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FIRST ON FOX: The Democratic Party’s candidate seeking to win a House seat in Tennessee’s upcoming special election has a lengthy record of anti-police rhetoric, which she espoused repeatedly on a now-deleted social media account and in interviews prior to becoming a state legislator in 2023.
Aftyn Behn, who is running against Republican Matt Van Epps in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District special election, also worked as a regional organizing director for the nonprofit activist group Indivisible prior to becoming a state legislator. The radical left-wing entity was also a frequent advocate for stripping funding from police departments, calling it “critical” at the height of the defund movement.
“Where’s the proposal that dissolves @MNPDNashville?” Behn asked on an old social media account, which has since been deleted, in response to a separate social media post from a Nashville City Council member indicating local officials had submitted a “substitute budget proposal” aiming to strip Nashville police of $2.6 million in funding.
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“If it’s been difficult for all of you to imagine a world without police … we can do it and there is a world,” Behn subsequently said during an interview with a local Nashville advocacy group.
Behn posted most of her comments at the height of the “defund the police” movement in 2020 and 2021 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Amid violent protests that often devolved into dangerous rioting and looting after Floyd’s death, Behn also downplayed the violence and ridiculed White people for criticizing the looting, stating it was simply how minority communities were expressing their grief over Floyd’s death.
“Looks like Aftyn is getting a visit from the Ghost of Wokeness Past,” quipped Republican strategist Matt Gorman. “Democrats over and over have been haunted by their past positions they thought they could hide from. Ask Kamala Harris about her advocacy of taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for illegal immigrant convicts on how that goes.”
Behn did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. However, Democrat strategist Eric Koch argued that attacks on Behn have been surging because “Republicans are getting worried in a district that Trump won by over 20 points,” adding that Democrats making this race competitive shows they are in good shape to take back the House in the midterms next year. The special election is scheduled for Dec. 2.
While popular in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, the push to “defund the police” has become a political liability for many Democrats running in recent elections. New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani faced criticism in the lead-up to his victory for his past anti-police rhetoric and went on Fox News to apologize. Earlier this month, a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan was reported to have quietly deleted old social media posts in support of defunding the police.
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“I’m currently involved in a transformative justice seminar, and so it’s how to imagine a world without police and what that looks like and what community mechanisms look like. How people cannot police themselves,” Behn said during an interview with Nashville Musicians For Change in July 2020.
“If it’s been difficult for all of you to imagine a world without police, please tune in to, maybe not this episode, but the next one. Because I’ll talk about things I’m learning and growing as an organizer. Because I think, especially for those of us that are young, and talking to our parents about what police abolition looks like, that we can do it and there is a world.”
Behn made her comments as she worked with the left-wing nonprofit Indivisible, which also has a record of pushing to defund the police, calling the effort “critical … to keep everyone safe,” in a Facebook post in 2020. The same year, the group called on people to phone their local, state and federal lawmakers to demand policies and budgets that steer money away from police departments and toward “Black communities.”
“Good morning, especially to the 54% of Americans that believe burning down a police station is justified,” Behn said in another post in response to polling about who saw the destruction of a Minneapolis police precinct as justified. The precinct burned to the ground, and police were forced to abandon the precinct.
Amid the chaos spurred by the death of Floyd that resulted in billions of dollars in damage and multiple lives lost, Behn was also co-hosting a podcast at the time. During one of the episodes, “Black Lives Matter,” Behn argued it “is not for us to decide as privileged White people how marginalized communities express their suffering and their pain and their grieving.”
She was referring to the looting and rioting taking place, calling it “a trope” for White people to say the looting was bad.
“I would really challenge all of you when you see these stories of looting, and you revert to this law and order type of response, I really challenge you to step back from that and think about what’s driving that,” Behn added of the rioting. “You should not condemn it because you don’t know the first thing about being where they come from and what their generational trauma that has been inflicted upon them by the police, by institutional racism.”
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During the same podcast episode, Behn suggested police don’t actually serve to guard and protect Americans.
“You think calling the cops is going to save you?” Behn asked her listeners. “Black men are being killed when White women call cops.”
Behn also came under fire this week for other comments on her podcast, during which she said she hated her city of Nashville and all the southern-style elements that come with it, like country music.
In addition to Behn’s remarks in interviews and on podcasts, the Democratic House hopeful also repeatedly espoused defund the police rhetoric on a now-deleted X account, which was Twitter at the time.
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For example, Behn responded to a post, claiming “the Los Angeles teachers union” was demanding a commitment to “defund the police” before it would commit to returning to in-person learning for students, with a response that called on teachers in her state to do the same. The post Behn was responding to also called for more similar demands across the country.
“Let’s go Tennessee teachers! We have your back!!!!,” Behn wrote in response to the post.
“Your individual positive experiences with cops do not outweigh the fact that the entire criminal justice system was built on institutionalized racism,” another post Behn shared on her now-deleted Twitter account stated.
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