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Welcome back to False Flag! Rep. Thomas Massie’s already difficult re-election bid was roiled Tuesday by a strange video of a woman named Cynthia West describing a romantic relationship she claimed she had with the congressman. According to West, Massie helped get her a job as a congressional staffer. But after they broke up, she said, Massie offered her $5,000 in untraceable money to keep quiet—untraceable because it was “cow money” Massie had earned from raising and selling cattle.
Massie has denied the hush money payment. As for the existence of “cow money,” well, that’s definitely a new one in the False Flag files. But the most interesting thing may be the tweets West’s husband allegedly sent revealing the relationship in the first place. Back in October 2024, West complained to the judge in her divorce case that her husband, an active-duty member of the Air Force, was harassing her and Massie in replies to Massie’s tweets.
West’s husband allegedly wrote that the congressman had taken West as his “concubine.”Apparently responding to a Massie tweet about invoking the War Powers Resolution, West’s husband tweeted to ask Massie if the lawmaker would later “invoke the war powers on Cynthia to have great sex.”
What a thing to tweet! As for today’s newsletter, it’s not about love so much as hate: Racist hate from a live streamer who was on the rise before he went out and shot someone this week. Yep. Read on, folks.
Also, I’ll be on stage at our Bulwark live show in San Diego on May 20, so buy your tickets now! Please consider signing up for Bulwark+ so we can get the “cow money” needed to keep this thing growing.
—Will
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There’s a truly villainous new livestreamer who’s become a cause célèbre on the right—a guy so bad he makes Clavicular’s videos about drug overdoses and the Israeli mafia look like an episode of Bluey.
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Meet “Chud the Builder,” a mustachioed, cowboy hat–wearing 28-year-old Tennessee man whose real name is Dalton Eatherly. His internet alias combines the insult “chud”—basically slang for a low-brow right-winger—and a play on both Eatherly’s profession as a construction worker and the children’s show Bob the Builder.
Eatherly’s gimmick is that he films himself walking around calling black people the n-word or accusing them of “chimping out”—a racial slur comparing black people to monkeys. When the people he’s accosting get understandably mad, he encourages them to attack him so he’ll have an excuse to defend himself with mace or a gun.
You can probably guess where this is headed. On Wednesday, Eatherly shot someone in the Nashville suburb of Clarksville, according to police, apparently after the man punched him. Eatherly also shot himself during the incident, sustaining a minor injury. Eatherly has been charged with attempted murder by the Montgomery County district attorney.
“Everybody knew this was going to happen,” popular streamer Asmongold said Wednesday after the shooting, describing the event as a “huge, huge aura loss.”
Clearly, Eatherly is acting in this vile way for attention. He’s been on my radar for a few months, but his shtick is so depressing I was reluctant to give it any more coverage. At the point where a rising online star is shooting people, though, I think it’s worth considering how the economics of livestreaming and the right’s embrace of even the most despicable people could allow a figure like “Chud the Builder” to exist, let alone get a serious following.
Eatherly’s rise has been fueled by “clipping” accounts on social media, which take the hours of streaming he produces and repackage his most incendiary moments into shorter videos. He’s appeared on InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s online show to make his case that he’s defending free speech by trying to reclaim the n-word for white people. His videos have also, understandably, been heavily commented on by black YouTubers, some of whom have raised the specter of violently confronting him.
“Somebody might have to just do it,” hip-hop podcaster DJ Akademiks said recently, calling for Eatherly to be assassinated in the same way Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was.
This sort of boomerang effect—in which Eatherly says the most provocative thing possible to get attention, which, in turn, gets a provocative response that also gets attention—is the fuel of the modern internet. And it’s lucrative.
The videos have made Eatherly a notorious figure in Clarksville, where he lives. He’s also raised $65,000 in a crowdfunding campaign, and sells a memecoin called, naturally, “$CHUD.”
Eatherly’s journey into commercialized racism began sometime in 2024 or early 2025, when he got into a road rage incident with a black woman. The woman’s daughter posted a picture of him, claiming he had called her family the n-word,