Intro: Political Polarization in America and UC Davis

It’s 2026, and you’re scrolling through your TikTok, Instagram, or X/Twitter feed. After the memes, it’s politics, and if you have any opinions that don’t perfectly match either side, both tribes will eat you alive. Conservatives will dismiss empathy as “woke” or a mental illness to justify ignoring opposing views, while Liberals will label any nuance or disagreement as “violent speech” or “anti-human rights” to morally justify their hatred for dissenting takes. Both sides have their polarizing, dismissive patterns with their “justifications”.

UC Davis is no exception. Just like every other modern university, UC Davis marks itself as an environment of inclusivity and intellectual diversity — and just like most modern universities, it’s a facade. The university is only inclusive of the views that the campus already agrees with. Challenge the progressive orthodoxy, even slightly, and you’re labeled a “fascist”, “nazi”, “bigot”, or in my case, “Brown Charlie Kirk” – a nickname ironically coined by the same people who claim not to judge people by their race.

But this essay isn’t just about me. As an international student studying at the University of California, Davis, for three years, I’ve witnessed first-hand how the American political polarization works at the institutional level.

To be clear, both conservative and liberal sides do this, but Davis happens to lean overwhelmingly progressive, and so the institutions doing the targeting here skew that way too. As for my own politics? They've shifted plenty over the years and will probably keep shifting — I don't pledge allegiance to either team, just whichever position makes more sense to me at the time. This essay isn't a defense of conservatives or an attack on liberals. It's a critique of what happens when any institution gets to act as judge, jury, and headline writer for ideas it doesn't like.

This article will focus primarily on the 2025 and 2026 ASUCD (Associated Students of UC Davis) elections to highlight how campus bodies — specifically the student government and The California Aggie — weaponize their platforms to eliminate ideologically inconvenient candidates before voters ever get a say. And by the time the voters do? The narratives against those candidates have already been pushed onto the voters.

Context: Recent events at UC Davis

To understand what’s happened at UC Davis, there are two events that you must be aware of.

The first is the November 2025 ASUCD elections — the race that determines which student government body oversees ASUCD’s $22 million annual budget.¹ The front-runners, Ryan Kan and Aaron Heth, running under the Aggie Alliance Slate, got disqualified at midnight in the middle of campaign week on the basis of anonymous written complaints and a Reddit post.² Heth successfully appealed and was reinstated.³ Kan wasn’t so lucky; he lost his appeal and was removed from the race entirely.

The second is Spring 2026 — the same Aaron Heth, now a sitting ASUCD senator, faced an impeachment attempt after The California Aggie published a front-page exposé framing his attendance at TPUSA’s CVP conference (a conservative conference for collegiate leadership) as grounds for removal.⁴ The Senate voted 11-3 to initiate impeachment proceedings.⁵ He survived, but what happened inside that senate chamber is worth paying attention to: a hearing about campaign finance bylaws somehow turned into a public interrogation of a candidate's religious beliefs, with senators openly mocking his faith.⁶ Luckily, he survived as the impeachment failed to pass.⁷ But the fact that there were two attempts to boot him from the Senate tells you everything about our campus’s lack of ideological tolerance.

And I’m not just a random neutral observer here. I’m an international student who got tired of watching our campus’s bullshit, called it out publicly, and became a temporary center of attention, as the “Crash Out Guy” or “Brown Charlie Kirk” on r/UCDavis and the UC Davis Instagram stories page.⁸ But I’ll get to that story in a bit.

Fall 2025: Ryan Kan

On November 13th, 2025, at 8:30 PM — a random Thursday in the middle of campaign week — the ASUCD Elections Committee unanimously voted to disqualify Ryan Kan and Aaron Heth. Prior to the disqualification, Kan and Heth were the leading top candidates, respectively, chosen democratically by UC Davis students and were the most likely to win seats in the race.⁹

The elections committee’s official charge was “unduly incentivizing the casting of votes”. Or simply put, voter intimidation. The evidence was two anonymous written complaints, one Reddit post, and one named complaint from a student named Ryan Hill.¹⁰ No videos, no recordings, and the only non-written piece of evidence was a photo of Kan standing near the South East entrance to the Memorial Union, which proved nothing beyond the fact that he was on campus holding an umbrella and staring at his own phone.

And here’s where things get interesting. The Judicial Council — which one would hope is less prejudiced and fairer than the Elections Committee — justified the disqualification based on complaint volume rather than evidence credibility. I’ll play the Devil’s Advocate for a moment: it does sound somewhat fair on the surface that multiple people having complaints regarding the same candidate warrants scrutiny into the candidate. But the problem with this logic is that a public figure — especially a conservative figure like Kan in a polarized progressive campus — will inevitably attract complaints motivated by ideology rather than genuine grievance. Complaints are a good signal worth investigating, but they are not proof on their own. And if the Judicial Council believes in the flawed approach of relying on “Preponderance of Evidence” (meaning a claim only needs to appear more likely true than not, rather than being true “beyond a reasonable doubt”) in a case where complaint volume can be easily skewed based on a candidate’s political identity, then they haven’t delivered justice and are just serving cancel culture dressed in legal language.

And the picture of the Judicial Council gets even worse when we dig a level deeper into how those complaints were actually generated. Rather than receiving direct incident reports from the complainants themselves, a large number of the Elections Committee’s correspondents were friends and bystanders speaking on behalf of the victims rather than the victims themselves. And on top of that, the follow-up questionnaire sent to the complainants contained leading questions that practically scripted the answers they needed — questions like “Did Ryan Kan rank candidates on your friend’s phone without her consent?” No wonder all complainants have the same circumstantial complaint; you handed it to them on a silver platter. Sure, I can give the committee the benefit of the doubt and blame it on incompetence and laziness rather than malice, but that still doesn’t justify the impact it had on Ryan Kan’s campaign and disqualification.

That said, not all complaints are easily dismissible. Ryan Hill — the only named complainant, whom I also followed up with personally on Instagram —walked into ASUCD himself and filed a complaint without any direction from the committee. His account (shown below) is the strongest complaint in the record and deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. I can’t testify to its legitimacy nor illegitimacy as I do not know Ryan Hill’s character, but I can say that after filtering through every piece of evidence myself, this was the only account that sounded genuine with a specific grievance. If true, it reasonably justifies one violation point — not the four unanimously assigned by the Elections Committee in a single midnight meeting to trigger an immediate disqualification. For the sake of transparency, just as I played the Devil’s advocate before, I have attached my correspondence with Ryan Hill and his Testimony below.

To top it all off, Kan was only given a 24-hour notice before his appeal hearing, while ASUCD dumped significant additional written statements he had never seen before within that same window. In any legitimate judicial framework, withholding evidence from the defendant is easy grounds for dismissal. I would know — I was a petitioner in a case at the Yolo County Superior Court last year, and I’ve seen how easily written statements can be fabricated or manipulated, and saw the judge dismiss most statements without signed affidavits or in-person witnesses, the way a proper legal system should work anyway.

I want to be clear about my position. I am not saying Ryan Kan is definitely innocent. Personally? I believe he is innocent based on my interview with Kan and my assessment of this campus’s hatred towards conservative candidates. However, my goal is always to draw a firm line between my personal opinions on this blog and the objective facts, letting you, the reader, form your own opinions. While there is potential credibility to the Ryan Hill statement, it also sits buried under a mountain of unbacked, anonymous reports and an incompetent questionnaire rather than true incident accounts orchestrated by the Elections Committee.

Ultimately, my goal isn’t to use my platform to play the judge on Kan’s character, but rather to highlight the abysmally low burden of proof ASUCD relied upon to derail a democratic election due to their bias towards conservative candidates. Bypassing statutory law, using circumstantial evidence, and using all means at hand to remove a candidate they ideologically opposed.

Perhaps as a reader, you're thinking: maybe this isn't about conservatives at all — maybe people just didn't like Kan, specifically, for unrelated reasons, and it's a stretch to read this as institutional bias. If that's you, that's a fair and analytical instinct, and honestly? I had similar doubts while writing this myself. But the Aaron Heth incident that I will be covering next, combined with an interview with Ryan Kan detailing his personal account, should make it abundantly clear this is unlikely to be a coincidence.

Spring 2026: Aaron Heth

The California Aggie Article

The incidents of Fall 2025 were quite mild compared to their sequel in 2026. Aaron Heth, who survived the initial slander during his Fall 2025 run, became the target of our student newspaper, The California Aggie.

On April 15, 2026 — just days before the ASUCD spring elections — The California Aggie published a front-page exposé revealing that Heth, then a sitting senator & current ASUCD presidential candidate, had attended a leadership retreat hosted by the Campus Victory Project (CVP) affiliated with Turning Point USA (TPUSA).¹¹ The retreat happened in December 2025, yet the article was published four months later in April 2026. Timed perfectly right before an election, Heth was actively campaigning in. And notice, The California Aggie article argues this is relevant due to potential violation of ASUCD funding by-laws, yet the headline leads with TPUSA rather than leading with a funding violation.

Was this a coincidence? Maybe. But it’s worth noting that this is the second election cycle in a row where damaging information about a candidate conveniently surfaced right at the most electorally damaging moment. Cal Aggie sat on a four-month-old incident and surfaced it exactly when it was politically convenient to do so.

Given that I prefer analyzing incidents from multiple angles to cover all tracks, even improbable ones, I could argue that perhaps The California Aggie’s motive was not personal political bias but rather reactionary clickbait timed for campus relevance. But even if that’s true — even if there’s no personal political bias among The California Aggie staff, which is highly improbable — it’s still unethical. Modern news sources are inherently biased, but that’s not a justification to continue that bias. This blog, which is openly opinionated because it’s a blog, is somehow still more factual than a news source, whose ethical responsibility should be to convey facts stripped of opinions, letting readers form their own conclusions. If this were a senator attending a No Kings protest, would it have generated the same front-page treatment, four months after the fact, days before an election? I doubt it.

The article worked instantly, within a day, Heth’s running mate Sean Birge publicly distanced himself, posting on Instagram that he was “completely unaware” of Heth’s attendance and reiterated himself to be a “dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and Anti-Zionist” as a means to clarify that he remained an acceptable candidate, while Heth did not.¹² Heth dropped out of the presidential race shortly after, and the entire Vision Slate dissolved.

And, as if dropping wasn’t enough, the ASUCD Senate voted 11-3 to begin impeachment proceedings against Heth over his Senate Seat — not the presidential race he had just abandoned, but the Senate Seat he had held since Fall 2025.

It’s worth noting the article’s positioning. The official framing was about campaign finance — implying that Heth’s fully-funded CVP attendance meant he received campaign funding by CVP and violated ASUCD funding bylaws regarding outside monetary support. I’m not sure how The California Aggie ever made that connection. They gave no evidence that any campaign funds were actually being used, or whether Heth made any questionable expenditures. Unless printing campaign fliers is suddenly as costly as buying bitcoins, there are no obvious extravagant campaign expenditures. Clearly, the article used the funding angle as a way to cover its tracks, with the goal to smear Heth using the TPUSA label.

And the most absurd part is that, unlike Ryan Kan, who has been openly Republican, Aaron Heth has never publicly stated his political affiliation. Based on conversations with people close to his campaign, my best read is that he's somewhere between moderate and Democrat, not a conservative being "exposed".

Factual Discrepancies and The Iowa State Precedent

• Heth attended the CVP retreat in December 2025, after the Senate election had already concluded in November and he’d won. Unless he is a time-traveler, it is impossible for him to use CVP funds for an election in the past.
• By the time the Senate voted for Heth’s impeachment on April 30th, Heth had already dropped out of the presidential race entirely. Impeaching a sitting senator over campaign bylaws tied to a future race he was no longer running in.
• To lend the impeachment legitimacy, Cal. Aggie cited precedent from the Iowa State University, where a student body president faced impeachment over CVP-related associations. What the California Aggie didn’t mention is that the Iowa State Judicial Branch — backed by their university administration — dismissed the impeachment articles entirely, citing First Amendment violations.¹³ (And this is a university without similar funding-related bylaws).

Conference Attendance != Endorsement

Let’s take a step back from the bylaws and assess the basic premise — a college student attended a two-day leadership & skill builder conference, hosted by an organization with different political beliefs than his own. A left-leaning student attending a conference hosted by a conservative organization to understand how they organize & campaign is seen as an offense, rather than being treated as the exact kind of curiosity a university is supposed to encourage.

Stepping foot into an opposing political or professional conference is a basic academic and strategic opportunity. Researching your opposition’s strategies is an intelligent and civil approach to understanding why they command the democratic majority's support, not a scandal.

Not to mention, a professional networking event designed to offer leadership mentoring and campaign skills is ideologically neutral. It’s just teaching. Learning core professional skills is no different whether the teacher leans republican or democrat. If I’m taking a Law class, my teacher being a Republican or Democrat doesn’t matter — what matters is how good they are at teaching me law.

Religious Interrogation

And finally, what seals the deal and confirms ASUCD’s disgusting bias is when they openly commented on Heth’s religious beliefs. According to The California Aggie, before the deliberation of the impeachment resolution, the public discussion repeatedly focused on Heth’s religious background and ethnicity. “Every single time Heth’s faith has been brought up, your snickering faces, your looks to each other — your hatred has shone through, and everyone here in the room witnessed it”, an anonymous comment on the California Aggie article.¹⁴

Payne responded in defense of the table, “I don’t think that we’re a hateful group. I don’t think the people sitting here are racist either, especially since most of them are minorities, and minorities do not have the institutional power to be racist. Racism is based on structure.”

My take? According to Payne, racism is only possible if you’re not a minority. Is racism defined as oppression based on race, or is it defined as the oppression of “minorities” based on race? Let me add some facts: in California, a significant 28% of the population is foreign-born, and Latinos/Hispanics are actually the largest ethnic group, making up 41%.¹⁵ I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist — but the logic that a minority (which factually no longer adds up in California) can’t be racist toward a non-minority population doesn’t hold. Racism is racism, and demographics (which were false anyway) don’t change that. If you’re a UC Davis student, look around. Are white people really the majority on our campus right now?

And before someone calls me a “fascist” or a “nazi,” I’m an Indian immigrant on an F-1 visa. I’m twenty years old as of now and spent the first eighteen years of my life in India. I am neither a resident of California nor a citizen of the United States of America. I am a statistical minority in California — only 2.4% of the ethnic population, where only 0.3% of which is on temporary visas like me. So I’m defending Heth as someone who actually fits the minority category they’re using. What’s sad is that I even have to pull out my “minority privilege” card to make this argument. I should be able to just call out the bullshit logic without first proving I have the right to speak.

Finally

Ultimately, this entire debacle makes it clear that our university has political problems. The ASUCD bylaws and campaign finance rules were never the actual point. They abandoned statutory law, made the debate about ethnicity and religion, and weaponized their platforms to aid their benefit (ironic given the strong stance against “fascism”). Two witch hunts, one for Ryan Kan, and one for Aaron Heth. Heth held on a strong fight and survived, Kan wasn’t so lucky, but neither deserved it.

Ryan Kan’s Statement

Until now, this essay has pulled evidence from official ASUCD documents, The California Aggie, Reddit posts, independent research, and an unhealthy amount of social media digging. I collected all of it across roughly seventy pages of iPad annotations and a gigantic Notion document. That research was critical to forming this essay, but honestly? It would've still been missing a critical human layer had I not interviewed Ryan Kan directly.

Coincidentally, while I was debating whether I should take time away from my already overcrowded schedule (one glance at any other page on this website about me and you'll see what I mean) to write this essay, I ran into Kan near Latitude Dining Commons. This was shortly after I had gotten "cancelled" by the UC Davis Reddit community for publicly criticizing The California Aggie's coverage of Aaron Heth. Kan recognized me as the guy defending Heth in Instagram comments and the infamous "Crash Out Guy" from Reddit. What started as a quick conversation turned into a two-hour discussion that gave me a much better understanding of his perspective—and provides the foundation for the quotes and arguments that follow.

The first thing about our communication that struck me was how Kan wasn’t frustrated about not winning a seat in the election, but rather about being judged for misrepresented arguments, before people ever even took the time to understand his real beliefs.

“People don't ever ask me like what I believe they just jumped a conclusion... Out of all the college Republican presidents in California... I probably would agree with [the average Davis student] more a lot compared to others”

As the President of the Davis College Republicans, Kan argued that most students immediately associate him with the most extreme stereotypes attached to his party, when in reality, he describes himself as significantly more moderate than many people assume.

"One side seems to think it's okay to bully the other side rather than actually having taken the time to talk and meet them.”

Throughout the interview, Kan repeatedly returned to a philosophy he associated with Martin Luther King Jr.: that disagreement should be met with dialogue rather than social exclusion.

"You don't fix polarization by judging people and by bullying people."

"My main deal when people just take away is that you don't fix polarization by judging people and by bullying people."

Kan also argued that modern political culture increasingly pushes people into a rigid binary group, leaving no room for moderation. This creates a situation where individuals can simultaneously be viewed as too conservative by some groups and too liberal by others. In his own words:

"When people like me who are more moderate leave the party, you only make room for the people that you don't want the party... like the white supremacist... the fascists... the Nazis. You make room for people like this.”

Kan explained that this is one of the primary reasons he continues to identify as a Republican despite disagreeing with portions of the party's platform. During our conversation, he openly acknowledged that college had changed many of his views.

"I don't agree with a lot of my party. I mean, don't get me wrong."

"I think college has definitely been a more eye-opening experience. It has made me more liberal in some issues. It's made me more fiscally conservative in other issues."

Kan ultimately returned to the same conclusion that surfaced throughout nearly every topic we discussed: dialogue is more productive than isolation.

"I understand that you might be thinking that we're all thinking the same, we're all a monolith... but I'm going to tell you something right now, we are not all a monolith."

"I will guarantee you that... we all have more in common than you think."

Finally, Kan closed with the following message:

“I don't know what the purpose of kicking me off the ballot and I will never know the purpose. However I can strongly infer that it was politically motivated. I have a message to those who seem reported me due to political motivations. You don't fix a divided nation by kicking out the opposition a functioning democracy requires a governing and an opposition.”

“I encourage those who are left leaning to talk to your opposition. I encourage those who are right leaning to talk to your opposition as well. We have a lot more in common than we think we do. That is how we fix our divided nation. Not by living in echo chambers.”

My Experiences

Before I learnt about the additional context surrounding Ryan Kan & Aaron Heth, this essay was intended to be a really small piece about me getting “cancelled” on Reddit for defending Heth in an Instagram comment section. In hindsight, as the context grew, that barely became the point anymore — but it’s still worth explaining briefly, both because it’s why I am writing this, and because my personal background is relevant to why I noticed this pattern in the first place.

I wasn't always politically moderate. Up until 2023, I was a fairly hardcore liberal — I had Twitch streams back when I was 16, where I'd openly talk about how I despised Trump during the pandemic, the same way most of my Discord friend group did. The shift from liberal to moderate wasn't some dramatic awakening — it was a slow accumulation of small moments where I noticed the culture I was part of didn't actually tolerate disagreement, even mild disagreement, even from people on its own side. I'd agree with other students at Davis on maybe 90% of an issue, push back on the remaining 10%, and get labeled "fascist" for it — while I was still left-leaning myself at the time. It's the exact dynamic Ryan Kan described: when you push people out for the smallest deviations, you don't leave room for moderates, you leave room for extremists.

Other moments added up to the same gradual shift as well. I watched modern media turn the death of Iryna Zarutska — a Ukrainian girl killed by an unpunished repeat offender in Charlotte, North Carolina — into a political game, while some left-leaning outlets refused to cover it over demographic optics, rather than treating it as what it was: a tragedy, and a sign that we've gone soft on actual accountability for violent crime. I saw the same thing with Charlie Kirk — people celebrating his death, a non-official figure whose only “crime” was having an audience and differing opinions. And at UC Davis itself, when TPUSA had organized an event on our campus, our students physically struck representatives and stole equipment, then called it a "peaceful protest." Is breaking the law and assaulting people peaceful activism? None of this shift is attributed due to an appeal to Democrats or Republicans, nor an appeal to Kamala or Trump as individuals. What I was actually noticing was how the people following these ideologies behaved — and that's not unreasonable to pay attention to, because a candidate's audience tells you a lot about who they'll answer to once in power, and how they’ll act.

I'm not saying I became conservative. I'm an atheist, I'm an immigrant, and on most issues, I probably still land left of center. What I am saying is that I stopped trusting modern media as a source of truth and started trying to form opinions from my own gut read of primary sources — which, ironically, is the exact instinct that got me labeled a "Brown Charlie Kirk" on Reddit for defending a guy whose politics I don't even know.

This isn’t just a problem isolated to political figures or the online world; it showed up in my personal life, too. My ex, herself a Hispanic daughter of immigrants, dismissed entire groups of Hispanic voters, who didn’t vote for the Democrats, as “ill-informed” or “uneducated”. In the UC Davis ECS (Engineering Computer Science) Discord server, an international student shared an immigration opinion based on his own experience as an immigrant, and he was labeled “uneducated” and permanently banned by the same people who call themselves pro-immigrant. Diversity only means shit if you can sit with views you don’t like, it’s just an echo chamber that means fuck-all.

My own Instagram and Reddit experience, which started this whole episode, fits the same issue:

But I do want to note, there wasn’t just hate, but a lot of support as well. Once people saw I wasn’t backing down, my DM’s and replies started flooding with a lot of support.

Davis isn’t the progressive monolith people assume it is. There are plenty of conservative and moderate students here, but they just don’t say anything because they’ve watched what happens to the people who do.

There’s a principle that I hold onto, that I encourage all readers to try

For any argument presented to you, you either find a valid rebuttal, or you realize you're wrong and update your beliefs, or — if you don't have a rebuttal yet — you go research one. But you research both sides equally, not just the one you already agree with. Always play devil's advocate. You never know if your own side is the one in the wrong lane.

I’ll be honest, writing this carries huge risks for me. Most people do not know my politics. I’m on an F-1 visa, and UC Davis has a history of visa troubles — in April 2025, twelve UC Davis F-1 visas were revoked without explanation, right around political protests. But my motto in life is “Complaining never helps, finding a solution does. (Even in unfair situations)”, and if I dislike the political climate, I ought to stand for it rather than stay silent.

Conclusion

Let's take a step back. A midnight disqualification, an impeachment over a past conference, a Discord ban, a Reddit pile-on over an Instagram comment. Disagreement is constantly reclassified as "harm," and once something is labeled harm, retaliation feels justified — impeachment, banning, doxxing, even racism, all committed by people who label themselves "tolerant." People justify this by calling it their legal right, without realizing that 1) it often isn't, and 2) even if it were, "legally permissible" and "morally appropriate" aren't the same thing. It's legal for me to call you a fat ass and a dick-wad unprompted — that doesn't make it kind, and it isn't a justification. Banning someone from the only Discord community for their major because "you're allowed to" is an abuse of power dressed up as a rule. This is cancel culture laundering itself as justice.

History proves how poorly this instinct fares. We had witch burnings. The Nazi movement wasn't some fringe accident — it had genuine majority support, which should permanently retire "the majority agrees, so it must be fine" as an argument. Heliocentrism, germ theory, and civil rights were all once the "dangerous" opinions the majority wanted silenced. This is why the First Amendment exists: progress happens when we protect the views people initially find uncomfortable. Echo chambers are where ideas go to stop improving, because society only gets better when someone is allowed to tell you what's wrong with it.

We made that progress once. But instead of building on it, we're regressing. People celebrate Charlie Kirk's death. Heth's critics mocked his faith — the same people who'd call that same mockery "hate speech" or "violence" if it were aimed at them. The DMs of support I got were from students too afraid to say in public what they'd happily say to me privately. None of this is a left problem or a right problem — it's a civility problem, and it's getting worse, at UC Davis and across America more broadly. Until institutions like this learn to debate the policy instead of destroying the person, they don't get to call themselves tolerant. They're just well-branded mobs with better PR. Let’s learn to sit with the discomfort and become civilized again.