Officials Ask A Pennsylvania Mayor To Resign After His Racially Charged Facebook Posts About Obama

Via Getty Image / Charles Wasko on Facebook

President Barack Obama’s final months in office have been punctuated with a variety of significant events. First-time veto overrides, final speeches before the U.N. general assembly, and even making new memes with Leonardo DiCaprio have busied the 44th president’s time. So too have truly awful things, and not just the increasingly frustrating 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Things like West York, Pennsylvania mayor Charles Wasko’s recent Facebook activity.

As Penn Live reports, Wasko has been publishing racially charged images targeting the president and his family since the summer. Nothing quite like a veiled, jokey call for assassination, but images featuring young orangutans in a wheelbarrow (which you can see at the bottom of this post, along with other photos) with the caption, “Aww… moving day at the Whitehouse (sic) has finally arrived.” In that instance, Wasko added: “Not soon enough!”

Needless to say, the West York Borough Council isn’t happy with the mayor’s behavior, and will vote to censure him on October 6. “Absolutely deplorable,” council president Shawn Mauck told Penn Live. “It makes you sick. There’s no good excuse for his actions or behavior.” He later added: “We want to reassure the public that we don’t condone it, and it doesn’t reflect the views of the borough council, borough government and its employees.”

Attempts to contact Wasko resulted in a short phone call with the York Daily Record. Before the mayor hung up, he explained it was simply “bullsh*t that’s going on up at the borough office.”

Meanwhile, councilman Brian Wilson took to Facebook to address the controversy. He noted Wasko “has the right to free speech,” but this doesn’t include “hate speech” since he’s “a representative of West York Borough and in fact not as mayor and to uphold laws for all.” As a result, Wilson suggests he “will ask him to resign as mayor.”

Here a sampling of Wasko’s Facebook content, which is as insulting as one might imagine.

(Via Penn Live)

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