Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey attended a celebration of Black-owned businesses last week, danced a little, and conservative media spent the next several days describing it as a civilizational collapse. A man moved his hips at a community fair. This is the story Fox News chose to run with.
What Actually Happened
The Black Entrepreneur State Fair ran August 9 through 15 at Midtown Global Market in Minneapolis, an annual weeklong event celebrating Black-owned businesses. Mayor Frey showed up, wore sunglasses, and danced when an emcee got him on the floor. Someone posted the clip to TikTok. It spread.
That's it. That is the full extent of the incident. A mayor attended a community event, participated when invited to, and did not dance particularly well. Roll tape.
Fox News Digital nevertheless filed a full news article about it, complete with quotes from multiple conservative commentators who apparently had strong feelings about a local politician's shoulder movement. The piece was written by two reporters and edited by at least one more. Resources were deployed.
The Commentary Was Something Else
Conservative commentator Benny Johnson called the clip "almost worse" than a previous incident in which Frey apparently ate Somali food in a way Johnson found objectionable, and labeled the whole thing "a walking humiliation ritual." Let that sink in for a second. A man eating Somali food is, to Benny Johnson, something a person should be ashamed of.
Outkick writer Ian Miller used the video to make a broader point that Democrats are "theater kids" who are "destroying American cities." Emily Jashinsky joked she would prefer Frey defund the police. X host Mario Nawfal said Frey's "ability to put on blinders and just vibe is unmatched," which is genuinely a funny line, even if it's being used to describe a man who committed the crime of attending a business fair.
Fox News also included the comment that "the world is full of white liberals willing to play the fool," which they published without apparent hesitation. Just dropped it in there. Moving on.
The Broader 'Democrats Are Dancing' Crisis
Fox framed the Frey clip as part of a disturbing pattern, citing Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who posted a campaign video parodying the children's show Blue's Clues to explain mail-in voting. El-Sayed wore a green striped shirt, recreated the show's "Mail Time" segment, and ended with the phrase "Vote ski-doo. We can too!" before disappearing into a campaign-themed picture frame.
Look, the El-Sayed video is objectively a lot. We will grant them that one. A grown adult pulling a ballot out of a mailbox to a children's song and then doing the Blue's Skidoo into a frame is a choice that deserves scrutiny. But Fox News presenting this alongside a mayor dancing at a community fair as evidence of Democratic rot requires a level of credulity that most functioning adults cannot summon.
The throughline Fox is trying to establish is that Democrats are performatively, embarrassingly desperate to connect with voters and failing at it. Which, fine, that's a real critique worth having. It is slightly undermined by the fact that the conservative alternative apparently involves sitting very still, eating no ethnic food, and never under any circumstances moving your body to music.
What's Not in the Fox Article
Fox News Digital reached out to Frey's office for comment and received nothing back, which they noted. What they did not note is anything substantive about the Black Entrepreneur State Fair itself, the businesses it celebrates, why a mayor attending it might be, I don't know, normal constituent engagement, or whether anyone at the actual event had a problem with Frey being there.
The people who run the Black Entrepreneur State Fair are not quoted. Attendees are not quoted. The emcee who invited Frey onto the floor is not quoted. The entire frame is conservative commentators reacting to a TikTok, presented as news about what the mayor of Minneapolis is doing wrong.
Frey's office did not respond to Fox News. Given the question being asked, that seems like a reasonable allocation of staff time.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to look at this coverage and see a story about Democratic politicians embarrassing themselves. What you are actually looking at is a media apparatus that has decided a white mayor dancing at a Black community event is something called a "humiliation ritual," that eating Somali food is a mark against a politician's character, and that showing up to a weeklong fair for Black entrepreneurs is the kind of cringe behavior that should end careers. That is the subtext sitting right on top of the text, and Fox ran it anyway.
The dancing itself is not the point. The dancing has never been the point. The point is that any Democratic politician who shows up to a non-white community event can be filmed, stripped of all context, and fed to an outrage machine that will generate seventeen quotes from commentators before the mayor's car has left the parking lot. It is a completely reliable process. It works every time. And the people operating it have gotten very comfortable with the fact that no one is going to ask them why eating Somali food made the list.
Frey may be a fine mayor or a bad one. Minneapolis has real problems worth covering. The Black Entrepreneur State Fair sounds like something a local government should probably support. None of that is in the Fox article, because none of that is what the Fox article is for. Two reporters and at least one editor spent their professional energy this week on a man's shoulder movement at a community fair. Whatever you think of Jacob Frey's dance moves, that's the embarrassing part.
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