Online hatemongers are bombarding Sonoma County government meetings, sidelining civil public discourse

During a May 24 episode of his podcast, neo-Nazi and former Petaluma resident Jon Minadeo II played clips from recent Sacramento City Council meetings that had been disrupted by a torrent of antisemitic messages, delivered by speakers via the city’s Zoom feed.

Minadeo praised the trolls, and left his followers with a directive: “Find a city council meeting, bring the fliers in, talk about Jewish supremacy.” He added, “This could be the next thing!”

Minadeo’s hate-filled rants are full of debunked tropes and conspiracy theories. But he was right on this point. Focused attacks on local government meetings have become a big thing among American extremists. And they are beginning to have a marked effect on public discourse.

In Sonoma County, the online trolls have flooded recent meetings of the Board of Supervisors, the trustees of Santa Rosa City Schools and, Tuesday, the Santa Rosa City Council. The first two elected groups responded by eliminating the Zoom option for public comment, reversing recent years of practice.

Local governments across the nation added the ability to comment via Zoom when public chambers shut down during the pandemic. And many kept that option in place even when meetings went in-person again.

The value is clear.

“Someone coming to our board chambers from Sea Ranch, that’s really an all-day trip,” Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said of a drive from the far-flung coastal village. “By the time they get here, maybe we’re late in getting started, they wait to make comment — by the time they get back, it’s a full day. The rural nature of my district makes Santa Rosa challenging.”

To Hopkins, allowing public comments via Zoom didn’t simply expand the volume of public participation. It welcomed a wider variety of citizens.

“There are people at our meetings who are, let’s be honest, paid lobbyists, and they want their interests represented. They will always be there,” the supervisor said. “People who are retired, who can afford to take a day off, will be there. But working folks from rural areas, you don’t usually see them in the chambers. It’s great for them to call in, wait for public comment while they watch their kids in their own home and still participate.”

Increasingly, that ability is being jeopardized by people with zero interest in the matters listed on the council or school board agenda.

Over the past couple months, organized online hatemongers have infiltrated meetings in San Diego, Sacramento, in Portland, Maine, and Laramie, Wyoming, and as far away as Victoria, Australia. And they have been especially active in the Bay Area, with coordinated, bigoted incursions in meetings from Walnut Creek and Larkspur, to Saratoga and Atherton, among other locations.

The Anti-Defamation League, which chronicles and tracks antisemitic hate crimes, has done the deepest reporting on the subject. Through social media posts, videos of public meetings and access to a private channel on the messaging platform Telegram, the ADL has identified several key figures driving some of the hate comments.

One of them is Minadeo, who is now living in South Florida.

On June 12, according to the ADL, the main Telegram channel of Minadeo’s network shared a post titled “*ATTENTION * CALL IN AND NAME THE JEW!” It provided login instructions for the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting scheduled for that day. Once the meeting began, it was hyped in the group’s chat.

“God speed to the callers. No real names or emails needed,” one member wrote.

Other hatemongers identified by the ADL include Ryan Messano, who lives in Fairfield, and Harley Petero of Modesto.

Messano, a sometimes real estate agent, is an outlier in that he isn’t shy about using his real name while spouting antisemitic comments — as he did during a June 12 Sonoma County supervisors’ meeting, when he told the board, “It is very troubling that we have members of America who think they can silence criticism of their religion by yelling and shouting about hate speech and antisemitism.”

On Sept. 16, Messano posted a notice to his followers on the rightwing social media platform Gab: “After weeks of truth being told in Sonoma about Jewish wrongdoing, presto, abracadabra, Zoom public comment is ended! Not to worry, we are going in person.”

No one showed up to speak at the Sept. 19 Board of Supervisors meeting. But the supervisors took online comments at a special session later that day, and more hate speech flowed in.

Petero also called into the June 12 Sonoma County meeting. According to the ADL, he usually uses the name “Scottie.” He posted on Gab this past Sunday, alerting followers that he is, “Organizing City Council calls across the country! DM if interested in joining the ranks.”

That same day, Petero posted video clips that included several antisemitic or racist comments delivered via Zoom at the July 11, Sept. 12 and Sept. 19 special-session meetings of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, and a Sept. 13 trustees meeting of Santa Rosa City Schools, among many other clips.

The small network is forcing local government to grapple with sometimes unwieldy solutions. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and Santa Rosa City Schools are currently accepting comments only in-person and via email. Chris Coursey, chair of the supervisors, announced at their meeting Tuesday that the policy will remain in effect through the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, other local governments are bracing for similar attacks.

“I’ve spoken with our city manager and a couple of my colleagues about how to prepare for the possibility in Santa Rosa,” Council member Chris Rogers said Monday. “It would be foolish for us not to assume it’s here.”

On Tuesday, the Santa Rosa council was infiltrated by online commenters hurling racist and antisemitic comments during the early part of the meeting.

The incursion began after staff began the public comment portion of the meeting with an unusual reminder of the rules and a warning. Speakers were told they would be muted if they veered off topic. It did little to stop the vitriol from pouring in.

The slow windup by some hatemongers made it difficult for city officials to gauge when to cut off the mic. In other cases, the disparaging words came in too quickly for staff to react.

The disruption prompted a frustrated Mayor Natalie Rogers to request the council take a short recess before continuing — only for the meeting to again be sabotaged by another round of online commenters once it resumed.

The trend is pressing enough that the League of California Cities last week hosted a panel discussion at its annual conference and expo, called Stop Hate: How Local Elected Officials Can Combat Rising Hate Crimes and Hate Speech. It took place Thursday in a packed conference room in Sacramento. The panel was made up of five East Bay mayors or council members.

The discussion wasn’t limited to public-meeting Zoom bombs, but they are clearly a widespread problem, driven by what Fremont Mayor Lily Mei called “the cowardice of the keyboard.”

One of the speakers on the panel was Walnut Creek City Council member Kevin Wilk, who is Jewish. Like Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, Wilk has suffered an onslaught of personal attacks during public meetings over the past few months.

Wilk is one of many politicians and news outlets who have struggled with the question of whether to ignore attention-seeking bigots or expose them. He now advocates calling out hate speech at every opportunity.

“In November, someone hung a white pride banner across Ignacio Valley Road, the most trafficked road in Contra Costa County,” Wilk said. “I took the stance that it didn’t work for Jews 100 years ago to stay silent. We have to make sure this will not be normalized.”

How to curtail it is another question.

Eliminating Zoom comments is an obvious option. Some places are looking at lighter measures.

Concord has shortened its initial public comment period to 15 minutes, which usually allows for only five speakers, Mayor Laura Hoffmeister said during a Q&A at the Stop Hate panel. Anyone else wishing to comment has to wait for the very end of a meeting.

“Our big Zoom list went down to two or three people,” Hoffmeister said. “If they’re really interested, they’ll sit around for three hours and wait.”

Hopkins said she has spoken extensively to County Administrator Christina Rivera about whether the board could implement a time delay and have a staff member review the incoming feed before posting comments.

Another possibility, Hopkins said, is setting up remote teleconference locations for people who live in isolated areas. She does that when participating in regional boards. Hopkins also acknowledged that driving from Sea Ranch to, say, Guerneville is not an ideal solution for a working parent.

There is a lot of talk about technological solutions, too.

The Santa Rosa council has an accidental benefit built into its Zoom platform, according to Rogers. Seeking to give commenters a clear sense of how much time they have left, the council shows them a screen that is mostly a big timer. They don’t get to see much of the council members or others in the chambers.

“I’m speculating, but often with Zoom bombers, they’re really in it for the shock value,” Rogers said. “I’m wondering, do they get the same shock value if they don’t see the public reaction to it?”

A Sonoma County communications specialist said the Board of Supervisors clerk can see only a commenter’s chosen username — or, if it’s a caller, the phone number. He added that, “Zoom has reports that allow some additional details to be seen by the administrator after the conclusion of a webinar.”

The county counsel’s office determined they can legally release Zoom participants’ names, the representative said, but not email addresses, phone numbers or IP addresses.

Asked for comment on the recent wave of hate speech over its platform, a Zoom spokesperson provided a statement that read, in part: “We are deeply upset to hear about these incidents, and Zoom strongly condemns such behavior. We are committed to maintaining an equal, respectful and inclusive online environment for all our users. … We encourage users to report any incidents of this kind to Zoom and law enforcement authorities so the appropriate action can be taken against offenders.”

In a July 2021 blog post to its website, the company offered substantial technical guidance to users for limiting disruptions of meetings.

These include steering public entities away from Zoom Meetings to Zoom Webinars or Zoom Events, allowing only signed-in users to join, requiring a meeting passcode that is shared privately, removing unwanted users with the Security Icon or participants menu, disabling someone’s video, muting participants and pausing a meeting to report offending parties to Zoom’s Trust & Safety team.

Clearly, not all of those approaches are feasible for a meeting with hundreds of viewers.

Zoom did not respond to questions about what identifiers it captures from online users — for example, IP address — or whether it has banned abusive commenters.

For the most part, U.S. and state law is on the side of free speech, even if that speech is widely viewed as offensive.

As described on the California Department of Justice website, the state differentiates between hate crimes and hate incidents. Both involve actions aimed at someone because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability. But the first category includes acts that are legally defined as crimes.

Hate incidents include things like insults, distribution of hate material in public places and displaying hate messages on your own property.

“The U.S. Constitution allows hate speech as long as it does not interfere with the civil rights of others,” the DOJ wrote. “While these acts are certainly hurtful, they do not rise to the level of criminal violations and thus may not be prosecuted.”

That is a fundamental underpinning of American democracy, and has generally been accepted by people of many political persuasions through the years. Now some wonder if the rules need to change in the internet age, when people intent on nothing more than making a scene and spreading hateful views can, with the ease of a login link, shut down public discourse.

“Make no mistake, this a threat to local democracy,” Hopkins said. “These attacks are targeted, are designed intimidate and disrupt. We should all be furious. And it’s frustrating having to curtail the ability of other people to participate.

“In a way, it feels like they’re winning.”

Staff Writer Paulina Pineda contributed to this report. You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.