Part One: How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet

In April 2026, a man named Dalton Levi Etherly—better known online as “Chud the Builder”—walked up to a stranger outside a Tennessee courthouse, shouted racial slurs at him, and when the man punched him, Etherly drew a handgun and fired multiple times. He hit a disabled veteran and father of three, missed several other bystanders, and also shot himself in the chaos. The victim survived. Etherly had been streaming the interaction live. What made this not a random act of violence but a business decision is that Etherly had spent months building a career around exactly this kind of provocation: filming himself harassing Black people in public, calling the reactions “chimp outs,” and monetizing the clips through donations and a meme coin. He had raised $65,000 in crowdfunding before the shooting. This episode of Behind the Bastards, with guest Jason Pargin, traces how the internet created a path from online trolling to real-world violence—and why that path now looks like a viable career.

From Snow Crash to the Sidewalk