photo by: YouTube screenshot

Michael Eravi parades a notecard with an obscene word on it in front of the Lawrence school board on Monday, Jan. 27, 2025.

“You don’t have no (expletive) brains?”

The voice explodes from the speaker. It’s a man from a San Jose, California, area code, and he’s leaving a voicemail for a school board member in Lawrence, Kansas, nearly 1,500 miles away.

“You cannot do that to people,” the voice says. “You cannot shut down the First Amendment. Don’t you understand that? … You can’t get it through your (expletive) thick skull that we have rights here in America.

“You are not the (expletive) ruler, understand? Damn (expletive) b*tch.”

This message is one of more than a dozen threatening or harassing communications that Shannon Kimball of the Lawrence school board received in less than a week. And she thinks she knows why that person, possibly so far away from Lawrence, was motivated to send it to her.

That person was “activated,” she thinks, by videos of disruptive behavior at public meetings in Lawrence, which have spread on sites like YouTube and TikTok, sometimes with links to public figures’ government phone numbers and email addresses. Many such videos are made by a pair of frequent public commenters, who believe that they have an absolute right under the First Amendment to berate public officials with vulgar language and gendered insults at public meetings, and Kimball says it’s leading to dark and troubling behavior from the people viewing them.

“They’ve posted our phone numbers, our emails and our names,” Kimball said. “They superimposed Nazi hats on us and featured that in their videos, and what it is doing is activating extremist followers of those channels … and the result of that has been a barrage of emails, voicemails and telephone calls.”

“I’ve received quite a few more than in any other time in my board service,” said Kimball, who has served on the board since 2011.

At Monday’s school board meeting, Kimball wanted to let the community know what was going on. Before the meeting wrapped up, she made a public announcement about the messages she’d received — “over a dozen and a half … just in the last four days” — and said she suspected that other board members had been targeted, too.

“I’m making this as an announcement because I want to make the community aware that the bullying, harassment, intimidation that you’ve seen in person in our board meetings continues — it’s just not happening on the floor of the boardroom currently,” she said.

“It’s happening online, and it’s extending far beyond what you see or what is being reported about in the media or otherwise.”

• • •

The incidents in the board’s meeting room that Kimball was referring to were a series of outbursts at meetings earlier this year by commenters who claim the board’s decorum rules for public comment periods violate their First Amendment right to free speech.

On Feb. 10, one of these commenters, Michael Eravi, held the floor of the Lawrence school board’s public comment period for nearly half an hour. His behavior included disobeying board rules, which he dismissed as “bullsh*t,” by using foul language, calling officials crude names, demanding that they “shut up!” and refusing to either sit down or leave after being warned about his conduct. He refused to stand at the lectern designated for speakers or to speak into a microphone, instead wandering around the meeting room, and he sometimes held his middle finger up while officials were speaking.

This incident led school board President Kelly Jones to question whether public commenting at the meetings, in its current form, had simply become too disruptive to continue.

Eravi and another man, Justin Spiehs, have become known in Douglas County for showing up at city, county, school board and other meetings and ridiculing and insulting public officials. Among other things, Eravi has used the N-word in addressing a Black city commissioner at a Lawrence City Commission meeting, and Spiehs has made repeated insulting remarks about female public officials’ physical appearance.

Both men assert that they have a constitutional right to do all of this, and between them, they have sued many public officials in Douglas County and have been removed from multiple meetings.

At the time of Eravi’s disruption in February, Kimball described the actions of Eravi and multiple other public commenters as harassing and bullying.

“I believe the purpose of what they are doing is solely to disrupt the meeting and not for any legitimate public discourse,” she told the Journal-World in February.

• • •

Eravi has been temporarily prohibited from appearing in person at the school board’s meetings. But he continues to comment at them via videoconference — and to produce content about them on his YouTube channel, which has more than 22,000 subscribers and contains hundreds of videos of Eravi commenting at public meetings and interacting with public officials.

It’s these kinds of videos that Kimball thinks are to blame for the surge in harassment that she and other board members have seen.

“This is because, what happens is that the video from our meetings is being used to create YouTube content that is then shared in extremist online groups,” she said at the meeting on Monday.

The videos with Nazi hats Photoshopped onto public officials? Kimball was not exaggerating. There are videos on Eravi’s YouTube channel with thumbnails that fit that description, as well as on a channel operated by Spiehs that has more than 9,000 subscribers.

On Eravi’s channel, you can find videos with titles like “Cops Step in the Pile of Sh*t left by a Mentally Unstable School Board President Kelly Jones,” “More VICTIM PROPAGANDA from a gaslighting commission and her MouthPiece,” or “Lyin Lockhart and his Criminal Deputy Chiefs – Leading City Leaders by their Noses…,” the latter referring to Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart.

One thumbnail features an altered photo of Douglas County Commissioner Karen Willey — edited to be wearing a black military-style cap with a skull and crossbones, the emblem of the Nazi SS — and the text “Kommissar Karen gets caught lying again.” Another has a photo of Lawrence City Commissioner Bart Littlejohn with bright yellow text that says “BART’S ON SOME NEW MEDS.”

Spiehs’ channel, meanwhile, has a dozen or so videos with thumbnails of public officials wearing Nazi hats and titles like “Tyrant In Action” or “School Board TYRANNY.”

The videos themselves are often of the men speaking at the public comment periods of meetings — both in Douglas County and in other jurisdictions — or interacting with public officials or law enforcement officers.

Content involving Spiehs and Eravi has also been reposted and remixed by other content creators, including on TikTok. One TikTok video shows Eravi at the Feb. 10 school board meeting, and partway through the video, an image of Kimball appears on the screen along with her district phone number and email address.

Although Eravi’s own videos include a disclaimer in their description sections that states that “NONE of our videos should be considered a ‘call to action,'” the descriptions also sometimes contain links to the contact information pages of local government and police websites, where people can find elected officials’ office phone numbers and email addresses.

One video posted by Eravi last month, about an incident in Williamson County, Illinois, asks viewers to help identify law enforcement officers shown in a body camera video: “If this is your sheriff… Help us identify his GOONS!”

And Eravi’s channel description seems to encourage viewers to contact public officials.

“Your voices matter folks!” the description reads. “Make the calls! Send the emails! Tell them what you think even if you see things differently than others!! Your voice is all that matters!”

• • •

For Jones and Kimball, the calls and emails they’ve received haven’t seemed like normal feedback from the public. They’ve seemed much scarier.

Jones said some of the calls and emails she got made her fear for her own safety and that of her family. One person told her that “I’m going to rearrange your face,” she said.

And Kimball shared some of the communications she’d received with the Journal-World, including the one from the man with the San Jose area code and another, by email, that told her to “Get the (expletive) over yourself.”

“If you let our children get harassed and bullied then cater to the bully then you deserve every ounce you receive,” the email read. “Eat sh*t hypocrite (expletive.) I’ve had 2 family members bullied out (of) Lawrence Public Schools … Examine yourself first, harassment enabling idiot.”

There’s a common thread in these communications besides just being harassing, Kimball said at the meeting on Monday.

“They’re almost exclusively from men between the ages of 30 and 65,” she said. “They use hateful, obscene and misogynistic language in their voice messages. It’s really disturbing.”

She also said her guess was that the harassment she received was “probably less than what is being experienced by other women on our board.”

It’s not only members of the school board who say they’ve been targeted. Douglas County Commission Chair Patrick Kelly told the Journal-World via email that he has received harassing emails related to his public service and statements made at County Commission meetings. He added that other commissioners were also on these emails.

He said he did not want to share the contents of these emails, because “I choose not to prolong or amplify these attempts to intimidate by repeating them.”

• • •

The recent voicemails and emails are far from the first unsettling intrusions into the lives of local politicians. Just a little over a year ago, in fact, there were two incidents involving the Lawrence City Commission, neither of which is believed to have anything to do with Lawrence’s most well-known public commenters.

First, three city commissioners — Mike Dever, Brad Finkeldei and Lisa Larsen — had bricks in paper bags left on their porches along with notes accusing them of “violating your own law to displace and kill the homeless.” After that, Lawrence’s then-mayor, Littlejohn, and the police chief, Lockhart, both condemned the acts.

“There is no room for turning political differences into a potentially criminal act,” Lockhart said in his statement about this incident. “There is a forum to voice your political beliefs, and disrupting the feeling of safety and security of our leaders’ families does nothing to unite our community or advance any cause.”

Just a couple of weeks later, something unsettling would show itself in that very forum — the City Commission’s meeting.

On April 16, 2024, during the public comment period, three commenters hijacked the meeting’s Zoom feed and used it to display Nazi imagery, including a flaming swastika. They shouted down another commenter, describing her with an expletive and misogynistic language and berating her, and decried diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “exclusion” and “stealing from white people.” Disruptions involving the same group appeared to have occurred in cities elsewhere in the U.S., too, including Bend, Oregon; Helena, Montana; and Essex Junction, Vermont.

It was after that incident that the conversation about public comment periods in Lawrence began in earnest.

Several weeks later, the City Commission voted to stop broadcasting its general public comment period on its YouTube livestream and to move it to the end of its meetings. And in the fall, City Commissioner Amber Sellers started leaving the commission chamber during the general public comment periods and watching them remotely from another room.

In a statement explaining that decision in September 2024, she cited, among other things, “racial and political slurs directed at specific Commissioners during public comments” and “Intimidation tactics, including threats and bullying, that seek to create an atmosphere of fear and hostility.”

Reached by the Journal-World this past week, Sellers said she hadn’t seen an increase in harassing calls or emails recently, but that she thinks the community recognizes when there are problems in the public discourse.

When people use racist and misogynistic language in addressing public officials, Sellers said, it can get in the way of constructive discourse. She added that it’s a small number of people using that kind of rhetoric, and most of the community does not want to see it happen.

“I feel there are people in the community who empathize with what we’re experiencing and don’t tolerate it,” Sellers said. “They call it out when they see it.”

Sellers and other local officials think there are some people in the community who are more interested in testing boundaries than in actually engaging with local government issues. Kelly said via email that although “Passionate public comment is expected at our meetings,” some people “have chosen to use public comment as a forum to test legal interpretations of public forums and speech rights related to those public forums.”

The concerns aren’t just about running efficient meetings. Some people worry about what message the harassment sends to other meeting attendees — or to those who might want to run for office themselves.

Jones told the Journal-World that she thinks it’s helpful to engage with community members during the public comment period of the board’s meetings, but disruptions discourage people from attending in person and sharing their comments with the board.

“I am concerned (that this) has created an environment in which people do not want to come and provide public comment, and particularly in our setting because it may not feel like a safe place to bring a kid if you are a parent, for example,” Jones said.

This year is also an election year for the Lawrence school board and the Lawrence City Commission. While Jones said the harassment will not be a deciding factor on whether she chooses to run for another term on the board, she said it is something that she will talk to people about when they ask about running, so they can be aware and have that conversation with their families.

“If someone is thinking about running and they have an ability to serve the community in this capacity, I wouldn’t want this to deter them,” Jones said. “I just want them to consider it.”

And, for her part, Kimball made it clear on Monday that she is not backing down.

“I wanted to share with the community,” she said, “that I refuse, personally, to be silenced by these bullying attempts.”

Reporter Bremen Keasey contributed reporting to this article.