Council restricts public comments in wrestle with Nazi trolls
Aiming to “combat vile comments,” the council has limited pre-meeting public input to in-person commenters only. The city has altered a past YouTube stream to remove the offending language.
The Laramie City Council has removed the ability of virtual attendees to offer public comment at the outset of its meetings.
Councilors passed Resolution 2024-16 on an 8-1 vote last week, deciding that comments “on non-agenda related items at the beginning of the meeting may only be taken in person at the physical location of the meeting.”
The move comes in response to months of sustained bigoted and racist disruptions — proffered virtually — that have derailed the council’s public comment periods and cast a cloud over the rest of each night’s proceedings.
“We’ve had a wave of unproductive and hateful public comments leading our meetings,” Mayor Brian Harrington said ahead of the vote last week. “For lack of other tools left to combat vile comments leading off every meeting, this was our next step.”
To be clear, virtual attendees may still offer input on agenda items as they are discussed throughout the meeting, and may still offer input on non-agenda items during the public comment period that comes at the end of each meeting.
But the general public comment period at the outset of each meeting — so far the Nazi trolls’ main target — will be restricted to in-person comments. That means only those willing and able to attend in person will be allowed to take the mic.
“This feels like a fairly small step,” Harrington said. “We’re talking specifically about the first public comment period and asking folks that, if they want to comment, please be here in the room for that first public comment period. Or you are welcome to call council members or email.”
The disruptions have indeed been “vile.” The trolls have made frequent references to Hitler’s Nazi Party, identified themselves with the names of Hitler’s lieutenants, dropped racial slurs, dipped into explicit, conspiratorial rants about atheists and Jews, and more.
Councilor Brandon Newman said he heard from a Jewish constituent who felt they could no longer tune into council meetings given the explicit and prolific antisemitism they would likely be accosted with.
“This truly pisses me off,” Newman said.
The comments have been so repulsive that Mayor Harrington said he was worried the city’s catalog of YouTube streams could violate the video site’s terms of service.
Following up on that concern, city staff altered a previous meeting’s stream, splicing out a comment that had used the n-word. (The splice can be seen at timestamp 14:10.)
City Clerk Nancy Bartholomew said it was the first time, to her knowledge, the city had altered a recording in that way.
“We didn’t want to violate the YouTube terms and conditions and be removed — because that’s how we stream our meetings to the public,” she told the Laramie Reporter. “We don’t want to lose the ability to be able to do that.”
Bartholomew added members of the public can still access the uncut recording by filing a records request with the city.
Several months of hateful comments
The hateful comments started in October when online attendees derailed a council discussion about starting meetings with an invocation. They employed barely coded Nazi dog whistles and ranted about Jews, while a follow-up comment featured an automated voice. The prayer proposal itself was rejected by councilors, but that night’s hateful and disruptive online comments were only the beginning of what would soon become a pattern.
At the next meeting, it happened again, and the council approved a resolution to require “cameras on” for anyone offering comments virtually.
This has not stopped Nazi trolls from launching into tirades while the mayor tells them repeatedly to turn on their cameras. But it has empowered the city to shut down those faceless tirades before they get too far.
Still, when the trolls attack, they attempt to offer these bogus comments repeatedly, using different usernames to appear initially as different individuals looking to comment. Whether there are multiple people engaging in these attacks, or whether one person is impersonating many, is not clear.
Since October, half of the council’s regular meetings have been disrupted in this way.
This typically forces the council to suspend the rules and close the online comment period — an action which brings the bigoted comments to end, but also cuts off any other virtual attendee hoping to share legitimate input.
“I honestly hate doing the suspension of the rules every week,” Harrington said. “Because … residents who want to have a legitimate public comment are then blocked out without knowing why and without being able to prepare for being here.”
Fairness and “discrimination”
Councilor Andi Summerville cast the sole dissenting vote. She argued council should either eliminate the first public comment period altogether, or keep both in-person and virtual as options, but should not ban one while allowing the other.
“This may not be legally discriminatory, but it feels discriminatory towards residents who have been using it appropriately,” Summerville said. “And it feels like it's unnecessarily silencing those residents.”
Council votes can hinge on who is available or willing to offer public comment.
For example, councilors rejected rental regulations in 2019 when they heard overwhelmingly from landlords opposed to the idea. But the council reversed course and adopted rental regulations in 2022 after hearing from a more balanced mix of landlords and tenants, as well as nonprofit organizations and community organizers, who largely supported the regulations. (Public comments were not the only factor that turned that vote; growing awareness of rental issues and the election of a few new council members also turned the tide.)
In another instance, a councilor who had been vocally supportive of an affordable housing ordinance voted against that ordinance after hearing almost exclusively from constituents opposed to it.
Not wanting to limit the council’s initial public comment period, Summerville said there might be other ways to address the issue of disruptive comments.
“There are a number of tools that we could be using to manage these meetings,” she said. “There’s a number of tools that I don’t believe that the city has used yet to control the meeting, the Zoom bombing, that we’re experiencing. I don’t want it to continue but I’m uncomfortable with this course of action.”
Mayor Harrington countered that every other tool had been exhausted. He said the council cannot require pre-registration, and the city already blocks attendees from sharing their screen.
“We are not able to mute people that are already admitted,” Harrington added. “Once you’re a panelist, you’re able to unmute yourself. And then what we end up doing is muting and unmuting back and forth.”
The attacks have taken a toll on councilors, who have been visibly flustered or angry following each “wave of unproductive comments.” While lending her support for the resolution Tuesday, Councilor Erin O’Doherty spoke about that toll.
“It was 79 years ago this weekend my uncle was killed by Nazis in France,” she said. “I feel when I say the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m honoring that sacrifice. And I really don’t want Nazis speaking at our meeting. It just ruins the spirit of the meeting.”