Montana Tucker, the TikTok star who famously wore a dress at the Grammys emblazoned with a message to save the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, spoke with Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” telling him that celebrities who were afraid to publicly take her stand had thanked her for doing so.
Shapiro began by asking Tucker how the Grammys were for her.
“You know, I’m a little disappointed you weren’t there, given you were number one on the charts,” Tucker quipped, referring to Shapiro and Tom MacDonald’s rap song ‘Facts.’ I feel like you should have been at the Grammys, don’t you think?”
“I did ask Nicki Minaj to hook a homie up, but that actually did not happen, unfortunately,” Shapiro joked, then asked, “You wore this kind of shockingly political dress at the Grammys. What was the reaction when you did that?”
Who wore it best at the #Grammys?
To us, the answer is clear.
Thank you, @MontanaTucker, for using your platform to make this powerful statement. 🎗️#BringThemHomeNOW pic.twitter.com/S3BKehySpO— StandWithUs (@StandWithUs) February 6, 2024
“It’s so interesting that you say political as well, because I don’t find it to be political,” Tucker replied. “I think that that is something that people are saying and that is something that needs to be taken away from it because it isn’t political to bring the hostages home. I think that’s something people are forgetting. There are people there, not just Israelis, former hostages, there are Americans. There are different races. There are different religions of innocent people that are still over there. And when I got the invite to go to the Grammys to walk the carpet, it was obviously a huge deal for me as an artist to have that opportunity. I knew I had to do something. I knew that no one else was going to do it.”
“I was super nervous about wearing the dress,” she confessed. “To be honest, I didn’t know what the reaction was going to be, but I knew I had to do it. I knew there was no other option. I couldn’t just go and wear a glamorous dress. I had to go and stand for what I believe in. If I have the opportunity to have the platform of people seeing this, I had to take it.”
Tucker spoke of the initial resistance she received from Grammy officials: “At first when I first walked the carpet, somebody from the Recording Academy, I don’t know who they were, came up to me and said Comms had an issue with my dress and they said it was too political and they said they don’t do politics at the Grammys and that my dress was too political.”
“I said I don’t think this is political at all, actually. Do you know what this ribbon stands for?” she recalled, adding that Harvey Mason Jr. “came up to me, saw me on the carpet and came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for wearing that. I love your dress. Let’s take a picture.’”
“It is somewhat hilarious to me that the Grammys would suggest that people don’t do politics at the Grammys, which is like, have you seen the Grammys ever?” Shapiro pointed out. “Like, ever. And then Annie Lennox calls for the cease-fire in the middle of the In Memoriam section … she was supposed to be there paying tribute to the people who died this year. And then she randomly starts doing Hamas propaganda on the stage calling for a cease-fire. Absolutely astonishing.”
“So how has the feedback been since the Grammys? Have you gotten blowback for having worn the dress?” Shapiro asked.
“You know what? While I was there, I was having so much anxiety, I couldn’t believe that I did this. This is something that I’ve never done, a big move like this. And I sat in my seat and all of a sudden my phone started blowing up and I didn’t even post a picture,” Tucker said. “My phone just started blowing up like crazy because it was getting posted everywhere from the Getty Images photos. The amount of support I have received has just been overwhelming and so incredible. I’m shocked at the lack of negative response that I got from it. People reaching out like crazy, people sharing it like crazy.”
“I think a lot of people want to do something like this and they’re just scared. I think that a lot of people that I’ve talked to, I think they want to – they don’t know how to do it,” she stated. “I’ve had people come up to me that are on such a different level than me in their careers, and they’re like, ‘Thank you so much for taking one for the team. Thank you for everything you’re doing,’ because they don’t want to post. They’re too scared. They don’t want to lose business, don’t want to lose their jobs, their career. They’re nervous to just share what they truly believe in because they don’t want the blowback.”
“So I think if we’re not standing for something, what are we doing? If we work this hard and we are fortunate enough to have platforms and we don’t use them for what we believe in, what’s the point? That’s how I feel,” she said. “That’s all it was for. It’s to remind people. …More and more, the misinformation and everything that keeps coming out every single day, people are forgetting what the real reason is here and why people like myself are fighting so hard. And these are innocent people with innocent family members. And they need to be home.”