Alan C. Miller: From Manufactured Outrage to Commission Meetings

An article about clergy protecting child abusers was published. A man named Alan showed up in the comments to make a joke. Not about the abusers. Not about the clergy who shield them. Not about the children who were raped and then silenced by the institutions that were supposed to protect them. About himself. About being Jewish. A little jokee-joke on a piece about kids who were violated by the people who were supposed to represent God.

The article said the clergy doesn’t show up for you. Alan said “be weird if they did, as I’m Jewish.” The article was about children being abused and institutions protecting the abusers. Alan’s contribution was a self-deprecating punchline that made the article about him.

So, I wrote a limerick. The last line was “no balls to reply.” You have no courage to engage with the substance. That’s the joke. That’s the entire joke.

The cowardice is the point.

Not his religion.

Not his ethnicity.

His silence in the face of children being hurt.

Alan couldn’t handle being called a coward. So, he manufactured something else.

He claimed the limerick was about genital mutilation. He claimed it invoked a Jewish religious practice as a vehicle for ridicule. He claimed it was bigoted, violent, ethnic imagery. He wrote nearly a thousand words about how a joke about his cowardice was actually antisemitism. He used his identity as a shield to avoid addressing what the limerick actually said. Because if the limerick was about his cowardice, he’d have to address why he showed up to a conversation about protecting children and contributed nothing. If the limerick was about antisemitism, he got to be the victim. And Alan wanted to be the victim more than he wanted to talk about abused kids.

Then came his countdown.

“This matter goes to zero. Today’s number is: 5.”

Then 4. Then 3. Then 2. A public countdown. A deadline. Five days to publish an apology in the Davis Vanguard or face unspecified consequences. The language was polished. The format was formal. The threat was veiled but unmistakable. A man who couldn’t handle being called a coward was now demanding a public act of submission. Repent or face consequences. The theology of the church he doesn’t even attend, applied to a comment thread.

The countdown expired.

No apology came.

 So Alan escalated.

He showed up at a Winters City Planning Commission meeting. Public comment. He read the same thing he’d posted online. The countdown. The demand. The manufactured outrage. A man who doesn’t live in Winters, driving to a commission meeting in a city that isn’t his, to read a comment he’d already published, about a limerick that called him a coward on an article about child abuse. That’s not public comment. That’s a man who can’t let go. That’s a man who brings his grudge into a room where he knows you’ll have to sit and watch and not respond.

And he wasn’t alone. Five people showed up. Five. Coordinated. Together. A man named Don, posting online as Ron, claimed he’d overheard me saying I had Alan’s home address and IP address.

Overheard.

A lie.

Don posts under a fake name. Don shows up in person under his real one. Don lies under both.

What I actually did beforehand, days beforehand, was inform the president of the commission that Alan was counting down to something. Because when a man you’ve never met starts a public countdown demanding your submission, you tell people. You tell the people who need to know. The president. The lawyer. The people responsible for safety. That’s not a threat. That’s a warning. Don claimed to have overheard something I never said. Took a lie and turned it into a weapon. The same pattern. The same playbook. Take the truth, twist it, and use it to make the victim look like the aggressor.

Five people. In a room. Together. To intimidate. That’s not civic engagement. That’s a show of force. That’s five people coordinating to make a point. You’re surrounded. You’re watched. You’re not safe here. The commission knew. They’d been informed beforehand. The president. The lawyer. Possibly other commissioners. And when Alan and Don and the rest spoke, the commission did the right thing. They listened. They moved on. They didn’t engage with the spectacle because the spectacle wasn’t the point. The point was to create one. To make a public record. To turn a comment thread into a physical confrontation. To bring five people into a room to send a message.

A few months back, our car was vandalized. We walked out and found it damaged. I can’t prove who did it. I’m not going to say who did it. But I’m going to mention it because the escalation is the pattern. The comments. The countdown. Five people at a commission meeting. The car. Each step a little closer. Each step a little more physical. Each step proving that the cowardice was the least of his problems.

Alan either failed to understand a very simple sentence, or he’s deliberately misreading my words to manufacture bigotry outrage.

I’ll let you decide which is worse.

A man who can’t read a punchline shouldn’t be lecturing anyone about morality. And a man who can, but pretends he can’t, shouldn’t be trusted with anything.

The weaponization of identity is the pattern. A man makes a joke about being Jewish on an article about child abuse. When someone hits back, he claims antisemitism. He wraps himself in the language of social justice. He invokes the history of his people’s persecution to shield himself from the consequence of his own mouth. The identity becomes the armor. The history becomes the weapon. And the actual point, that children are being abused and institutions are protecting the abusers, gets buried under a thousand words about a limerick.

This is how it works. Not just Alan. The pattern. Show up to a serious conversation and contribute nothing. Get called out. Manufacture outrage. Demand submission. Escalate from comments to countdowns to commission meetings. Bring friends to lie on your behalf. Turn a warning about your behavior into a false accusation of a threat. Prove the diagnosis correct with every step you take.

The countdown went to zero. The apology didn’t come. The commission moved on.

He had no balls to reply to child abuse.

He still doesn’t.

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  • Matt Stone is an independent journalist and author based in Northern California. His work examines culture, memory, and the moral weight of everyday life through a clear, grounded lens. Stone’s writing currently consists of fiction and poetry, often exploring the intersection of personal experience and broader social currents.

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10 comments

  1. Wow. This seems bonkers.

    This also cracked me up: ” A man named Don, posting online as Ron, claimed he’d overheard me saying I had Alan’s home address and IP address.”

    Boo hoo hoo. Coming from a person (Alan) who doxxed someone else on the Davis Enterprise (me), posting their real name and place of employment. Pardon my French but f*** that. F*** anyone who does that.

    What a maroon. Seriously. Who does this person think he is? He can come in here and lob chaos monkey turd bombs that contribute absolutely nothing most of the time (and thinks he’s really HAW HAW HAW funny when he does it, too–Spoiler: He’s not), and then get offended when people finally push back?

    And then takes a group of bully boys to a meeting with him? I’m just mind boggled.

    This is what this person wants to do with his one wild life? Absof***inglutely pathetic.

    1. “Wow. This seems bonkers.”

      This seems bonkers because you are only getting one side of the story (so far), and thus makes the story incomplete and therefore inaccurate.

      “Coming from a person (Alan) who doxxed someone else on the Davis Enterprise (me), posting their real name and place of employment.”

      I want to make sure I am understanding the above sentence correctly: KS, what you are saying is “a person (Alan)” [Me] “doxxed” (the act of publicly revealing or sharing someone’s private or personally identifiable information online without their consent, usually with the intent to harass, intimidate, threaten, or harm them) “someone else on the Davis Enterprise (me)” [You?], “posting their [Your?] real name and place of employment.”

      Pardon if I misunderstood that convoluted sentence, but I believe you are saying that “Alan C. Miller doxxed you in the Davis Enterprise by posting your real name and place of employment.” ??? Am I interpreting your words correctly?

      If so, how would I do that? I don’t know you, I don’t know who you are, I didn’t know Kendra Smith wasn’t your real name, I don’t know your real name, and I don’t know where you work. Please post immediately what posting you are referring to or otherwise provide evidence of your accusation.”

      “Pardon my French but f*** that. F*** anyone who does that.”

      On that we agree. And F*** anyone who puts out false accusations of doxxing.

      This is going to end in one of two ways:

      1) You are going to provide the evidence of your accusation and I will apologize.

      2) You are going to admit this was a false accusation and you are going to apologize. To me, here, publicly.

      I think doxxing is vile and I don’t believe I’ve ever doxxed anyone (using the definition above, possibly not using some of the made-up definitions that distorters of the English language use).

      There is no Door #3. If DG takes this down, I will move it to the Davisite. I do not take false accusations lightly.

      1. Nope. Not apologizing. You mentioned my real name, which you knew from this site as well as my place of employment on the Davis Enterprise back in 2024 to a JJ Surbeck. I notified the Enterprise and they did not take it down so I canceled my subscribtion.

        I have nothing more to say to you. I’m not going to search for a post on the Enterprise from 2 years ago. I know what happened and it was you.

        Take your thin-skinned DARVO bullshit and shove it, sir.

        Oh no!!! You’ll take it to the Davisite! I can tell you I’m shaking in my boots.

      2. I have a screenshot from RelentlessCactus on November 15, 2024 8:57 a.m., who I am pretty sure is you, and that account mentioned my real name in a comment to JJ Surbeck. I do not use my real name on The Enterprise and yet you used it. My mistake about mentioning my place of employment, but you did doxx me with outing my real name.

        You don’t get to do that just b/c you know I use my real name in another forum. I obviously didn’t use it on the Enterprise for a fucking reason because I was literally getting *physical threats* by 2 people on NextDoor around that time. So, just no. What you did was not OK and then you squeal like a 12-year-old girl when called out? Laughable. Fucking laughable.

        Now you can truly f*** off, “Sir.” You don’t have a leg to stand on here.

        Here’s the link: https://www.davisenterprise.com/forum/commentary-the-nightmare-returns/article_6fc9d97c-9dff-11ef-9d34-03c2a519ba4d.html

        1. ‘relentlesscactus’ is indeed me, and I appreciate you providing the link. However…

          The only thing in the link you provided (besides 35(!!!) comments) is that I replied to someone who had repeatedly accused you of not using your real name. I posted that because I thought they were barking up the wrong tree. “KO Smith” was simply another form of your actual name, not a pseudonym, because you were posting elsewhere with your first and last name. I wasn’t exposing information, it was clearly the same person as both used streams of pejoratives at those they disagree with such as:

          “deplorables”, “civility scolds”, “keep on whining”, “unhinged”, “little toadies”, “right wing troll”, “clown”, “big part of the problem”, “no one gives a toss about your little blog”, “right-leaning old men”, “wankfest”, “anything slightly to the left of Attila the Hun”, “circle j*rk”, “13-year-old incel troll behavior”, “deranged and delusional cultists”, etc.

          The connection I made was between two obvious variations of your real name. More importantly, you explained elsewhere that you weren’t using your ‘real’ name because you wanted some separation due to threats. Yet the alternate identity you chose was simply another easily-identifiable form of your own name. You could have, should have, used an actual pseudonym if you were getting threats.

          You also initially accused me of revealing your place of employment. After producing the “receipts,” you admitted that you had exposed that, not me. In other words, the evidence you offered disproved the central accusation you made against me.

          But instead of saying, “I falsely accused you of revealing my employer,” all I received was “my mistake.” Like that you wrongly accused someone of committing a crime was trivial. Connecting the names “KO Smith” and “Kendra Smith” doesn’t make me Sherlock Holmes. Also I had no ill intent in doing so. Revealing private information would have been doxxing, but I didn’t do it.

          Accusing someone of “doxxing” is not a trivial criticism. It is an accusation that they maliciously exposed private identifying information in a way that can place someone at risk. That simply did not happen. I did not post your address, phone number, employer (which I didn’t know, and you say you did that, but I don’t see anything in the link about an employer at all), email address, family information, or any other private information.

          Say that you were wrong, and apologize. That would be the appropriate response after making an incorrect public accusation. But you will double down. Because you always do. As you did before with insults and expletives. I can tell you, KS, apologizing really doesn’t hurt that much, and it might take a load off.

  2. Keith posted this: “ So David and the Vanguard, is Alan Miller going to be given a chance to give his side of the story?”

    I have reached out to Alan and will assess the situation accordingly.

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