.
Even within communities that had previously defended Eatherly’s content as protected speech, the mood shifted noticeably. The argument that provoking strangers with racial slurs in public while carrying a loaded weapon is an expression of free speech becomes considerably harder to make when the logical endpoint of that behavior plays out on courthouse steps in broad daylight.
What happened Wednesday also forced a broader conversation into the open — one the platform ecosystem has avoided for far too long. Major platforms have spent years allowing creators to build, spread, and monetize content that targets specific racial groups in public, deliberately escalates confrontations, and broadcasts the results. Kick banned Eatherly, eventually. X has not. The videos remain. The account is still active. The 219,000 followers are still there.
At what point does a platform’s inaction on this category of content constitute complicity in the real-world escalation it produces? That question does not have a clean legal answer. But Wednesday made it impossible to ignore.
A Pattern With a Predictable End
Looking back at the timeline, nothing about Wednesday feels genuinely shocking and that is perhaps the most troubling part of this story.
A man builds a public career out of targeted racial harassment. The streamer posts videos of himself using chemical agents against people. On social media, he says he will respond to perceived threats with lethal force. Police arrested him for disorderly conduct on Saturday, but he walked out of jail on bond Sunday. Days later, he arrived at a courthouse with a gun and ultimately left on a stretcher.
Each step in that sequence was visible. Each was documented, in many cases by Eatherly himself. The behavior escalated consistently over time. And the platforms, the legal system, and the broader public attention that his content attracted treated it largely as entertainment right up until the moment it became a crime scene.
The other man — whose wife says the shooting struck him in the stomach and shoulder, whose GoFundMe raised $7,000 within hours, and whose family still has not released his name — never chose to become part of any of this. He was outside a courthouse on a Wednesday afternoon. And then he wasn’t okay.
That detail, more than any other, is the one worth sitting with.
Conclusion:
Dalton Eatherly is in a Tennessee jail tonight, facing attempted murder charges, having shot himself and another man outside a courthouse he was already attending as a defendant in a separate case — three days after a different arrest in Nashville. The full circumstances of Wednesday’s confrontation are still being investigated. His self-defense claim will be tested in court. The legal process will run its course.
But the story of how someone gets to this point — through years of escalating public harassment, platform monetization, a follower count built on racial provocation, and an online identity constructed entirely around the idea that there are no consequences — is a story the internet has been telling about itself for years. Wednesday did not create that story. It just gave it an ending that, as more than a few people noted online, very few who had been paying attention found surprising.
Whether the consequences now facing Eatherly are proportionate, whether his self-defense claim holds legal water, and whether the platforms that amplified his content for years bear any responsibility for what happened outside that courthouse — those are questions that courts, lawyers, and the public will be arguing about for months.
For now: two men are in hospital. One is in jail. And Clarksville is cleaning up a crime scene that didn’t have to happen.
References:
- CNN — “Chud the Builder, known for posting racist content, faces attempted murder charge after shooting outside courthouse” (May 13, 2026) — https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/13/us/chud-the-builder-tennessee-shooting
- NBC News — “Livestreamer ‘Chud the Builder’ charged in shooting outside Tennessee courthouse” (May 13, 2026) — https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/livestreamer-chud-builder-involved-shooting-tennessee-courthouse-rcna345044
- Washington Post — “Man known for racially derogatory livestreams charged with attempted murder after Tennessee shooting” (May 13, 2026) — https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2026/05/13/chud-builder-courthouse-shooting/
- ABC News — “Streamer known as ‘Chud the Builder’ involved in shooting outside courthouse, officials say” (May 13, 2026) — https://abcnews.com/US/streamer-chud-builder-involved-shooting-courthouse-officials/story?id=132938312
- Newsweek — “Who Is Dalton Eatherly? Racist Streamer ‘Chud the Builder’ Involved in Shooting” (May 13, 2026) — https://www.newsweek.com/racist-streamer-dalton-eatherly-chud-the-builder-involved-in-shooting-11948390
- Atlanta Black Star — “‘Karma’: Chud the Builder Charged After Accidentally Shooting Himself While Open Firing on Black Man Outside of Courthouse” (May 14, 2026) — https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/05/14/chud-the-builder-charged-after-accidently-shooting-himself/
- Fox 17 — “Controversial live-streamer arrested after restaurant livestream dispute, racial comments” (May 10, 2026) — https://fox17.com/news/local/controversial-streamer-chud-the-builder-arrested-after-restaurant-livestream-dispute
- Biography Island — “ChudTheBuilder Biography: Age, Rise to Fame and Arrests” (May 2026) — https://biographyisland.com/chudthebuilder-biography/
- WDBJ7 — “Man known for racially derogatory livestreams taken into custody after shooting, Tennessee” (May 13, 2026) — https://www.wdbj7.com/2026/05/13/man-known-racially-derogatory-livestreams-taken-into-custody-after-shooting-tennessee/
- WKRN News — “‘Chud the Builder’ charged with attempted murder” (May 13, 2026) — https://www.wkrn.com/video/chud-the-builder-charged-with-attempted-murder/11790766/
FAQs:
Q1: Who is Chud the Builder?
Chud the Builder is the online alias of Dalton Levi Eatherly, 28, a Tennessee-based livestreamer known for recording confrontational public interactions, using racial slurs directed at Black people, and posting the footage to social media platforms. He describes himself as a “free speech patriot” and had over 219,000 followers on X before Wednesday’s incident.
Q2: What did Eatherly say about the shooting?
Eatherly livestreamed himself on a stretcher speaking to first responders. He told TMZ he was jumped by the other man, prompting him to fire in what he claims was self-defense. He also stated he accidentally shot himself in the process. Authorities have not confirmed or denied the self-defense claim, which remains under investigation.
Q3: What were the charges from the Nashville arrest days earlier?
Police arrested Eatherly at Bob’s Steak & Chop House inside the Omni Nashville Hotel on May 9 after he livestreamed against staff instructions, made racial statements, and refused to pay a $371.55 bill. Prosecutors charged him with theft of services, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest before authorities released him on a $5,000 bond.
Q4: Has Eatherly been banned from any platforms?
Yes. Kick banned him indefinitely after initially issuing a short suspension, following backlash and the resurfacing of controversial clips. His X account remains active as of this writing, with the derogatory content still publicly visible.
Q6: What happens next legally?
Eatherly is currently held in Montgomery County Jail pending arraignment, where bond will be set. He faces four charges, the most serious being attempted murder. The investigation is ongoing, and the self-defense claim will be central to any legal proceedings that follow.
