963 - Distractions feat. Prem Thakker (8/25/25)
Zeteo’s Prem Thakker joins us for a look at Trump’s takeover of Washington D.C. We talk about the impetus for the takeover, what day-to-day life in occupied D.C. looks and feels like for its immigrant communities, and the Democratic Party’s impotent response. We then look more broadly at Trump’s Fortress America, ICE’s country-wide renditions, and the continuing case of Kilmar Ábrego García. Finally, we talk about the destruction of Nasser Hospital in Gaza and the Democratic Party’s flip-flopping on the term “genocide.”
Follow Prem on X/Twitter: https://x.com/prem_thakker?lang=en
And be sure to check out his work at Zeteo: https://zeteo.com/s/subtext-with-prem
Comments (152)
Congrats Chris and Molly!
Congrats Chris. Chapo Baby #2.
My girlfriend is completely terrified to be outside in DC, when she first came to the country she moved in with her brother in Orlando but came here to visit another brother living around DC. She was a civil engineer and fell in love with the trains trails and bike paths, and we fell in love with each other. Now her mom who was here legally has already been deported and her coworkers tell me she cries every day at work in fear of what will happen to her. To see someone escape Venezuela and truly see this country as the city on the hill that I myself could not invision as a citizen and a leftist, and to see that not only destroyed for her but the shards of it embed inside of her and hurt her at all times has been horrible.
This is so sad. I’m sorry.
I can’t believe that the thing about ICE agents wearing masks hasn’t gotten more attention. The implications of this are fucking insane; basically if someone was wanting to be fully compliant with the law they would be expected to surrender to any person wearing fatigues and a mask (since there is no way to discern an ICE agent from some rando)
That's the point. No accountability. Look up curfew shooting during Katrina.
Would love if you guys had Graham Platner on, first time in my life I've actually felt excited about a politician from Maine
Hearing Felix not at like 2 kbps and 15 feet away from his mic is crazy
Wow shit sounds real bad. Anyway what’s everyone grilling for Labor Day??
Boring do a funny episode
I love Will for explicitly asking “what should we expect from our leaders?” We got dogshit leaders bc we allowed people to talk endlessly about “just getting rid of trump”. Then we all rallied behind the most useless sack of shit to sit in the way of progress since Andy Johnson fucked up reconstruction. (I realize that we, us here in the Chapo comments, probably didn’t, and we have no ability to actually change anything. We’re barely allowed even allowed the illusion of a vote anymore, but we all know it’s basically pre-decided with gerrymandering. I guess above I meant we in the sense of the captured left wing of politics as a whole)
hell yeah, dads out of the house, no editors baby, whats gonna be more scuffed, the audio or the takes?
Is this dude just pacing is circles around his room?
Life long DC resident- obviously the immigration aspect of Trump’s occupation is horrible. From a safety aspect though I feel much safer in NYC or Chicago than my own city. Even got caught up in a shooting last month (Dupont Circle). Don’t agree at all with methodology of crackdown but something actually needs to be done and no one else has.
Wonderful episode and conversation
Much love to Chris & Molly & Wadebaby!
Congrats Chris & Molly!!! 🍾🙏🌟🎉
molly! chris! yesssssssssssssssssss!
Congratulations Chris and Molly! My daughter was born 2 weeks ago…cluster feedings are temporary but the memories will last forever!
Congrats to Molly and Chris 👍🏼
BREAKING: Chapo Trap House says the WORST THING EVER, now experiencing world record blacklash for moncing Trunk
Sending much love to Molly and Chris!!!!
I wonder if there's a point at which vulnerable people (e.g. brown; 'foreign-sounding' name; ex-spouse of a newly-christened ICE brownshirt), as well as those who love them, start talking about ways to enact the 'Michael Collins' doctrine. It probably won't come soon, but I don't think it's impossible in a country as well-armed as yours. Also, congrats Chris and Molly - proof of Amber's thesis that fear of the end times cannot and should not stop anyone from having kids ☺️
Congratulations to Molly, Chris, and Baby Wade. Wishing them all the best.
Dox that baby
There were military police deployed in new Orleans for a year or two after Katrina.
CONGRATS TO MOLLY, CHRIS, AND BABY!!!
If DC became a state, could that theoretically create an arcane constitutional crisis? Would the Federal government have to build itself a new capital somewhere west; an American Constantinople? Trumpstantinople?
If you live in DC federal occupation is the least of your problems.
Idk seems like a pretty big problem
Felix discusses “articles” at 10:50
Is Prem slowly spinning in a circle in front of his mic?
This changed how I listened to the rest of the episode thank you
Much congrats to Chris and Molly! Also question- what is the name of the song at the end of the ep?
Congratulations to Chris and Molly, so happy for the Chapo baby news 🥰
congrats to the number one grey wolves and baby
DC desperately needs to become a state. The way Biden pussy-footed around the issue was pathetic and disgraceful. Emblematic of everything wrong with that administration.
They didn't mention it but the whole time I was thinking "they can also test this on DC because they don't have to worry about winning their votes in 2026" lol
DOX! THAT! BABY!
Congrats Chris and Molly!
congrats Chris and Molly! hoping nothing but the very best for all of you
Congrats to Chris and Molly! 🎉❤️
Congrats to Chris and Molly. Glad to see Chapo reproducing
at that point I guess you'd say it's more that the Epstein scandal is "a distraction" from the March on Rome style takeover of the goverment
We love Chris, don't we folks! The handsome producer, that's what they call him!
I live in DC and this was a really accurate description of the situation here.
Congrats to the Wade family!
I don’t disagree with the idea that people should be unhappy about their tax dollars going towards funding all of this but, again, as Will points out earlier in the episode, a lot of Americans are totally fine with all of this. Constantly acting as if we can shame these people into changing their minds seems fruitless. There’s no electoral solution to this. They’re not ashamed anymore. That was the whole point of this project. I haven’t been happy about almost anything that my “tax dollars” have been used for since as far back as I can remember. It’s all awful and terrible and yes, your uncle and grandma are evil for supporting this. Enjoy Thanksgiving.
Says the guy that does nothing but cry in the Patreon comments.
Congrats Chris and Molly!
awwwwww yay congrats Chris and Molly! 🥳🎊 Wishing your family nothing but health and happiness ❤️
Met Prem once at Green Zone, we ordered the same cocktail. Nice dude fr
stop wasting your time thinking about what the dems are gonna do in 2028 I think we all know it’s just gonna be a farce election.
Mech suit Bernie could run on the cute grandpa platform and the technological abomination platform
Congratulations Chris and Molly !
Congrats to Chris and family. Parenthood rocks - you’re going to do great
On the history of the use of federal troops in America there is a great definitive 3 part series that covers everything from the 1780s to the 1992 LA riots. Basically the law is written in such a way that the President has an insane amount of discretion in using federal troops. There’s even an instance of Grover Cleveland going above the head of the Illinois Governor to deploy federal troops to suppress the Pullman Strike in Chicago in 1894. https://archive.org/details/@jimski/lists/12/federal-troops-domestic-disorders
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/guide-emergency-powers-and-their-use
I love when Will gets choked up when congratulating Chapo fam for the birth of their kids. He’s such a sweetie.
Congrats Chris!
Congrats Chris
Prem thicker than oatmeal
congrats Chris and Molly!!!!
you guys were right. Miriam turned this country into israel
Prem is so right. if we had any self respect we’d burn this whole fucking thing to the ground right now. i could not be more ready
Congratulations Chris and Co
Will is going through it.
Is there video of the interaction with Mr. Bigballs and how exactly that played out? Because I assumed it was the result of an online scumbag finding out real life was different from reddit or twitter.
Had some feds on my street run a red light with pedestrians in the cross walk just to harass and give a DoorDash driver a ticket. No identifiable agency or badge or name. They just had a temu police vest on that anyone could’ve bought and were strapped up with guns like they were going to war. One even had a “tactical” knife on him
The pedestrians should have opened fire in self defense, that's what police would do.
Who would’ve guessed Prem Thakker is a huge pussy
Where do you people get these ideas? Literally every interview these guys do has some schizophrenic guy talking to the masses about how the interviewer annoys them with the sound of their voice
What's the song at the end?
Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914) by The Zombies. From their masterpiece Odyssey and Oracle.
I have the Felix-centered schizophrenia but only in the sense that I think he keeps saying “half-hazard” to fuck with me personally
My special message from Felix word is "calculus"
If we had principled leaders like the fascists do they could do the thing where they tell the reporters what they want to hear while acting powerless to stop our collective will from being enacted
Diane, this case gives me a strange feeling. Not only has Special Agent Kamala Harris disappeared, but this is one of Shor's Blue Rose cases. (Seriously, what is with Shor getting away with rigging polls to validate Dems' most evil and pusillanimous tendencies? More like Black Lodge Research.)
Finally, I can leave my house with the certainty that I will be able to calculate in peace with my Casio wristwatch
Congrats on the baby yall!
40:00 They're using anything to detain anyone: traffic tickets, broken tail light. Yep. It's the same tactic cops use to round up blackk people off the streets. They see a black person in a car, run their plates, find an outstanding traffic ticket and take them to jail using that. It's nothing new.. It's just being spread to other races by the racists.
Unsolicited parenting advise for Chris: Never jump at 1st poop. Always wait for the 2nd poop. I hope this will save you from cleaning projectile poop off your wall...
Felix. It's "HAPhazard"... not HALFhazard.
We do not need malapropisms at a time when the nation is at the precipice of an enormous crossroads.
Fuck yeah! New baby alert! Congrats!
The DC police budget is almost 600 million dollars this year. 500 million last year. Nearly 650 million in 2023. We hand them billions to sit around and the cities are supposedly so unsafe you can’t wear a watch? Surely the police are huge failures, right? Right?!?!
Big Balls is the Franz Ferdinand of Civil War II
Horst Wessel 2025
Deploying the military to liberal cities is antagonizing so they can do a kyle rittenhouse if anything happens. Its turner diary shit. Remember when trump said to shoot the enemy within? Its a setup to start a race war. Also this time they have all americans data to go gull syria torture organfarm prisons.
i hope there’s a race war so the people who post about it all the time hopefully get smoked in it
Congratulations to the new Chapo baby and the fam
Shoutout to Felix pointing out that Ben’s chili bowl sucks. HS cafeteria food. Credit to them surviving all them years and such but that place is just a photo shoot masquerading as a restaurant
Also the only restaurant where Bill Cosby eats free. They had to repaint a mural of him on the walls after his conviction.
Gun to heads of my family I would have to vote MTG over AOC. Have the democrats ever been more pathetic? I mean I guess during the Biden term. Or the ‘08 crash. Also the Iraq war they were pretty pathetic. Why did we ever get behind this party?
The incredible irony of calling dems pathetic after saying you would vote for MTG, an actual antisemitic fascist. You're the problem dummy. Congrats, you've negatively polarized yourself into fascism.
Chapo baby
Aw Chris and Matt are both girl dads <3
Love this for them.
Jamie Lee Curtis’ heavies were part of the distraction.
So glad to hear that Chris and Molly's kid is safe and sound!!! Circle around and protect!!!!!! I honestly cried through a lot of this episode because I can't take the inhumanity that is apparently standard, now, and I've been through my own year of inhumanity. But this was nice news at the endm
I am unfortunately only a couple of degrees of separation from many younger WH staffers and the word on the block is Big Balls was in fact trying to buy coke from randos
That tracks. I figured it was that or his drunk ass shouted slurs at them.
Dear "The Ethicist", I have a PhD in ethics and my employer is facilitating a genocide. Can I still provide earnest chiding of ingrained misogyny (trans or otherwise) to Gen X homeowners that regret not ODing in the 90s or should I spend several weeks on trivia until the cashed cheques outweigh my sense of agency? Thanks! The Methicist
saying "there was not a single crime committed" in dc seems at odds with gop beliefs that demonrats are constantly doing crime
I really push back and reject the idea that all of these national guard deployments are being done to look busy and have no particular goal in mind. I think this is a natural consequence of the last 20 years of us sending our soldiers and police over to Israel to learn from the IDF, and all the aspirations of our politicians to make us more like Israel. This is all part of the project of patrolling our streets the same way, treating ALL Americans that aren't loyal productive subjects as Palestinians. The problem is despite how many fascist hogs we have in these positions of power and law enforcement, you still need to be even more fucked up to do the sort of genocidally brutal suppression of opposition that the IDF does. No matter how much the US Marines are fucked up murderers, even they will never be as fucked up, murderous, and personally motivated to go out and brutalize random civilians as the IDF is. (Which I say not to absolve the Marines, but to highlight how inhuman the occupying forces are.) And while you have some cops that might be willing to do that, they're also too fat stupid and lazy to take the iniative to go out on patrol and commit the same level of terror. That's why you see them just sort of milling about in a parking lot. They're *trying* to do what Israel is doing by having a constant occupying force to brutalize people and make them too affraid to oppose them, but they mercifully lack the capacity to even do that right.
I want to make a point too, with regards to the claims that people can "wear jewelry, go to the park, or ride the train safely for the first time!" Which is that we should really ask ourselves why, if this is even true, are people more safe under National Guard occupation than local policing. I think that whole idea could just as easily be turned back around on them about how localized police departments are unionized fascist paramilitary gangs that don't actually have any interest in keeping the streets safe. And by their own admission even the national guard as a federally managed gendarmerie accountable to some sort of standardized military code is better at keeping streetcorners safe and more willing to engage with the community. So why the FUCK should we ever respect these police guilds that consume so many resources and don't do anything to improve the safety of the city when a federally deputized 19 year old weekend warrior can do the same job better with more accountability. Like I thought these people were deathly afraid of abolishing local police in favor of a national gendarmerie accountable to the federal government, yet here they are raving about how much better it supposedly has made DC. I'm not sucking off the guard or saying this is a good thing but it seems like there's an obvious cognitive dissonance here for people who support this.
Felix begins speaking at 7 minutes and 21 seconds this horrifying episode
And promptly says “half-hazard”!!!
Just curious, as someone that has an ownership stake in several national hotels, can I sue the govt for violating my 3rd amendment rights by housing federal troops (ICE agents) against my will?
i hope the 13th legion is still in rome for my next shrink appointment
RSS Issue should be fixed!
Congratulations Chris and Molly!!!
congrats chris and molly
Uhhh; Will, you’ve got to at least try to make me want to listen to the show; this is fucking depressing; I have always found immigrants to be the most hopeful happy smiling people; and a show about their detention and humiliation and degradation is not what I want to think about. Please talk about roast beef more. Thank you.
why would you admit this under your real name you absolute pussy
Love the Zombies outro
Prem in 360 surround sound ! Can you please talk INTO the microphone I pay 8 Aussie dollars a month for this.
I just want to remind you guys: it gets better…. I mean… not here obviously but in like nicer countries with better governments.
I fundamentally believe that Trump is exercising a deeper will of the actual American state, and the right wing freak show around him is fairly tertiary. This is Capital consciously recognizing decline and intentionally tightening the screws on the general population. Crypto adoption juices Wall Street. AI transforms both domestic and international security infrastructure. The consolidation of power behind the executive, and the use of that authority to discipline the population, gutting social welfare and education while engineering a boom for high paying domestic police jobs… That kind of movement requires buy in from a significant element of the state and capital that goes deeper than Laura Loomer and Marco Rubio.
I tend to agree, what’s crazy making for me is watching it personified as a rotting old man in a red white and blue suit with wispy gold hair, it’s too much for my brain. He looked INSANE at the Korea press conference today, he’s like jaundiced af now and has visibly bruised hands and he did that random shouting Brandon style a few times. It’s too much!
Guys I think you’re all overreacting a little because of the war is coming home. But think how many jobs it’ll create for the vet bro coffee industry when they force you at gunpoint to apply drop shipping labels
She wore a keffiyeh and you guys just ignored it?!
was this Prem's first time on the show? anyway, he's been doing incredible reporting for a while now, great guest for a bleak moment
oh I commented before the news, congratulations Chris and Molly!
feels like they're attempting to normalize armed forces because they can't just release quadcopters without escalation. How are we not even one year into this
Congrats to Chris and Molly
"dabbing on us" Christman.
I'd appreciate if at some point the Chapos could address "What the fuck does Israel have to do with anything". Like, why does every politician in America and most of Western Europe just completely bow down and commit atrocities on behalf of basically, as far as I'm aware, a country on par in most respects with Afghanistan as far as it's economy, culture, and impact on the wider world. Honestly it feels like the only answer at this point is that the Jews really DO control the world. I just don't get it. I've seen the thing about "Oh it works as a center of power for the US to exert force in the Middle East" as if there aren't a thousand easier and cheaper ways to set up 200 military bases out there to extract our oil. I know this sounds dumb but it's actually driving me insane, I just don't get it
They have nuclear weapons aimed at basically everyone that will automatically go off if the government should ever fall.
So Kamala still as bad ???????
Hell no just not as funny
Early slop really messing with my Tuesday breakfast routine.
At what point does it become legitimate political speech to say “I want the treasonous dictator and his junta that has seized control of my government physically removed from power, including the use of physical violence in the rare instance that a treasonous dictator and his junta that has seized control of my government?
The point at which major media will legitimize open discussion of anti-government terrorism, political assassination, military coups and useful tips for how to wage armed revolution against the Tyrant-in-Chief is when the dollar trades below most major international currencies and the stock market loses 50.1% of its value. Until then it is a CRIME to even think of such topics and we're all good citizens who believe that violence is NEVER a solution.
DC resident here. thanks for covering this. looking forward to listening. things have been a little scary round here lately, and i’m pretty sure the feds will be walking around with assault rifles soon
Would be a shame if someone rammed them with a vehicle
Won’t show up in my RSS feed. Anyone else have this issue?
Probably shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the law and order improvements with the national guard deployments.
Yeah, and where's the *evidence* the Nazis set the Reischtag fire themselves? I am a very reasonable person.
Felix starts speaking at 7:22
Um excuse me?
Longtime Chapo fan: it’s really gross hearing them talk about our country speedrun into fascism. When last year they refused to endorse Kamala “simply to prevent facism every 4 years”
sybau
whats the polymarket over/under on what will happen first: national guard blap protesters/fleeing migrant OR chapo hits 1000 eps
They occur simultaneously and ep1000 is about the shooting of the protestor who just happens to be…..Virgil Texas
Farmer Chris’ clock must be broken
Twisted Metal is pretty good
Well slop my ass and call me Sally
Odd time to eat, but sure.
hellz yeah. thanks fellas
Early slop? Hell yeah
Ooh first