Davis political organizer Dillan Horton reflects on activism, backlash and the importance of hope
By LAILA AZHAR — features@theaggie.org
When Davis-based activist Dillan Horton reflected on his upbringing, he traced the roots of his political consciousness back to his childhood.
“If you ask any of my close relatives — even if I myself look back at my upbringing — it doesn’t seem overtly political,” Horton said. “But if you’re paying attention, all of it very much was.”
His grandmother, whom he described as “the first protestor of the family,” lived in Dallas during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
“She watched all the county commission meetings on local-access TV,” Horton said.
His mother, a nurse and lifelong union member, instilled in him a similar sense of civic duty.
“She was very much, ‘You have to register to vote, you have to vote in every election, you have to pay attention to the news,’” Horton said. “There wasn’t a time where there wasn’t a newspaper on the coffee table or the news playing on the TV in my home growing up.”
Still, Horton never expected to end up in politics. During his fourth year of high school, his government teacher mentioned in passing that, because their congressperson was retiring, a campaign was looking for interns.
“He was like, ‘Hey, send them your resume,’” Horton said. “I had never even had a resume before this moment.”
Around the same time, a friend asked him to help lead a high school chapter of Amnesty International, a global human rights organization. Once Horton stepped into the world of activism, he knew he would never leave.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that might be interesting — I’ll try it out,’” Horton said. “And then it was like a drug.”
After attending El Camino College, which he called “the best community college in the world,” Horton transferred to UC Davis. Since then, he’s become a familiar figure in local organizing circles.
His “activist home,” as he described it, is the Yolo County chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
“We started as the sad and disappointed and dejected people who were volunteers for Bernie [Sanders]’ 2020 presidential primary campaign here in Yolo County,” Horton said.
After Sanders’ defeat, the group met downtown for a final get-together — which instead became the de-facto first meeting of Yolo DSA. The members decided to channel their campaign energy into building a permanent base for progressive politics in the region.
When one of the original co-chairs moved away in 2021, Horton was elected to the position.
“Our bread and butter, what I’m always trying to make sure that we’re involved in, is labor solidarity,” Horton said.
The organization’s very first campaign, he recalled, was supporting SEIU 2015 — the in-home health workers union — as they negotiated new contracts.
“It’s about how we, as a community organization outside the union, can back them up in contract struggles or be helpful on the ground when unions are trying to start up,” Horton said.
Horton’s civic engagement extends beyond DSA. He spent six and a half years on the Davis Police Accountability Commission before joining the city’s Social Services Commission this summer. He currently serves as president of the Yolo County Pride Democratic Club, sits on the Davis Pride Committee and is the board chair of the Davis Vanguard.
He is also a two-time city council candidate, running in 2020 and 2024. Central to both campaigns — and to much of his activism — is the issue of affordable housing.
“It comes in different ways, but across the board the thing that people want to talk to you about more than anything else is some kind of area of housing, the price of housing, the availability of houses,” Horton said.
Even in the wealthier neighborhoods of Davis, he has heard the same concern.
“For them, it’s their kids,” Horton said. “Their kids probably grew up middle class, and they maybe have an upper-middle-class job now. But their kids can’t afford to start their family in Davis. So for them it’s like, ‘Man, my kids have to drive in from two hours away to visit because they can’t afford to live here in the community that they grew up in.’”
At a time when identity-based issues often dominate national conversations, Horton believes people are united by economic reality.
“The reality of people here is that they care about where they’re going to live and putting food on the table,” Horton said.
While running for office often exposes one to an onslaught of personal attacks, Horton’s wit and friendly demeanor have helped him withstand the intensity of being in the public eye.
“I’ve got thick skin,” Horton said. “I joke that because I was the skinniest, shortest, gayest kid in all my classes growing up, I had to develop a way of dealing with people picking on me that wasn’t fighting back — because I was too short and skinny to really make that peer-to-peer competition happen. So, I had to develop a sense of humor.”
However, some of the vitriol he received during his second campaign was uniquely difficult.
“I was prepared for all the personal attacks with the gay stuff,” Horton said. “I’ve been doing ‘gay’ for a while. What I was not particularly prepared for was how saying that Palestinians were human beings that didn’t deserve to get murked out of existence would be met with such intense hate.”
During his second campaign, he recalled attempting to balance staying true to his
principles with strategy. His first statement after Oct. 7, he believed, was overly hesitant.
“It’s like that Rihanna clip when she came out with that, ‘Um, it’s for women and men and um, people of all gender appropriations,’ like she’s fighting for her life,” Horton said.
Despite his initially cautious response, he still faced harsh criticism for his views on Palestine.
Photos of him at protests and city meetings were previously circulated on social media — sometimes altered to include or enhance logos of organizations, implying affiliations he didn’t have.
In dealing with this type of criticism, Horton was reminded of his days as a UC Davis student, when Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions were being considered by the student government.
“I was a student government nerd, and so, [during] my first year in Davis, I was in ASUCD,” Horton said. “I saw it affect my friends on the Ethnic and Cultural Affairs Commission, a lot of whom were Middle Eastern or Muslim; how it made it unsafe for them to walk home on campus at night during the time when this was being discussed.”
Today, that climate feels familiar to many UC Davis students navigating political discourse.
Just last month, UC Berkeley sent letters notifying members of campus whose names had been included in reports of “alleged antisemitic incidents” to the Donald Trump administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), as part of a decision made by the University of California’s systemwide general counsel.
This decision by the University of California, alongside events including the arrest and threatened deportation of student organizer Mahmoud Khalil, have created a culture of fear in discussing Israel and Palestine.
“It’s insane to be on social media, witnessing the horrific images coming out of Gaza and then to scroll and hear about someone losing their job or the visa status for saying that those atrocities are wrong,” an anonymous third-year art studio student said.
An anonymous third-year cognitive science major pointed out college campuses often serve as flash points for heated global issues.
“College students are often at the forefront of protesting war and conflict, like the Vietnam War in the ‘60s [and ‘70s], and now with Palestine,” the student said. “So there’s a lot of media attention on things like the encampments, which means that when there’s backlash to this speech, the crackdowns are often really felt by college students.”
Horton noted the irony of right-wing attacks on political speech.
“The ‘party of the First Amendment,’ the party of, ‘Hey stop cancelling everyone’ is actively ‘cancelling’ people by jetting them from the country,” Horton said.
Despite fears about the state of the world, Horton encouraged people to have hope.
“We haven’t not faced genocide before, as a humanity,” Horton said. “We haven’t not faced misogyny before. We haven’t not faced transphobia, homophobia, anti-blackness, xenophobia. We’re seeing them in a perhaps different angle than we have before, but these are all demons and boogeymen that we have faced in the past — and overcome. That gives me some degree of solace.”
Horton turned to history for strength, citing Bayard Rustin — the Black, gay civil rights leader who organized the 1963 March on Washington — as an inspiration.
“They found a way,” Horton said. “We can borrow from their techniques, figure out how to adapt them to our time, to our own situations, and use that to navigate our way out of these troubled waters that we’re in right now.”
He discouraged people from letting the state of the world paralyze them.
“We’re overwhelmed with ‘bam, bam, bam,” ‘You don’t have this right” or ‘We’re challenging this’; ‘Are we invading Canada today? We’ll find out!’” Horton said. “It is human to be struggling to deal with that. But we have to remember that being overwhelmed is what they are relying on. So we have to figure out a way to take care of ourselves, because this is very much a marathon, not a sprint, and we’ve got to figure out a way of being in it for the long haul.”
Written by: Laila Azhar — features@theaggie.org
