What to Know
When viewers tuned in to the 2026 Grammys and watched stars arrive on the red carpet, many noticed that plenty of celebrities were adorned with “ICE Out” pins or other politically-charged accessories to make their voices heard without even saying anything. But when someone asked Jack Antonoff about his own ‘ICE Out’ pin in a clip shared on X (formerly Twitter), his response was so bizarre.
If you can even call his answer a genuine response, that is. A red carpet correspondent asks Jack what his pin means to him, and he goes off on a bit of a tangent. It’s like one of those moments on TV, where you want to look away out of secondhand embarrassment because the fictional character is being, well, embarrassing. But in this case, it’s a real person, and it doesn’t end quickly.
Jack Antonoff’s “ICE Out” pin at the Grammys seems to have him confused.
Jack Antonoff on wearing an "ICE Out" pin at the #Grammys:
— Variety (@Variety) February 2, 2026
"It's a really good time for people to come together and figure out how to move through this." pic.twitter.com/CrzP3zdwZn
A Variety reporter asks Jack why his pin is important. The music producer and Taylor Swift collaborator scoffs and seems to say “it’s ridiculous” in reference to ICE. But then his answer gets a little convoluted. It’s hard to know if his response is so awkward because he doesn’t truly know where he stands when it comes to ICE, or because he thinks the answer is just so obvious that he doesn’t know why he was asked about the pin. Some fans might choose to believe the latter.
“It’s terrible, you know, I mean it’s time to…it’s just, for every reason you could imagine, I would think, but yeah, a bit speechless trying to even talk about it,” Jack says as he seems to struggle through a response. When the correspondent says that it’s hard not to talk about it right now, Jack continues, “We can do both and find a way to, I don’t know, it’s just a really good time for people to come together and figure out how to move through this, because it’s gonna gonna be small communities that can really help.”
Um, sir, I beg you several pardons?
That nothing burger of a response is confusing at best, and people were quick to point that out in responses to the post on X with the video from the Grammys red carpet. One user wrote that, for celebrities, activism is more of an “accessory.” Someone else added, “Were they giving them pins out at the door?”
Other music artists wore the same “ICE Out” pins at the Grammys. And, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the pins are part of a larger mission from organizations like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Working Families Power, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Maremoto. Some artists told The Hollywood Reporter that they had much more colorful words for ICE, but the pins did the trick. Jack, on the other hand, apparently couldn’t quite get there what his thoughts on wearing the pin and what it means.
However, when someone wrote on X, “It’s giving ‘I’m wearing it to not come off wrong but I don’t support this I don’t know or care about this issue,'” another user replied that Jack’s response was just careful so as not to be “attacked” by others for his thoughts against ICE.
Whatever the case may be, his response was just plain weird. On that, many seem to agree.
