School Board newcomer Gene Posca knew exactly what he was saying at last week’s meeting, and he wanted all of us to hear it.
He wanted to publicly respond to a growing number of critics who justifiably expressed outrage over his controversial social-media posts – especially one low-brow meme that compared Democrats who donned surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic to Ku Klux Klan members who wore masks while terrorizing Black Americans in the 1900s.
He wanted to try to defend the indefensible.
In so doing, however, Posca made a bad situation worse, ignoring School Board policy and putting partisan politics and his hard-right ideology above the best interests of our school district, which now must contend with another unnecessary distraction.
For four minutes at that Sept. 25 meeting, Posca read from a prepared statement that provided ample reason to question his judgment in matters pertaining to public education and raised serious doubts about his fitness to occupy the board seat he was awarded when he ran unopposed last year.
Several members of the audience were so disgusted by his remarks that they walked out of the chamber.
One week later, in fact, more than 600 people had signed a change.org petition seeking to have Posca removed from the School Board. The online action was started by the Indian River Freedom Coalition, which has accused him of “unethical behavior” and claimed he has “lost the trust of this community.”
Meanwhile, School Board members continued to receive a stream of emails from local residents condemning Posca’s inflammatory social-media offerings, as well as his wrongheaded attempt to defend the KKK post.
Among those emails was a powerful commentary offered by the District 1 School Board member Posca succeeded, Mara Schiff, who wrote that she was “appalled” by his speech, which she claimed was “filled with misinformation designed to increase political divisiveness and defend his irresponsible social media presence.”
She described his remarks as “offensive and embarrassing.”
And they were.
They were also troubling – because they didn’t need to be aired, especially at a time when our embattled and fractured School Board already wastes too much time confronting culture-war issues concocted by the local Moms For Liberty chapter purely for political purposes.
Posca, staunchly endorsed by the Moms, could’ve ignored the verbal attacks and allowed the furor to dissipate over time. Or, if he felt compelled to address them, he could’ve simply admitted he was wrong, acknowledged that it was inappropriate for school board members to post such nonsense, and apologized.
Instead, he doubled down.
But not immediately.
First, Posca tried to downplay the KKK post, which contained side-by-side photos of a young man wearing a surgical mask and a fully hooded, masked and robed Klan member, accompanied by a caption that read: “Democrats Continue Proud Tradition Of Wearing White Masks To Show Political Affiliation.”
He explained that the post was created by the “Babylon Bee” website, which launched in March 2016 and traffics in satire tailored for a conservative audience.
In other words, it was just a joke – one that Posca said “shouldn’t be deeply offensive,” despite the KKK’s racist, hate-filled history of beating, lynching and raping Black Americans for decades, especially in the South.
Is it possible Posca doesn’t understand that using the KKK as a punchline in a social-media post demonstrates an amazing absence of sensitivity, especially to Black students, teachers and administrators in our school district?
Or is it that he doesn’t care?
Certainly, it’s fair to wonder: Would he do the same with the Holocaust, or the 9/11 attacks, or the Sandy Hook massacre in which elementary school kids were slaughtered?
If not, then why the KKK?
Has Posca’s sense of humor become so warped by the political tribalism of our times that he actually gets a chuckle from connecting today’s Democrats to the Klan?
It’s difficult to imagine any right-minded person who finds anything funny about the KKK – but not impossible.
Thomas Kenny, a failed School Board candidate and local Moms board member, went to the podium at that meeting last week and clownishly attempted to defend Posca’s post.
“It’s pretty hilarious,” Kenny said. “I laughed at it.”
He shouldn’t have – because Posca, who opposed mandatory masking during the pandemic, wasn’t joking.
If you read the KKK post Posca shared on his social-media account, you’ll notice he added a comment: “The democrats haven’t really changed.”
And he meant it.
In offering his rambling defense, Posca suggested that anyone offended by the post was upset because of the “inherent element of truth about the history of the Democrat Party.”
He went on to say that Democrats were the primary owners of slaves in America, fought to preserve slavery, resisted integration in the years after the Civil War, and created the KKK to intimidate and terrorize the Black community.
They did.
Then, however, came the falsehoods, twisted and omitted facts, and tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories usually found on extreme-right websites. Posca’s deliberately distorted, one-sided history lesson included:
- The Central Intelligence Agency allegedly funding hip-hop artists in the 1980s to “corrupt young Black Americans” by glorifying drugs, sex and violence.
- The CIA, also in the 1980s, “flooding Black communities with drugs, including a never-ending supply of crack cocaine,” the sale of which was used to fund the contra movement in Nicaragua.
Schiff, an associate professor in Florida Atlantic University’s School of Criminology and a restorative justice scholar, cited the “ridiculousness” of many of Posca’s allegations, calling them “simplistic and incomplete, and a disservice to the complex and nuanced history of race in the U.S.”
Others called them dishonest.
But they weren’t shocking, given Posca’s recent push to remove what he described as the School Board’s “racist” (not racial) equity policy and his refusal to challenge the state’s new standards for teaching Black history – even one that requires lessons on how slaves might’ve benefitted from their servitude.
The only real surprise was that he actually said what he said, and he did so publicly, which brings to mind an old saying in politics: “When someone tells you who they are, believe him.”
Posca told us who he is.
Now it’s up to us to decide whether he’s fit to serve on our School Board.