For at least four months, city and county meetings across the Bay Area have been hijacked repeatedly by remote callers spewing antisemitic, racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks during public comment periods.

Some local governments have had enough.

In the last two weeks, at least six city councils and one county board have decided to end remote comments via phone and Zoom. The practice began during the lockdowns early in the Covid-19 pandemic, and many governments had continued using it as a way to encourage public participation.

The city and town councils in El Cerrito, Santa Rosa, Livermore, Walnut Creek, Windsor and Healdsburg have reversed course and now require people to attend meetings in person in order to speak during the public comment period. They can also submit written comments in advance.

The remote comment option was “truly maybe the only silver lining that came out of Covid,” said Walnut Creek City Council member Kevin Wilk, who is Jewish. “It opened interaction with the public. It’s frustrating that a few can ruin it for the many, but we can’t be an amplification source for these hate groups.” 

Chris Coursey, head of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, announced on Sept. 28 that the board would “take a break from virtual comments while we try to figure out a solution to the racism, the antisemitism and the hate that has been spread online by bad actors over the last several weeks.”

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors may follow suit. During the Sept. 26 meeting, multiple bigoted commenters had to be cut off before Aaron Peskin, board president, declared his intention to change the rules and end remote comments entirely.

Repeated disruptions of meetings have not been the only outcome of the hate-filled comments. Wilk noted that he’s seen clipped recordings of the phoned-in hate speech posted to websites that glorify the antisemitic comments and recruit others.

The Goyim Defense League and White Lives Matter, two white supremacist groups, have been leading a coordinated effort to infiltrate public forums with hate speech, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which tracks the incidents. 

Hateful callers commandeered the public comment portion of the El Cerrito City Council meeting on Sept. 19, prompting the council to end its remote public comment policy as of Oct. 3.

“In recent weeks, over 35 California agencies have had their public meetings overcome with antisemitic, racist, and vulgar comments by a group of public speakers participating via Zoom,” the El Cerrito council said Sept. 28 in a statement announcing its decision.

“It appears that this is a coordinated effort to attack local meetings that offer remote public comments, and the majority of these speakers are not local and often not even located in California,” the statement said.

Two of the people leading the Zoom-bombing campaigns are current or former Bay Area residents. Ryan Messano of Fairfield, a white supremacist who specializes in disrupting public meetings, had been making hate-filled comments week after week at the Sonoma County meetings. Jon Minadeo Jr., a former Petaluma resident who now lives in Florida, is the leader of Goyim Defense League and a supporter of Messano.

It’s frustrating that a few can ruin it for the many, but we can’t be an amplification source for these hate groups.

Wilk said the Walnut Creek City Council has been dealing with recurring, anonymous and hate-filled comments at its meetings since early June that often targeted Wilk by name with anti-Jewish rants. On Tuesday, the council announced a ban on remote comments as of the next city council meeting on Oct. 17.

“It was a hard decision, because we wanted to see what we could do to keep that method of communication open for government interaction with the public,” he said. 

The announcement came after hate speech escalated at a Sept. 19 meeting when a malicious caller also read out someone’s Walnut Creek home address for the purpose of harassment, Wilk said. The city council cut the caller off mid-sentence.

“We said, ‘That’s it,’” Wilk said.