Culture & Society · The Record
Harrisburg Pride festival was awarded $10,000 of Pennsylvania's $90,000 in Pride grants, award list published by The Epoch Times shows
Conservative outlets called the 2022 festival taxpayer-subsidized. An award list published by The Epoch Times, and the same figure in Breitbart's report, put the festival at $10,000 of $90,000 - the second-largest amount on the list, shared with two other festivals.
The video is gone. The claim built on top of it is not, and it is the claim, not the footage, that can still be tested against a record.
On August 4, 2022, Andrew Mark Miller of Fox News reported on a social media post that, in his account, appeared to show a young boy pole dancing at a Pennsylvania Pride event, and reported that the original clip had been deleted shortly after it was reshared. Reagan Reese of the Daily Caller News Foundation, writing the next day, described the same since-deleted TikTok video as showing a shirtless man instructing a child in a rainbow skirt at a dance pole, under the caption "Central PA Pride had a pole set up with an amazing instructor to assist. My kiddo is a natural!" Both outlets identified the instructor as hairdresser Mikee Bentz. Fox News reported that the hashtags on the post seemingly coincided with the Central Pennsylvania Pride Festival, which took place in Harrisburg over the weekend before its report. The child is not identified in any source reviewed here and is not identified here.
The festival stood by him. In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson said: "The Pride Festival of Central Pennsylvania stands behind the actions of Mr. Bentz whose Metro Enterprises provided nothing more than a vehicle of fun and exercise at last weekend's Pride Festival." Bentz, in his own statement to the same outlet, said: "I am proud to offer Harrisburg/Central Pennsylvania an avenue for fitness, creativity, artistry, and expression in businesses that are not only operated at the highest level of ethical behavior, but that also take into account inclusivity and a deep appreciation for protecting the environment."
The claim
Two outlets moved the story from conduct to public money. The Daily Wire's headline described the setting as a "Taxpayer-Subsidized Pride Event." Hannah Knudsen of Breitbart News put a number on it on August 5, 2022, writing: "A pride event in Pennsylvania that reportedly taught children how to pole dance received a $10,000 grant championed by Gov. Tom Wolf's (D) administration."
That is a checkable sentence, and it points at a document.
The record
The Epoch Times published the underlying award table: 17 recipients sharing $90,000 through what it described as PA Pride Community Grants. The Central PA Pride Festival appears in that table at $10,000. Breitbart reported the same recipient count and the same figure for the same festival.
What the table adds is proportion - a reading none of the coverage captured in full for this piece performed, including the outlet that published the table. The $10,000 is not the largest award: the Lehigh Valley Pride Festival received $12,000. It is the second-largest amount on the list, matched exactly by two other line items, the Reading Pride Festival and the Washington PA Pride Festival, both also at $10,000. The awards descend from there to $1,000 for the Hoyt Arts Center Queer Color Run. The 17 line items sum to precisely $90,000, matching the total The Epoch Times reported, so the table is internally consistent. Central PA's share of the program is a little over 11 percent.
Carrie Fischer Lepore, then deputy secretary for Marketing, Tourism and Film at the Department of Community and Economic Development, said in the statement quoted by The Epoch Times that the program "reaffirms our commitment to bringing visibility to the LGBTQ+ community and creating a more inclusive commonwealth." One United Lancaster reported that the state launched the program in partnership with the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition to support LGBTQ+ and Pride-related events. Breitbart, quoting a program description whose source it does not name, reported that the program "supports Pride festivals and events throughout the commonwealth through September 2022."
One limit belongs here rather than in a footnote, because it cuts against this piece's own headline: the state's original announcement of the awards was not retrieved for this piece. The figures above rest on secondary renderings rather than on any posting by the state. Of the Daily Wire's piece, only the headline was captured for this review, which is why statements here about what the coverage contains are scoped to the coverage captured in full. As of August 10, 2026, the Department of Community and Economic Development's tag archive for the PA Pride Community Grant Program lists a single item, a Shapiro-Davis administration release about downtown investment and small businesses in Etna. No 2022 award release appears on it.
A detail nobody carried
The festival's own site states that it "is a project of Black & White Party, Inc (BWP), fiscal sponsor," and directs anyone seeking that entity's registration and financial information to the Pennsylvania Department of State. On the record available here, that establishes one thing and no more: the festival presents itself as a project of a separate incorporated entity. No source reviewed here describes how that arrangement operated, or which entity received or administered the grant. None of the coverage captured in full for this piece mentions it at all.
Analysis
On the strength of the published award list, the label survives: a state program did direct $10,000 to this festival - though whether the money was received by the festival directly or by its fiscal sponsor, the record reviewed here does not say - and "taxpayer-subsidized" is a fair description of that. What the record does not support is the tighter reading the headlines invite - that public money paid for the activity in the video. According to Breitbart's own account, Wolf announced the recipients in July 2022; Fox News dated the festival only to the weekend before its August 4 report, and the sources reviewed here do not establish which came first. The nearest timeline marker is Wolf's endorsement of the event itself, which the Daily Caller News Foundation reported came in a July 30 letter posted on the event's website - a date for the endorsement, not for the grant announcement, so it does not settle the order either. And nothing in any source reviewed here connects any part of the $10,000 to Bentz, to Metro Enterprises, or to the pole. A state grant award and a vendor's presence at the event are two separate facts that the coverage set side by side and let the reader fuse. No source reviewed here alleges criminal conduct by any person, and this piece makes none.
The more durable finding is about the record itself. The 2022 award figures are now easiest to read in the work of the outlets that reported on the program in 2022, while the state's own posting is no longer where it was. That is an argument for treating the secondary renderings as provisional, and for the state to repost the list.
Prediction, checkable: by February 28, 2027, the Department of Community and Economic Development's tag archive page for the PA Pride Community Grant Program will still list no release enumerating the 2022 awards.
On right of reply. In 2022, Fox News reported that Wolf's office did not immediately respond to its request for comment, and the Daily Caller News Foundation reported that the festival, Bentz and Wolf did not immediately respond to its own. Daily Pol has not itself sought comment from any subject named here. A right of reply request is recorded as required and not yet made in this piece's claims ledger; a human editor must send it and document the attempt before publication.