Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 23 - Chud the Builder
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There's few people that one could truly call depraved to the core.
In this week's episode we tackle one such individual and through that we will dive deeper into the flows of money that unnaturally prop up right-wing voices.
Enjoy a primer on the slur slinging Kick streamer Dalton Eatherly, better known as "Chud the Builder".
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We've talked about how Nick Fuentes received 13.5 Bitcoin from a French national before, and about how dark money flows from corporations to all of these freaks. This time, however, we're shifting our focus from dark money and down to grassroots organizing. Today we're going to talk about how extremely good the far right are at throwing money at the dumbest causes imaginable. We're going to use the attempted murderer and kicks uh sorry, we're going to use the attempted murderer and kick livestreamer, Dalton Levi Etherly, or Etherly or however you pronounce his name, also known as Chud the Builder for some fucking reason, as our case study and launch platform to talk about far-right fundraising. Welcome to the reaction podcast. Today's episode is on Chud the Builder and also Loki, the venture capital firms at ONGo Fund Me, Amazon, and the Christian fundraising sites. Give us time to go.
SPEAKER_08Okay, before we go on, is it Aetherly? Aetherly?
SPEAKER_07No, I don't know. I have no idea, man. I said otherly, and then I was like, there's gotta be Hold on, I'm looking it up.
SPEAKER_08Aetherly. I think that's the best. Aetherly. Yeah. Alright. Dalton Aetherly, known online as Chud the Builder, used to be a residential contractor in Clarksville, Tennessee. Then, in early 2025, a road rage incident put his face on the internet. He had called a woman a racial slur. Her daughter filmed it and posted the clip. It traveled fast. Most people would have felt some shame, but Aetherly felt an opportunity. Within a few months, he had rebuilt himself as Chud the Builder. His formula was very simple. Find a black stranger in public, say something ugly, film the reaction, post the clip. As we've discussed countless times on the podcast, this is the influencer economy. Attention is the raw material. Provocation and clippable moments is how you extract it. Aetherly's methods were crude, and his politics are thin. Pretty, pretty freaking thin. But his following grew fast anyway. He soon crossed over 200,000 followers on Twitter alone. Isn't that fucking insane?
SPEAKER_11Isn't that like people spend their entire life like organizing politically, doesn't matter for which branch, or or like doing professional sports, bro. And they barely passed the like 100k uh threshold, which is like an insanely difficult threshold to pass on Twitter and so on. Like that's like 1% of 1% of 1% of people on the platform. And yet a guy who just runs around and says n-word very violently and aggressively. Uh I love how I said very violently and aggressive as if there's a non-violent and aggressive way of saying he doesn't guys trust me, he doesn't say it like in a based way, brother.
SPEAKER_08But like no, no, no.
SPEAKER_11But just get 200k followers. Like it's it's an incredible platform, this x.com, the everything.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's yeah, wonderful. Thank you, Elon.
SPEAKER_08Well, there's a lot of botting going on, especially for the far right, but there is also kind of like a a appetite for appetite for racism. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but I'm I'm kind of trying to reformulate it because I want to understand like describing it as racism is fine, but what is the psychological thing that is being offered here?
SPEAKER_07I think it's the same like thing when because we talked to Wao Mao in the past episode about looking at live leak shit, it's the same thing, I think. It's like seeing something shocking. It's just it's the same as like those like sensational TV shows you used to have where they well, I I guess topically, because of the fucking Robert Pattinson movie, like uh uh the uh Chris Hansen like uh catch a predator type stuff. Like you want to see something kind of messed up. A lot of people like that. Even if like they agree with him, they might know that it's kind of shocking and messed up. They just like the the spectacle of it.
SPEAKER_01Some breaking news to tell you about the social media influencer known as Chud the Builder is now facing an attempted murder charge after a shooting today outside the Montgomery County Courthouse. Deputies say Dalton Etherley, better known as social media as Chud the Builder, was involved in a fight leading to gunfire. Both men were hospitalized. Deputies just arrested Etherly, charging him with attempted murder, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon. Tonight, he's being held in the Montgomery County jail.
SPEAKER_08I almost feel like it is a expression of radical freedom. And uh and again, this is this is not me saying that's good. Sometimes freedom should be constrained. And this is one of those times, which is there is these social bonds, there is a normative way of acting, you know, in our society, on its face at least, racism is supposed to be a bad thing, and especially for like young teenage boys in the throes of hormones and the kind of rebellious turn that we all feel. Well, most of us do when you hit adolescence, kind of rebelling against the mild liberal diversity of don't say those naughty words. It's infantile a little bit. That's a good thesis. I think they're infantilized. Yeah, I think they are stupid. I think they are baby brains, I think they are teenage boys. Everybody's 12. Everybody's 12 years old. Like that is the controlling thesis. Yeah, I hate it personally.
SPEAKER_09Mommy, government doesn't let me shady inward. I'm gonna film my shell of shady inward.
SPEAKER_08It's not even the government, it's that my grandma would hit me on the butt. I'd get a swat on the butt if I did that.
SPEAKER_12I'm gonna go and kick and give twenty dollars to a guy who's very based and says the word. Like this is how they live.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, literally. I don't know who which one of you said it, but someone said like how all of their politics are basically like how they're mad at their teacher and like ways to get back at the memory of their teacher. They're twelve. They told them they couldn't do this or that. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_11It's also like incredibly unimaginative because like you want to live out your fantasy of being a very badass guy. And that's like your idea of badass guys, guy who doesn't give a shit and just drops the fucking end bomb in front of a black person. Yeah, like it's so profoundly unimaginative.
SPEAKER_07And everybody gets mad, and that's what makes him so cool. I so based. You mad lip? Everybody thinks it's a fucking freak.
SPEAKER_12Lip mad. Wow, dude. You say it in rap music all the time. Why are you mad now?
SPEAKER_11Like, I was gonna say, are you literally 12, bro? But like we already answered that question.
SPEAKER_07Um Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've we've been yeah, we've been over that. They are.
SPEAKER_11What I'm trying to say, it's not even I mean, not like racism can ever be cool, but at least like, you know, fucking hoods and calling yourself grand wizards and like fucking horses, waah, we're gonna burn a cross, wah, just some like wah symbol or whatever. Now it's like like just like half-asleep hangover guy donating five dollars to a guy called Chud to run around and do shit.
SPEAKER_07Like, what the fuck? It's the like the most American racism, even more American than Ku Klux Klan. It's just racism for profit because a Chud the Builder has no core ideology, he's just it's just you know, it's attention. People talked about him, people liked him, right? Because he was doing that shit. So he's like, I'm gonna do it more.
SPEAKER_08I'm just trying to conceptualize why I find this shit so pathetic, and I just I don't know how to express my contempt at a level that I feel like needs to be expressed. Like this guy, Etherly, his content isn't just saying the word, which has been old for like 20 years. You know, people were going on 4chan and saying those, you know, the word and being shocked, you know, uh for 20 fucking years. Now it is the guy is literally going up to people and saying it to their face and live streaming it for content. And that ultimately led to the incident that I think is the core episode for why this guy is even notable instead of just some slug from the deep reaches of the internet, because on May 13th, 2026, Etherly showed up at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville for an unrelated civil matter, a roughly three thousand dollar debt dispute outside the building. He got into confrontation with Joshua Fox, a 31-year-old disabled army veteran. So this is the weird thing. He wasn't even live streaming the shooting.
SPEAKER_07Wait, I've got a question because I didn't look into this part. He he didn't even show up to provoke. He literally was just there because he didn't pay his his bills and this whole thing happened.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh at least as far as I know. Maybe, maybe I'm I'm wrong, but I from what I believe, at least CNN reports that I read. That's fucking crazy. That he wasn't even live streaming the shooting, but he did go live afterward. Oh. So the arrest warrant, it shows it says that either Lee turned his body into a bladed stance and reached for a firearm in his jacket. A struggle followed, shots were fired, and Joshua Fox was hit, and he was so badly wounded that they had to life flight him to you know, Vanderbilt University Medical Center for emergency surgery. Now, like the the the details of the shooting are a little bit sketchy, but from what I understand, his side of the story, you know, Chud's side, is that Fox came up to him and said, You better not say any of that chimping out stuff to me, or else we're gonna have a problem. And then they got into a confrontation, right? So maybe maybe Fox like recognized him for being like a racist live streamer, but that's Chud's side of the story. I don't think you should really listen to it because the guy is facing such serious felonies that he's gonna come up with a story to try to save his own ass. And as I said before, the the live the shooting itself, as far as I know, wasn't livestream. Yeah, but shortly after firing, eitherly live streamed himself speaking to first responders. The video was titled Chimpin, which and shows him still on pump.fun talking to first responders at the scene. About a minute into the I thought he was a kick streamer. Yeah, he was. Oh, okay. Yeah, keyword was. I think this is the video that still is up right now. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to point out um about a minute of the clip, he tells viewers that this is the kind of thing people would pay to see, saying, Rich people are saying you'll get rich if you hit this guy. He's narrating the shooting's aftermath as content while it's still happening, openly framing his attempted murder as a monetization opportunity. And by the way, and this is the thing that is crazy, he has a meme coin or a shit coin called Chud. And during the aftermath of the shooting, it hit its peak market cap of four million dollars.
SPEAKER_07That's kind of fucking yeah. I I'm just I'm just in my head, like, okay, so you got this this world now where like you invest in this guy doing something insane so that his like coin Should we explain what the fuck a shit coin is? Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, yeah.
SPEAKER_08So I'm sure unless you're living under a rock, you're probably aware of what a cryptocurrency is, which is like a cryptographic currency that requires a computer to solve these problems, basically do make work, and then it randomly provides. This is how Bitcoin functions, at least, rarely provides these rewards, which is this token, like a Bitcoin, that it, you know, is selectively mined, and then there's like a limited number of them. Well, people have taken this idea and they have now started to write their own crypto coins and cryptocurrencies, and you can modify them or you can uh you know change their names or whatever. It's it there's nothing to it because it's just you made up a coin, it's not connected to anything. Well, there's these like it's just for pump and dump schemes. Well, exactly. There are these like very sh, you know, seedy, what we call meme coin or or other people call shit coin websites where people will trade like actual money or currency or other coins for these coins, and it has now resulted in this influencer economy where various influencers or other people with followings will make these meme coins and then they will try to like pump them to their audiences. And as they are the originator of the coin, they own, like depending upon how they design the coin to operate, they have like a founding stake. So some percentage of the coins they just own right off the bat. And as people start to either mine the coin or transact in the coin, they can start selling it into that liquidity that's been generated. So what happens is like you make a shit coin, you go famous, it starts to pump, a bunch of people start to trade the rise in the currency, the uh kind of a get rich quick scheme. They're trying to find a greater fool to buy the coin from them when it goes even higher. And if you are like kind of the founder of the coin, you sell into that pump and you do what's known as a rug pull, where as people start buying your coin, you start dumping a bunch of it into the market to grab as much cash as you can as quickly as you can, and the coin becomes worthless because there's so much supply of it that it soaks up all the money, and eventually, you know, people stop transactioning in it and it goes to zero value. So everybody who bought the coin from you is broke and you've stolen a bunch of real money. So basically, to link this back to what we were just saying, like he had his own shit coin, Chud, and that coin during the aftermath of the shooting hit a market cap of four million dollars. Which is fucking absolutely crazy.
SPEAKER_11That like in so many people thought that because it is linked to this influencer who is now involved in a shooting, the value of the coin will increase. So we have like a parallel economy of shit coins which grow in value depending on how breaking news a particular story that they might be related to is. Absolutely fascinating way to define increase in value of a particular, in this case, I guess, to an extent we could say currency. If you explain this to a caveman, his head will probably explode.
SPEAKER_07It's some shit you would see in like video games like Cruelty Squad, which the people who know what that is know that that world is fucking insane, made by like some very strange Finnish man. Like this is not something you that should happen in real life.
SPEAKER_11Absolutely, but the the attention economy, as Mike said, uh does not care. It absolutely does not care. And when you have this basic uh underpinning and understanding that there is increase in value of any asset, be it his like kick channel, be it his shit coin, be it the shoes he wore when he shot that guy, all of it is now enshrined in you know value in the attention economy, which can, if somebody knows how to adequately capture that attention capital, cultural capital, and other stuff, and translate it into real capital, real money, can make a buck out of it. Like we will do everything, just not give each other free healthcare. I said we have found ways to financialize a shooting, but we haven't uh figured out how to, I don't know, treat every child on the planet. I know I sound like a fucking hippie right now, but it is Yeah, no, Centrist Podcast.
SPEAKER_07I don't believe I don't agree with him. I don't believe in this stuff. Sorry.
SPEAKER_11It's one of the clearest and most not depressing, but kind of in a strange way, hilarious and even exhilarating examples of misplaced attention of our entire species when it comes to directions we can potentially go into and the directions we're going into.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it it's a it's a complete like misdirection of potential and of our energy and resources to this garbage.
SPEAKER_06Viral video circulating online purports to show the chaotic aftermath of a racist streamer allegedly shooting a black man outside a Tennessee courthouse. Streamer Chud the Builder, whose real name is Dalton Etherley, shot the unidentified man during a scuffle on May 13th outside of the courthouse in Clarksville, according to the DA, who said Chud also accidentally shot himself during the confrontation. The 28-year-old has amassed an online following by filming himself spewing vile racial slurs, such as referring to black people as chimps, and openly saying the N-word to get reactions. The victim was medically evacuated and is recovering in stable condition, officials said. The mustached antagonist was supposed to appear at the court for a civil case over unpaid debt, which comes just days after he was arrested for allegedly refusing to pay a $400 restaurant bill, even after he polished off his entire meal. Following the shooting, eitherly was booked into the Montgomery County jail, while the local sheriff's office vowed that those responsible would be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Eitherly has been charged with attempted murder, employing a firearm during dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.
SPEAKER_08So the shit coin popped and it was his most viewed video, but he also kind of shot himself. So think of this fucking dork who whose entire brand is walking up to black people, assaulting them, saying slurs, offering them bananas, if they get offended, say they're chimping out, and then menace them with a gun, and then he finally gets a confrontation with someone who's not going to allow him to abuse them, and he shoots them and himself. Crazy. So in that scuffle, with that man, he shoots himself, and he was also treated. The victim was transported, as I said, in a helicopter, his life hang by a thread, and that has led to prosecutors uh charging him with attempted murder, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.
SPEAKER_11Shouldn't this, like in the world of machismo, kind of immediately render you persona non grata, because like uh you're no longer a Chad, Chud after you shot yourself, aren't they all like operators fucking clearing room, entering type shit, and then motherfucker blows his left nut off. Isn't that like super cucked? Oh, wait, wait, wait.
SPEAKER_07Oh, uh I see the mistake you're making. No, no, no. This is solidarity for them, though. Like, cause because half of those people have also shot themselves in the foot.
SPEAKER_08This is a very, very European mistake you're making. For example, sometimes I'll be talking with European men and my friends, like you guys, and they'll be like, I can't believe there are people use guns and think that's tough. Like, isn't it tougher to get into a fist fight and fight someone man to man? Like, how is it tough to shoot someone with a gun? Anybody could shoot you with a gun. There's nothing tough about that. But in American culture, it's not about you being physically tough, it's about you perpetuating the maximum amount of violence. And the fact that he did so incompetently doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so why Yeah, so so the fact that he the fact that he shot himself just adds to the machismo because that's more violence. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08It's like extra level of violence, bro. That's so based. Exactly. The fact that he was just blasting. It's like right out of always studying in Philadelphia. I just started blasting.
SPEAKER_12Next time he should like miss and kill like seven little girls in the background. It would be like, oh my god, dude. So it would be like, that's so fucking cool.
SPEAKER_08He got to shoot a little girl and get away with it. That's how they think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And so she was probably gonna grow up to be a hoo-er anyway. Hoo, brothers.
SPEAKER_08You are kind of judg coded now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, baby.
SPEAKER_12She was a what was that soprano? She was a hooa! Yeah, she was just a hoa. A, she was a hoo-a. B, she hit me.
SPEAKER_08Well, I hope there's a similar outcome for both perpetrators. So Montgomery County judge set his bond at 1.25 million. Now, if you're not familiar with the American cash bond system, it just means that you are held in jail before trial unless you provide some sort of surety that you're going to show up and how much money or assets. You are required to promise is different depending upon the severity of the crime. Because the more severe the crime, the thinking is, the higher likelihood that you are going to run. So if you're going to be let out of jail before you're convicted, they need to make sure that, you know, the amount of assets you are presenting are going to be sufficient motivation to compel you to show up in court.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, a really fun side effect of that is that if you are a poor person, you stay in jail and you lose your job because you can't show up to work. And if you're a rich person, you get to post the bail and go back to your mansion and wait for trial.
SPEAKER_08Yes, exactly. And you know, you would think this unemployed former contractor would not be able to come up with that kind of money because the bond was set at 1.25 million.
SPEAKER_00Well, the Clarksville social media personality known as Chud the Builder appeared in court this morning after investigators say he shot a man outside the Montgomery County Courthouse. News Tuesday Weaver is live in Clarksville after a judge said a temporary $1.25 million bond. Maggie, what else can you tell us?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, Kendall, of course, after this arraignment, we actually were able to see that um Dalton Etherley was ordered by a judge held on a temporary one point two five million dollar bond. And of course, that's as the court prepares to have a separate bond hearing next week. We do know.
SPEAKER_08And the reason why, as I discussed earlier, seriousness of the charges, and the fact that it happened in broad daylight outside a courthouse. But the funny thing is, he already had another case in a neighboring Davidston Count County, where just four days earlier he had been arrested for walking out on a nearly $400 restaurant tab while live streaming the confrontation that followed. He was charged with theft of services, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.
SPEAKER_07A real piece of work, yeah.
SPEAKER_08And the thing about right wingers and reactionary, you know, content communities in general is none of this cost eitherly his following. If anything, it built one. His immediate aftermath, the defense fundraiser we're going to be talking about, pulled in $300,000 within weeks and continues to grow. Supporters cast a man accused of shooting someone outside a courthouse as a free speech martyr. And that tells you just how completely their movement has learned to launder violence, even deadly violence, into some sort of victimhood narrative. Now, Etherly has not yet been convicted of anything. Both his Montgomery County and Davidson County cases sit with a grand jury. He has not entered a plea. But his bond was revoked in Davidson County after new evidence surfaced in the shooting case, and he spent more than two months in jail as a result. Attempted criminal homicide carries 15 to 60 years in a Tennessee penitentiary as punishment. And a firearm enhancement requires a mandatory six years served in full. As of this recording date, he is free because on August 10th, 2026, he posted his over $1 million bond and walked right out of that Montgomery County jail.
SPEAKER_10No.
SPEAKER_08That was a few days ago. Back online, he's still building his brand around the very shooting that should, if our society was functional, have destroyed it. The gap between the sentence he theoretically faces and the freedom he actually has is unconscionable. Our bail system that treats a six-figure bond as a minor inconvenience for anyone with a large enough audience. Together, they brought either lead time. He's using it to keep monetizing an attempted murder charge while his case grinds through the Tennessee courts. He is a symptom. We have an information ecosystem that has spent well over the last decade rewarding the exact behavior that put Chud in a Montgomery County courtroom. We have a political culture that has spent the years since 2016 teaching young men that racist provocation pays. And how could they not learn the lesson? I mean, Donald Trump is twice elected president. So of course the culture is completely degraded because it the fish rots from the head. He proves that the raw material of white nationalism can be refined into livestream engagement with zero ideological commitment attached. And the version that is represented by Chud the Builder might be more dangerous, not less, than the committed ideological neo-Nazis like Dick Fuentes. You can identify an ideologue. You can de-platform them. You can map his network. A rage-baiting contractor with a gun and a ring light needs none of that infrastructure. He just needs an audience conditioned to cheer when he calls a stranger a slur on camera. Eitherly built that audience in about a year. The courts will eventually decide what happens to him. The economy that made him is still intact. It is still recruiting. And it is already looking for the next Dalton Eitherly to put in front of a camera. With Nick Fuentes, you can attack his ideology, you can attack the institutions and the infrastructure he builds and kind of categorize an ideological, you know, grouping. But with this, it's just any guy with a cell phone and a gun can walk up to a black person and say the N-word and then get a million bucks.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_08So you've now created this kind of like decentralized system of racial terrorism that is now incentivized for money. I am Chud the Builder type shit.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_08And I think that's way more dangerous than even having like a prominent, crazy right winger political figure who we can all kind of isolate and we can target and we can work to suppress. When you have a system that is set up like this, where this type of content pays, you're encouraging anybody who is alienated, anybody who is has fallen down these rabbit holes to engage in direct political and racial and physical crimes and be rewarded for it. And that is that is unsustainable for a functioning society.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it's the difference between constructing an organization that recruits and enables this sort of like behavior and just the basic material conditions leading to the logical outcomes that they do creating this exact sort of person. And when the material conditions are such as they are, that will keep happening. You don't even need anyone who is like directing it or being directly involved in making sure it happens. It will just keep on chugging along. Chugging along, yeah.
SPEAKER_11Fuck you. I know. It's extra depressing because the worse things get economically, the more desperate people that are willing to do absolutely anything in order to get ahead and even get some money, we're gonna be seeing. This is you know, we thought like in the early 2000s and so on. I remember there was like a disgusting subculture of basically running around giving homeless people money and then making them fight each other, right?
SPEAKER_08Bum fights.
SPEAKER_11Yeah, yeah, bum fights and shit. And at some point everybody's like, yo, bro, that shit's nasty, like stop fucking doing that, and then you know, that migrated into the darkest corners of the of the internet, even internet that most people, even if they wanted to, cannot uh cannot access.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that's such a fucking good comparison, dude.
SPEAKER_11Right? But now we have as we are further degrading, mostly because of systemic contradictions, right? We're getting to a stage in which types of content, let's say, that were up until very recently considered like so not even not even like politically taboo, just icky. Like, really, you're you're that much of a sellout that this is what you're doing. Like, people, I don't know, that one guy got arrested in South Korea, I think recently, they would just go to a foreign country and then just drop also racial slurs on them or or yeah, or make fun of the their culture right in their face and see how how far they can push it and so on, child the builder, and unfortunately, countless of other examples of people like making stuff on mainstream platforms, like for example, KIC, that 10 years ago would have been seen as not only unmonetizable, but something that like the entirety of society would organize against. What I'm trying to say, it's not even a thesis, but it's just a very lukewarm take, is that as competition increases on these platforms, the only way to properly stick out is going to be pursuing, let's say, uh greater levels of debauchery in your videos. And sometimes that debauchery will be more of a like, I don't know, a sexual nature or more like hot takes and stuff that the end of the day very often harms nobody, but also it can be of this particular nature, content that is so utterly shocking that people haven't done it before, not because they didn't think of it, but because they were like, okay, there are certain lines that you cannot cross. And as both of you very, very well put put very well, it is going to be almost instantaneously financially rewarded. And that's a recipe for complete and utter disaster. And honestly, I thought that it has a breaking point of the Campbell's back when they take it too far and somebody ends up dying or almost dying. But as we can see, it happened. Does this guy still have a platform?
SPEAKER_07Yes, he does. Absolutely wild. This camel can hold so many fucking straws, dude. Like it's it's not happening. Yeah. But I I think like another element of your comparison to like the bum fights thing, where you're obviously there, you're you have like rich people exploiting horrendously impoverished, victimized people. But here now, you have Chud the Builder who in a strange sense is also like that's exploitative content where he is also kind of being exploited by a bunch of weird people who are watching him, who in and of themselves are also like kind of participating in the exploitation by like watching him making him, you know, go to more and more extremes, getting a kick out of watching that. You have this like a loop of a bunch of like weird, you know, like kind of predatory behavior from every side. From every side. And it's fucking disgusting.
SPEAKER_11You kind of rant a person to do stuff that in your like infantile degeneracy you don't have the balls to do in real life. It's almost like playing a video game, but the character is a real human being, and instead of I don't know, doing quests and getting XP or I don't know, exploring the beauties of Beirut, I don't fucking know. It's uh you know, when you go on like you know, live streams on Twitch and you watch somebody exploring like a beautiful place. Here you're exploring the darkest uh aspects of basically human society trademark. And you kind of get to pay uh to pay to do it without being exposed yourself to any potential repercussions or violence. You know, all of your revenge fantasies, all the bigotry that you really, really hold in yourself. You can have a guy that you send 50 bucks to you, and he just fucking says it to a person. But again, this was He is your avatar, that's kind of fucked up. Yeah. Yeah, this is the type of shit you need a tour or whatever the fuck. I don't know how to use that, like browsers on the dark net and so on, in order for you to explore, and you would probably like 99% of the time you would get scammed because you would go to some sort of fake website and so on. Now it's in the in the full mainstream, and in the full mainstream to such an extent that like any regular everyday kid can get access to it. And that's the entire like Mike was in the game far, far, far before us. Tell me if I'm wrong, but that was kind of the pitch that Kick went with. Like on Twitch everything is forbidden. Here we're absolutely everything is allowed.
SPEAKER_08Well, I don't know about that. Okay, so the main live streaming service for people who are creating content uh live with video is a website called Twitch.tv, which is owned by Amazon.
SPEAKER_07Is that or like Instagram Live or YouTube Live, right? Uh yes.
SPEAKER_08There's other alternatives, but Twitch is kind of like the long-form streaming site, the biggest one, where the most prominent streamers.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, the ones who are who's like their career is streaming instead of just like people who like celebrities who go live now and then.
SPEAKER_08So I would I would say that Twitch has some relatively loose content guidelines. The best way to understand them is like PG13 Plus, right? And if a video game is a mature video game and it has things like nudity or incidental, you know, stuff that you might see in an R-rated movie, it's okay as long as it's not like paused and fixated on, and you're not making, you know, you could have sexually suggestive content, but there is like a kind of moving interpretive line, and then people are constantly playing with that. And the reason why I bring that up is because there has always been this culture, this reactionary culture of viewers who get angry at women who are, you know, expressing themselves sexually or wearing, you know, a top that shows cleavage or just you know, things like that, moving in a way that is sexually alluring.
SPEAKER_09Ah, that whole era of hey, wait, why can't I make as much money as sexy lady? I am not sexy and I cannot make sex your lady money.
SPEAKER_11Imagine that being the main thing that goes to your head. Like, you're not doing well in Twitch, and the first thing that goes to your mind is like, why am I not sexy lady? is has always been very funny to me.
SPEAKER_08Yes, no, that's exactly right. Like, basically, there was this culture forward where women were harassed for basically being attractive women and therefore having an audience they quote didn't deserve that it was easy mode and they were exploiting their looks. They don't work as hard as me, white man who plays video games on the internet, yeah. Exactly. And that's the thing, like that's also true of men. Like, more attractive men hit larger audiences. Like people just like, you know, it's just it, but it's not a remarked upon. You're never gonna hear a guy get accused of just being sexy, right? And that's why he's he's successful. So I bring this up because one of the main purveyors of this was a content creator by the name of Train Rex. And Train Rex was a you know creator on Twitch who had kind of his foot in the edgy sphere, but he was largely not like what I would consider to be a full-blown open reactionary. Okay, like he I think he had kind of contradictory politics, like so many people do, and held some left-wing views. But then he started to get involved with gambling, and there was this famous crypto gambling website that still exists called stake.com, where people could basically illegally gamble online using like cryptocurrency. So you would buy cryptocurrency, you would transfer it to stake, and they would allow you to gamble online on that website, you know, because they were based in some Caribbean country, I don't recall. And so a lot of these larger streamers started to get these brand partnerships with stake.com where they would get, you know, large payouts, you know, rake backs from like the losses their community made gambling, the creators would get paid a portion of it. Yeah, they get a commission. The creators would be given free play, you know, millions of dollars of free play. That must have been crazy money. So steak was rapidly growing, and it became a topic of conversation on Twitch. Like, hey, these gambling sites, they're very shady. Like, we have a lot of young people here. It's a highly addictive thing to become involved with. Like, gambling addiction is probably one of the most damaging addictions you can have. And so maybe Twitch should not allow these crypto gambling websites on the platform. And there was kind of this creator conversation, and and it kind of grew into a meta conversation, and ultimately Twitch decided to kind of clamp down on these unregulated crypto casinos and the gambling content. And, you know, a lot of these large creators, typically TrainRex and and people like XQC and others, they were really mad because they had made tens of millions of dollars from dreams. And in cooperation with the founders of stake.com, they founded kick.com. Now, what's interesting about this is TrainWrex had been one of the leaders of the kind of misogynistic women on here are like profiting. You know, like he he said that like women were sluts, and you know, the women who had ignored us in high school, at his words, were like coming to Twitch and they were using their bodies just like they had. And he was urging Twitch to kind of like clamp down on the content, not allow women to have sexually charged content. Anytime a large female creator or an OnlyFans creator who had a stream, you know, did something risk gay or you know, exploited their looks or their body, he would be like leading the witch hunt to get them banned, right? And get the platform rules changed. But when kick.com opened, and that's exactly what it was for, it was a place for these creators to go and do these gambling streams. And so it offered all sorts of incentives to creators, including like paying them to go on kick and just stream there, yeah. Giving them these brand deals with stake.com where they would get, you know, codes, where they would get percentages of the money gambled, as I mentioned. And that's what it is. So kick is it became this like funnel for this crypto gambling website.
SPEAKER_11But they used the reason like because it didn't want to say, like, okay, we just wanna like have a website where you can gamble. So they used the excuse of a no more sexy, stupid lady make money on our platform. That's why you should come, because it's true, like uh egalitarian meritocracy over on kick.
SPEAKER_08But what's funnily enough, like so after all these years of advocating for clamping down on women's, right, on kick, they've actually relaxed, right? And and now it has become exactly what you described, which is this like very unregulated anything goes kind of content platform, which only very you know only really enforces things when they become such a PR disaster.
SPEAKER_07Like that time someone killed someone on stream, yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yes, exactly. Someone was tortured to death on stream, yeah. And like what they what I would call bullying content, where they get a neurodivergent person who is not capable of expressing boundaries and exploited by a group and bullied on stream and kind of like coerced into so-called consent. They had they had a French streamer who was tortured to death on their platform. Yeah. And I do think the French government is pursuing is pursuing Kik, but basically it is a you know, a website that is disreputable and is only desiring as many eyes on it as possible so that they can be fuddled into addictive cryptocurrency gamble websites. That's a long story long, I'm sorry, but I felt like giving you the full context of what kick is and why they don't give a shit about the content, because it's not about that. It's about getting you addicted to gambling.
SPEAKER_07It's also like the the quote unquote free speech platform to an extent.
SPEAKER_08Well, that's exactly that's how they market themselves. That's that's how they market their segment, which is like, we're the place where you can just be raw and real.
SPEAKER_07But then, of course, you know, certain people aren't able to stream there because they would be too far, like Nick Fuentes, I believe, streams. So, like, what was it called again?
SPEAKER_08Fucking it's not Rumble, but he he he has his own, he's had I think he developed his own platforms. I think he had one called Cozy.
SPEAKER_07That is such a weird name for a Nazi streaming website, but okay.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, yeah. They have like I think I I think there are other sites, you know. I may again, this might need to be fact-checked. But I think he was on Cozy during January 6th.
SPEAKER_03Dalton Etherley, better known as Chud the Builder, enters a Davidson County courtroom Wednesday, the social media influencer facing charges in Nashville after he refused to stop live streaming inside a restaurant at the Omni Hotel and then refused to pay. But the hearing today mostly focused on a separate case in Montgomery County. Prosecutors played videos and reviewed social media posts made by Etherly posted before the shooting outside the Montgomery County Courthouse. They were racist and violent.
SPEAKER_04Back in uh May, he was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting a disabled veteran during a fight outside of Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville. His bond was set at one million dollars. Or we're gonna find out how exactly that bond was paid for.
SPEAKER_07It used to be you'd have to amass your funds before living out your violent white supremacist fantasies in the real world. The KKK were run as a business, with a legal business charter from the state of Georgia, with a marketing wing and a whole heap of profits. They marketed through pamphlets and sold, quote, solid gold pendants, cufflinks, belt buckles, coins, rings, and brooches that were billed as emblems worn by high officials and influential members. That being said, to quote Alex Newhouse, a former GameSpot reporter, turned PhD candidate and extremism researcher, quote, in a strange twist, KKK rates of membership had no correlation with increased rates of lynchings or hate crimes, nor even pro-clan political legislation. End quote. This was the classical model of funding for white supremacist groups, before streaming and so on and so forth, the funding model of a century ago. And this model of funding hasn't wholly gone away a century later in the digital age, but it has been supplemented by the individualistic outrage crowdfunding model of say or do something racist first, then collect the money after. Before Chud's fundraiser, you had numerous others, like the Minnesotan woman who went viral for calling a literal child the N-word and subsequently garnering over $700,000 in donations. On the Christian fundraising platform, Give Send Go. One donor by the name of White Texas Mommy said, quote, These young generations of whites are sick of the bullying, intimidation, and being made to shut up about race issues, end quote. As she donated $50 to a woman who said the N-word to a child. The owners of the site deleted all the comments for being too racist, but left the fundraiser up, saying, quote, We unequivocally condemn the hateful comments that sought to fuel division and harmful narratives. While also saying, quote, We remain committed to ensuring all funds raised are delivered to the campaign recipients as intended. When asked why the supposedly Christian website hosts fundraisers for extremist right wing causes, co-founder Wells said, quote, It's not the place of a Christian to rob people of freedom. Jesus was actually called a friend of sinners. End quote. That's incredible. It's so fucking funny, if it wasn't so sad. Twelve years ago, during the police killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a GoFundMe was also set up for the police officer before the circumstances of the case had at all been clarified and settled. Nobody at the time knew the facts of the case or that the police officer would be cleared of any wrongdoing. They were just donating because the police officer killed a black man. One donor said, quote, We appreciate your service in the animal control division of the Ferguson Police Department, end quote. Most of this digital fundraising retains the general form of older fundraising efforts by white supremacists. Direct donations on livestreams or through payment processors like PayPal adjust the contemporary version of mail-in donations. What separates then and now is how easy it is to expose your campaign to potential donors, allowing Flash in the Pan style creators that come and go, like Chud the Builder, or the woman who called an eight-year-old the N-word, to rake in heaps of cash from viral fame before disappearing. The way these platforms are built is perfect for these guys. For the actual organized far right, it's a little bit more complicated. Most of the far right arose alongside those payment processing and crowdfunding platforms, in a period we could describe, at least compared to now, as a regulatory void. A complete lack of any sort of regulatory effort in this period meant it of course wasn't in the interest of a private company to deny a Nazi from using their platform to crowdfund. Especially not when some of these sites skim 5% of that Nazi gold off the top. The Wright enjoyed pretty much unfettered use of mainstream funding platforms for this sort of thing, all the way up until the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. For which the Wright had raised copious amounts of money to cover travel, lodging, and tiki torches. After Charlottesville brought additional scrutiny, platforms like Patreon, PayPal, GoFundMe, and so on finally took measures, which briefly put a halt to the money flowing from the suburbs and into the pockets of Nazis. The fact that the contemporary right developed in this Wild West period of the internet meant a lot of their fundraising was built around how things worked then. So when things suddenly changed with Charlottesville, it left a lot of them scrambling for new solutions. Many actually returned to the methods of the KKK from a century prior, asking their supporters to mail them checks or cash. Examples of this, I believe, is like Daily Stormer, for example, I believe has an address for them to send envelopes of cash above their link to their Bitcoin donation link. Now, this is not to say that these problems have been fixed, where Patreon and others may have taken some measures against violent extremist fundraising on their websites, others haven't. Now speaking of Patreon, they haven't kicked these violent extremists off the platform. So if you want to support this project and get unlimited access to all episodes, please check out the Patreon link in the podcast description. We unfortunately don't get Bitcoin donations from weird French people or corporate dark money, so we rely on you guys. We're currently halfway to the goal we set for the first year of the podcast, and for that I want to thank you all so much for your continued support. Among the things where no effort has been made to combat all this is on everybody's favorite platform for buying shit they don't need, Amazon.com. I've talked about Arctos Media before, but to refresh your memory, they're the publishing house for the intellectual tradition of the neo-fascist right. They're the company that publishes the English translations of Alexander Dugan's works, as well as the French new right thinker Alain de Benoit, who we talked about in our earliest episodes. If you go to Amazon.com right now and search Arctos Media, you will find Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, and Alan de Benoit, all sold there by Arctos Media. Arctos Media CEO is a Swedish Nazi who co-founded a company with Richard Spencer. The issue isn't that Julie Civola or Oswald Spengler's texts are being read. I've read them. Know your enemy on all that. But these texts are largely available online for free. The reason they're selling them with pretty covers on Amazon is the same reason the leftist bookstore sells you the Communist Manifesto with a fancy cover. It's fundraising. When someone purchases one of these books with hundreds of five-star reviews, then Amazon is directly facilitating the transfer of money into the pockets of Nazis, who will at least attempt to utilize that money to organize. It's the exact same playbook as the KKK of old.
SPEAKER_11If there was ever any truth, that was the truth.
SPEAKER_07Yep. When are we gonna um, you know, live up to the memory of the KKK and sell merch? Never!
SPEAKER_08We're never living up to the memory of the KKK. What the fuck? Uh oh fuck. Oh yes, uh what he said. Um can we uh edit that to say live up to the memory of John Brown? Okay. We're living up to the memory of John Brown. We're gonna have a you know large payout. Thank you. What kind of m merch did he sell? Did John Brown sell merch? Honestly, John Brown probably did. I like if if you know anything about him, specifically, like people talk about his raid on Harper's Ferry, yeah, which is not actually where you should study him. You should study him during his successful campaign in what's known as Bleeding Kansas.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_10Um, where they did do fundraisers and shit, where he sold a lot of merch. Kansas bled until they bought every single t-shirt.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, when he said bleeding Kansas, he bled them dry of all their money. If you want to hear more about like us talking about Civil War shit, by the way, you guys should listen to the At and Shea Guest episode. It's a wonderful episode.
SPEAKER_10Oh, hell yeah.
SPEAKER_07We talked a lot about merch in that one for sure. The guys who didn't revert to the methods of the 1900s instead turned to the obvious modern solution: Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_10Adolf Hitler had Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_07Jesus, dude.
SPEAKER_11If we got through Poland, we're selling Poland tokens, dude. Uh currently in 50% ownership. We gotta take care of the Soviets. I don't know. It's a pump and dump. The Polish pump and dump of 1939.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, I'll keep going. According to Jason Belzakis in a policy brief from the Global Center on Cooperative Security, quote, Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi propagandist and editor of the Daily Sormer, has also seen value in acquiring cryptocurrency. Between January 2017 and September 2021, Anglin reportedly acquired from supporters at least 112 bitcoins with an estimated value of 4.8 million dollars. Now this was of course in like 2021 or something like that, so I don't know how much that's worth now. But I'm assuming, while the Bitcoin value might have gone down a little bit, he probably acquired a few more bitcoins. In 2019, also, the perpetrator of the Christchurch attack made a donation to Daily Stormer through the use of Bitcoin. What's the solution to all this? In the policy brief by Jason Blazakis in the section titled Countering the Financing of Anti-Authority and Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, mouthful, he gives the think tank style answer. Legal action and civil asset forfeiture, basically relying on lawyers in the courts to do the right thing, or sanctions, basically relying on the state to designate fascist organizations as domestic terrorist organizations, and taking the relevant steps that the state does against foreign terrorist orgs. Now at present, I have little to no confidence in either of those approaches. The closest to something like this we've gotten seems to be Donald Trump branding anti-fascists as some sort of domestic terrorist organization. Remember what we talked about with Three Arrows in terms of Germany's extremism laws. The state, such as it is, likely views someone who is militantly anti-racist and anti-fascist with more suspicion than it does someone who is militantly racist and fascist. And that's because the state itself militantly upholds white supremacy. Thirdly, he suggests that law enforcement and especially international law enforcement activities will be critical for countering the funding of right-wing extremists. And on this one I agree to some extent. No matter what, some sort of policing effort will be necessary. Unfortunately, of course, with the current state of affairs being what they are, I'm skeptical that we will see any satisfactory effort by law enforcement at curtailing far-right funding. The fourth, social media penalties. And by this he means genuine pressure or even crackdowns on social media companies by governments. This one is necessary, but again I'm skeptical. Partly because of the pace at which the social media giants are able to outmaneuver any potential regulation. But I agree that in order to counter all this, severe crackdowns on social media companies and even direct control of or tweaking of the algorithms is necessary. Finally, and this one actually do have some faith in, cryptocurrency regulation. It's in the interest of states to regulate this massive financial loophole which allows for money laundering and tax evasion. Now this was a policy brief aimed at legislators, which is why all these solutions revolve around ways to utilize state power to curtail extremist funding. I don't think most of these approaches are practically feasible, or if they were, would be carried out in good faith whatsoever. It seems to always come down to needing some usually pretty bad people to do the right thing for once, which doesn't seem like a winning strategy. The most effective approach, beyond advocating for hacking Bitcoin wallets used to finance far-right extremism, something we would never do, of course, seems to be to organize pressure groups, which is to say largely useless. My argument therefore while we could gain some marginal victories here and there, such as the ones that came after Charlottesville, they aren't worth it. This isn't a battle we should be fighting. Let the state do its thing, render unto Fuentes that which is his or whatever. We have more important work to do.
SPEAKER_11Okay. Every political project has to get funding from somewhere. Back in the day, some of it used to be a lot more, let's say, romantic. Bank robberies, coke labs in the jungle, even full-on hostage for money operations. The right, as we learned from Freda, didn't lag behind, nor does it ever when it comes to the cash game, because let's be honest, they are on the side of cash. Big, big cash money. Be it an electoral candidate or an online talking head, anti-fascist and anti-capitalist voices need an immeasurable quantity of regular, everyday people donating to their platform. While with the pull of a few right levers, as we've learned in multiple of our prior episodes, a right wing talking head political candidate or organization can end up being covered in millions of dollars before uttering a single word. Now, what does this actually do? Most will tell you it makes the right almost unbeatable because greater resources means greater potential for victory, right? Well, it's a little more complicated than that. For example, let's take access to money. Both large-scale lobby structures and everyday secret wealthy white supremacists throwing cash at you, making commercial viability of right wing content very high. Key word here is commercial viability. You see, by throwing so much money into this space, you end up with virtuosos of the game like Tucker or Candace, but also thousands of absolute freaks like Chud the Builder. The space becoming so incredibly profitable ends up attracting a mass of profit-hungry slop makers that end up making the wider movement look either extremely unserious or more importantly, a grift. When you have thousands of Asian-based accounts milking Americans on Twitter through their algorithm, when you have Manosphere influencers dropping thousand Euro courses for men they don't feel an inch of respect towards, when you have people who actively commit hate crimes so they can make GoFundMe money, you are essentially siphoning cash away from a political class of people more than ready to fight for a conservative American Reich into Lamborghinis or houses for these con men. In a crazy way, you're allowing for the gentrification of right wing content and you know white supremacist organizations.
SPEAKER_10I'm gentrifying Hitler, dude. It's not the same anymore.
SPEAKER_11But okay, I know this is heavy-handed, and I'm not going to sit here and uh thank comrade Andrew Tate for conning reactionaries because as he's doing it, he's still spreading untold metric tons of hate through his established platform. All I'm saying is that the right's access to funding a show like ours would never be able to imagine has very real downsides, spawning an entire ecosystem of grift that's great for making money, but not for making a serious organization. It doesn't stop there either, and Jesus Christ, I'm on a massive hope pill spiral today, because even the so-called serious right has finance-induced problems of this nature as well. We've dropped this thesis in one of our previous episodes, and I genuinely believe we would have the right to attribute it to ourselves because I haven't really seen it anywhere else. The right wing content funnel is financially motivated to keep its viewership at a rate of maximum profitability, which does not always translate into maximum radicality. That's the thesis. What do we mean by it though? Well, if you're Candace Owens, for example, and your dear friend Charlie Kirk gets killed, you could use your very real political power and influence to start pushing for mass-scale right-wing militia organization for an open call to arms against left-wing insurgents who have taken it a step too far. You could issue a rallying cry to real patriots and government to finally wake up that it's either us or them and that we must be the first ones to pull the trigger or the enemy will end us. You could be a true beacon of right wing organization, utilizing the martyrdom of your comrade as a rallying cry for a massive power play. Or you can talk about how the French president's wife is trans and that she collaborated with the Israelis to kill Charlie Kirk. Which of the two garners quick, fast buckets of cash and which potentially risks your life, career, and even freedom? By throwing so much money at right-wing political creators, we have created an ecosystem in which there is a direct cost incurred whenever they choose to step out of their role as a simple quote unquote content creator or quote unquote talking head. Willingly or not, they are conditioned by their commercial viability to remain within the bounds of short-term grifting instead of the more old school fascist grift of getting into power and then living like a king. But does this offset the power the right is granted by having such an easier time fundraising? Of course it fucking doesn't. Money is still money. And even short-term right-wing grifters contribute to a fascist political climate. But it's important to remember that more money doesn't always translate into political victory. At least we have to hope, because uh otherwise our broke asses are completely fucked.
SPEAKER_07Chubb the Builder and his ilk are a flash in the pan, gone as fast as they appear, or destined to fade into relative obscurity, coasting off of whatever money they manage to scrounge together during their moment of fame. Even the more professional influencers like Nick Fuentes can't scrounge together the sort of money necessary to meaningfully change society, and if they tried, it might fuck with their wealthy lifestyle, so they won't. They know that their real contribution to the fascist right isn't fundraising. It's consistently trying to reach that age-old fascist goal of cultural hegemony. The money, in that regard, doesn't really matter. The left has throughout its history stood against mountains upon mountains of capital. It was the same in 1933 when German big business gave substantial donations to the National Socialist Party, which historian Adam Tus said, quote, really made the difference. It will be the same now and forever. Our enemies are always richer than us. It wasn't really the Nazi ability to fundraise that helped them win in 1933. It was the scores of businessmen who shared in their vision and stood ready to donate. Thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_08So go over to uh reaction pod at patreon.com, subscribe, you know, become a patron at the highest tier you could afford. Honestly, scrimp it save, maybe avoid movie night or going out to eat with a wife, a girlfriend this week.
SPEAKER_10Hypers for your children. No crazy.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, you don't need those yet. No, no, no, no braces. Lisa needs braces, no braces. Shut the fuck up, Lisa. You know, let the teeth come in a little bit longer. But make sure you're at the highest level. Thank you.
