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.

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.