“America 250 Begins” with Ilana Glazer

Ilana embarks on 2026, the 250th anniversary of the USA, with a stark acknowledgement of the dangers and challenges we are facing as a country. She underscores the opportunity we have this year to stand up for TRUE human equality as the antidote.

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Host: Ilana Glazer
Producers: David Rooklin, Annika Carlson, Madeline Kim, Kelsie Kiley, Glennis Meagher
Video Producers: Lexa Krebs, Louise Nessralla
Audio Producers: Nicole Maupin, Rachel Suffian
Lighting Director: Kevin Deming
Editor: Tovah Leibowitz
Graphics: Raymo Ventura
Outro Music: Don Hur

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, welcome to It's Open, the first solo It's open with Ilana Glazer of 2026, which is America's 250th birthday. This year is America 250. We've got a lot to think about how twisted that we're here in a fascist regime by a wannabe king in our 250th year. God is a twisted comedy writer. She really is. She's dark dude. She's dark. Our intentions with this project are to share reality. Our reality is being systematically fractured because it's been made systemically possible. Systematically meaning right now, literally the nuts and bolts of fracturing us through algorithms and flooding our zones so we can't concentrate on the one clear thing that's happening. And then systemically being that this country is born on top of two genocides against Native American people who the people colonizing this land were like, get out of here and against African Americans or African people who were captured and forced here through fucking torture. That is the, it's hard to contend with. That is the founding of this country. But it's like we're holding people to a promise 250 years ago who were like, they owned slaves, not John Adams. He was lit. He was fucking lit dude. But George Washington owned slaves. Jefferson was like sick dude. He owned slaves and toiled about it, but was inherent. He inherited that legacy of enslaving people. What does it mean America two 50? What are we going to make it mean? That's the fucking thing. We have to make it mean something. So as I'm recording this, as we are recording this, it's a day after Ice killed a woman in broad daylight, A masked Tubby agent murdered a woman protesting ice. This is fascism. This is the Gestapo. And it is so scary. It's so scary. Ice killed a woman, an American citizen using freedom of speech out just existing, but using freedom of speech a day after the US invaded Venezuela in collaboration with Exxon. It's so dark and twisted. This is so, I don't know. I'm beside myself. I really am. I don't have the answers. I don't know. And a thing that we were just discussing about our intentions here are also to have a lightness, to have a joy, but it's not like joy or some manufactured or imposed sense of or idea of happiness. It's like the joy of being human, just getting on the mic and talking and connecting. That's the joy. We just want to be alive and hear each other speak, see each other's human faces, not AI filtered, fucking crazy ass, fucking manipulation of humanity. It's really, it's fucking dark. It's just a dark moment. I'm like, I'm keeping the light in my personal, it's so hard. So I'm 38 years old. I'm a total millennial square in the middle of my, I don't know what in the middle. Maybe I'm an elder millennial, but not really. I'm like, I'm a middle millennial and I have a four and a half year old. I was born in 1987. I'm trying to just collect the, I was like a kid, a little kid in the nineties. I was a teenager in the early two thousands. Rough, and we're trying to be parents right now. And you have this sense of parenting your children, your young children as a millennial parent. And it's joyous and it's incredible and it's interesting and it's full of, I'm wonder, but then this impending doom from the outside. So it's torturous and that's the most privileged end of the spectrum here. People are being deported to labor camps, to countries they haven't been to in 20 years, people who immigrated here legally. There was this period for a while where white people were waking up to white privilege and they were like, white privilege. I know, I know. And then they would say the thing that was privileged or first world problems. I know, I know. And it's kind of lost its meaning where it's like you're just saying it to check off a box and then just do your thing and not really change or something. And I guess I'm finding myself in that position right now, but I'm like, I know this is the most privileged version of all that is happening right now, but it also feels torturous. It also feels torturous. It's like we really are one organism. We really do feel the suffering of our neighbors even of the way that Israel's war on Palestine has connected globally. I mean there's many reasons and it's so fucking complicated up and down, but we are seeing a genocide on our phones and it's horrible. It's also because that suffering connects to us because we're one organism. This planet, it's sick. I know that the rest of the world is also watching us like, oh, those poor Americans. I don't know. I'm thinking of Judy Garland, tortured by the studio system. That's like all of the United States right now. Oyo, I feel like we're like we are on a cruise ship and the people who were supposed to be the staff serving us, taking care of us have turned murderous and they've locked the doors and we were out at sea with these psychos fucking psychos. And a big part of this is white awareness of it in 2016. That is really when I started getting really politically involved before I think my comedy and Broad City was political without realizing it. But white people have the privilege of not having to be aware of the political nature of their actions because this white supremacist system relies on us to be bought into it for it to function. We really have the keys to the car, especially white moms and white women who have some goddamn sense and human decency. Recently we posted this clip and I cooped with Scary Mommy an Instagram account I love about, I totally get it. Moms my age who can't engage. It's too much. It's too much. I get it. And I said that raising children is raising healthy good people is the first act of resistance. I mean, but I'm also now like, yeah. And yes, also, we have to kind of organize a bit. White women can either be the disruptors of this system or henchmen of this system. And we are seeing the loudest fucking mic right now with these women who are working with this administration, working with this alt, this right wing alt. It's supposed to be alt, it's supposed to be fringe, this super racist, super misogynist propaganda machine. And it's like everything right now. It's mainstream. So yeah, I feel like I'm out at sea stuck on a ship with psychos. This is how so much of the country of black Americans, brown Americans, immigrants, native Americans have been living for 250 years. White moms. If we stood up and held hands, I don't even know. I'm not even telling. I'm not even saying what should be yet. I don't even have the prescription. But this woman was killed by ice yesterday in broad daylight and they want us scared so that we don't vote because America is overwhelmingly voting against this administration right now. And we have 11 months till November. Tick, tick, tick bitch, 11 months. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? We have elected officials in place. This is the other thing is my brother has always been my cultural guru. He takes in so much and sends me articles and I'm like, I read the headline. It was incredible. I can't take shit in. He takes in so much. So he tells me about a lot of things he's seen and one thing he saw, he saw Fran Lebowitz speak 10 years ago, and she was doming the crowd of queer, nerdy New Yorkers. And she was like, I think this was about regarding Hillary Clinton. She was like, you want the perfect candidate. You wanted a perfect candidate and you didn't get it. And look what you ended up with. And it's true. We want the perfect candidate. People talking about Kamala Harris wasn't the perfect candidate first of all. She's very pretty. But first and foremost, I'm like, let's look at this very pretty woman in her fifties. What a relief and a godsend to look at this beautiful woman speak and her, I mean, I know she's nutty, but her melodic voice, I'm like, that's a gift. You know what I mean? And it's not like there's so many women on the conservative side who would be pretty if they weren't spewing evil filled with a rotten spirit. Kamala Harris, I don't think she's the perfect person or candidate, but she does not have a rotten spirit. It's just to see this pretty woman with bright eyes, it would've been a huge win. But I don't know people's problems with, we have great elected officials in place in government who are fighting for us every day. People ask me because I'm so politically involved, would you have a run? Fucking no. Dude, that is such hard scary work that in comedy, it's like you, I can talk about being horny. I can be horny. I can talk about drugs, make jokes, whatever. Be curious in a certain way. I wouldn't want to do that work. That's why I am so I guess invested in good progressive elected officials like thanks for doing something I would never want to fucking do that. I am too spiritually weak to do, physically weak to do. Can you imagine how scary it is for Congresswoman Ayana Presley from Massachusetts to walk in the halls of Congress, just she has stood up for all the right things. She's a black woman in Massachusetts, she A OC to walk down the halls of Congress with these fascists people who are openly Nazis, openly racist, openly so hate-filled for women, whatever little issues. Zoran Momani, is he the mayor of Israel or New York City? We have been the propaganda machine, that hateful propaganda machine. They won this battle, they won this battle, and they have their hands in that fucking soil. They have their hands in the machinery and our reality is being fractured and we have to will ourselves to choose healthier and to be together and to not look for the perfect candidate. Kamala Harris. There's rumors of her wanting to run again and people are like, oh God, who cares? Whoever it is, we have to get behind with our fucking balls in the fucking game. You know what I mean? Whoever it is, corporate Dems not my favorite. I love small dollar powered Democrats. That's who I really believe in. But we're just not going to get a perfect candidate instead of pretending things are perfect, which is like what happens when white people run things is that no matter what party it is, it's like, we're fine. We're good. Everything's good. We've got it under control because we've never actually acknowledged the fact that our country is built on slavery and genocide, genocidal frameworks that have unfairly propped up white people in a system that like, so now we are all losing jobs to ai. We are watching billionaires control our media. What's the trade-off here? When do we just look each other in the eyes as Americans? And honestly, it's the 250th birthday of America. When do we say this country was founded on ideas of equality and now we're going to make it so, and it's really the bare minimum basic human rights for all Americans. Housing, food, clean water, clean air and healthcare. We've been brainwashed as white people to think that if everybody in this country has that, then something's being taken away from us. But we are now finding ourselves fucked. And ice killed a woman yesterday. Okay, so do you remember that poem? First they came for the communists, then they came for dah, dah, dah. Then they came for the Jews, then they came for me. So I was looking that up before I started recording. Martin Nia Moler. He was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who in Adolf Hitler's first rise because just like Trump, there was a rise, a fall and then a rer stronger in the twenties. This guy, Martin Nia Moler was with the Nazis. He was pro-Nazi. He liked some of their ideas on the alt-right. And then they went away and then they come back in the late thirties and forties and this guy finds himself, I don't know, their anti Lutheran or whatever he was, or Protestant or something, and he was put in a concentration camp and that's when he wrote this poem to be like, oh fuck. I thought it was them, but they came for communists or something. They came for so-and-so. They came for the Jews and then they came for me. When are we going to, or not even when I guess I'm saying it, we have to realize Americans and white Americans that we are not immune and we're not actually different. We've been brainwashed to think and then we have this hope that maybe we are special, but we are not. And that's a good thing because we are all in this together and we are all equal. We're all of equal value, and we really only have each other and we have to make America's 250th birthday mean that we have to are not safe. We are not different from Latino immigrants who are, by the way, us citizens, by the fucking way, us citizens. We are not different than black Americans. Our value is not different. It's equal. We're equal. And who we are different from is these fucking frightening sadistic psychopaths who are supposed to be in a corner of the internet where they fucking jerk off together and their connection in a dark corner of culture calms them enough to not fucking murder us all. But they've gotten themselves into power because we haven't been, it's not even organized. It's just like we got to just be like, this is all, there's just got to be this baseline common sense of humanity. Fascism takes so much organization, they spend trillions of dollars and so much time organizing against basic human rights because if that organization weren't so hammered in and there wasn't some huge fucking machine behind it, then everybody would just want basic human rights for each other. That is natural, that is sharing. It's like you open an orange and you just want to be like, oh, you want a piece? Sharing is fucking natural. In the New York City subway, New York is famously a tough city to live in. And while there's weird propaganda, I mean, forget the fascist propaganda right now about cities being dangerous when it's like, no, they're not. But also just New York has this story of being tough and people are tough with each other, but really New Yorkers know that we're really quite united and help each other out. But on the New York City subway on the platform, people naturally tend to gather and be near each other. We all just, I think most people want most people to have basic human rights. And as we begin America's 250th year, we can't just aim to preserve things the way they were. We have to really make this, this is our opportunity. This is fascism. This is the clearest moment of ethnonationalism white supremacist nationalism that our country has ever had the clearest, most visible, mainstream, loudest version of it. So we have to, and we can make this mean that we actually reject the notion of fucking fake equality, fake calls for equality. We can reject the notion of white supremacy. We can make America two 50 mean actual racial equality, actual gender equality, not yet in policy. That's going to take a long time to implement, to get ourselves out of this mess. But we have to make big moves and we have to be brave. We have to be brave. I think it's the movie Brave, the Red-haired Irish girl movie I think is where they say in this movie, I'm butchering it, but it's like it wouldn't be brave if it weren't scary. It is scary. We have to be brave and we can be less scared if we are in it together. We can be less actually unsafe. The more of us who get together, we have to do this. We have no choice. This is not going to go away. This is not going to get better unless we do this. I don't have a fucking prescription today other than find your local indivisible group and know about them and follow them online just to start having the vocabulary about how to resist fascism. I also want to shout out showing up for racial justice. I'm not like, I may seem like I'm so informed and so active, I just know about the scene. I'm not as active as I want to be, but just knowing that that's there, that there's a whole movement there. We're going to have to make big moves to make these midterms mean America two 50. We are not a country for kings. We are a country founded on the promise of equality through opportunity and merit. And for 250 years that has not been true. But the people deserve basic human rights and we know it. The people deserve basic human rights. I believe this for the planet, a global standard for it. And as fascism is on the rise globally, I think there is momentum in calling that out globally. But for America, two 50 for the United States, the people deserve basic human rights. We deserve not to be shot by violent rogue government agencies like ice. We deserve to have freedom of speech and protest. That's the most beautiful thing about America. It actually, it is incredible freedom of speech watching the American Revolution, the Ken Burns doc, the people in this country who were here first, and while they were enslaving people and some of them violent psychopaths themselves, there was a discourse happening about what it meant to be free. And ironically, enslaving people and genocided Native Americans. I know it's hard to hold and I'm like, it's hard to hold, but still to discuss what freedom means and to try to obtain it, there's something exciting about that. There's something that gives me reason to live about that. There's something I am proud of in that, if I can hold it in the context, what does it mean to be free right now? There's this quote that my husband learned a while ago, but the essence of it, we've been talking about a long time, and especially having a child, we've talked about that love is attention. Love is attention, and attention is love. And these violent human beings, they're human beings too. These violent human beings who are causing so much, wreaking, so much havoc on our country, they want our attention because they don't feel loved. And so there's something to me about not giving them your attention, giving the people that make you feel good and healthy and sane and rooted in a healthy sense of reality. Your attention, that's a healthy act. And paying attention to yourself. I've learned to love. They want to be gods. They want to private jet all over the place so that they feel like they're above their mortality and everywhere at once. But in fact, you're sitting in your own farts on your private plane too, just like I am on a fucking commercial flight. You still are pulling your pants down to go to the bathroom, pulling them back up. Even these private jetting, carbon footprint destroying motherfuckers who are not paying their fair share of taxes. They're human beings too, and they just want our attention. And you can, that's one act of resistance. And you can also tune into organizations like Indivisible to feel empowered and to know you are not alone in wanting to fight fascism and pay attention to yourself even if the feelings are scary and dark right now. We are in this together, and the more that we acknowledge that, the less alone we feel. We are in this together. We are here. What are we going to do about it? We actually have will and choice to do something right now. We can do this together. I really believe it. And we have to have joy and pleasure. We have to have joy and pleasure. That is the meaning of being a human being and being alive lately. The things are so crazy. The simple elements, fire, water, snow, straight up, dude, I'm just literally the cold wind in my face. I'm like, there, it's, I'm alive. I'm alive over the holiday break. I had such a nice time. I got up to the country with my family, and you have a kid. As a parent, I want to give my kid everything she wants, everything she doesn't even know she wants. I want her to have experience in the snow and good experience in the snow. I never did like winter sports growing up. No skiing, no snowboarding. I thought Jews don't ski, but it's like Jews ski rich. Jews ski. We didn't have, it's expensive to get your kid snow gear again and again and again as they fucking grow. So I haven't bought snow gear in 20 years. My daughter, we got her snow, snow gear and there was a big snow coming and I was like, fuck, I don't have snow pants. I don't have proper snow boots. I went out and bought all the proper snow gear. But the thing is, I don't have to buy snow gear ever again. I'm five, one and a half. Maybe I'll get to 4.9, but in 40 years, you know what I mean? Maybe then I'll be buying new snow gear. But right now I was like, why haven't I gotten active in the winter since I was a kid? Because it costs money. And I spent money on snow gear this year and I'm like, I never have to do it again. It's incredible. And literally a privilege to walk around in the snow and be warm and not wet. And boy did I take pleasure in that. Just walking in the fucking snow. I might take a ski lesson, guys. I might take a ski lesson. So waspy like I'm so excited. I think I'm going to in January, take a fucking ski lesson. I went sledding. And also it's like, what was I sledding in before several sweatpants? It's so crazy. Get snow pants, bitch. I went sledding. It was a fucking blast to have proper gear. It was so much fun. Made some fires over the holiday break. You don't need much. We don't need much basic human rights, dude. We just, fire is lit, is lit, water is lit. So I'm really into rice bowls and trying to get into Asian cooking, specifically Korean cooking. So YouTube is so delicious and delightful and enjoyable and relaxed. I'm discovering as I get into this world. And I discovered as well as 6 million other people, the Korean mom cooking YouTube, lady, M-A-A-N-G-C-H-I. And I've been wanting to make kimchi pancakes for a while. But also then I was discovering all this Korean cooking she was making. And one of our producers, Madeline Kim on this show is Korean, Korean American. And she's also my tour manager. And when we tour the United States doing standup comedy, we get a lot of Asian food and it's like, it just feels good for me to have a rice ball, a meat, a vegetables, and I want to cook that more. And I made a kind of, I would say Korean inspired but not Korean style rice bowl over the break for my daughter and my friend Jessica, the drama church from goodnight and good luck and had kimchi and vegetables and Japanese sweet potato and Japanese style tuna salad. It was so fucking good. And I felt so. I just love cooking and making my own food. It makes me feel so empowered and I'm really taking care of myself, really taking care of myself. It felt so good. Little soy sauce and rice wine vinegar as the little sauce at the end. So yummy. So that's giving me joy right now, giving me peace, touching my own food, cooking it, making time for that. This first week back, I've been packed in with work. There's so much I want to do and make and accomplish. But those two weeks, I really was chilling a lot and I'm looking forward to taking some just a full ass 24 or 36 or 48 hours off this weekend to be with my family. Unplug. I do not do short form content over the weekends. I don't do it at night. It scares me. I can't go on Instagram at night. It's scary. It's getting up in your brain. So you know that joy, that pleasure, that feeling of my own humanity. I'm going to do that. I'm going to continue to share that with you. We are going to do it together. America two 50, this is going to be a big year. We're going to continue processing it together, feeling it together, being in it together and choosing how we step forward together. Yeah, it's going to be big, but as scary and painful as it can be at times, there is joy and there are wins on the other side of this. So we got this. Thanks for joining me and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day, lataaa. Thank you so much for joining me at Its open with Ilana Glazer. I keep saying this, but I'm so fucking thrilled about this project. It really, really means a lot to me to have you here today. So I want to thank you for joining. Remember to like and subscribe and be part of this community. And I want to thank my creative team, my producers Annika Carlson, David Rooklin, Madeline Kim, Glennis Meaghar, and Kelsie Kiley. I want to thank my visual audio artists who made this look and sound so beautiful, Nicole Maupin, Kevin Deming and Lexa Krebs. Thank you to Raymo Ventura who made these awesome graphics and the branding and the opening sting, and thank you to Don Hur for making this awesome outro music. And we could not make this without you. Dude, that is our editor. Thank you everybody for joining and I'll see you next time.