Democratic congressional nominee Aftyn Behn, a Tennessee state representative, is running in a Dec. 2nd special election for a vacant U.S. House seat. (Aftyn For Congress)
"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. Behn's special election is slated to take place on Dec. 2.
While popular in the immediate aftermath following 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, which Mamdani ultimately went on Fox News to apologize for. Earlier this month, a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, was reported to have quietly deleted old social media posts he made 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's comments came amidst her work with the left-wing nonprofit Indivisible, which itself also has a record of pushing to defund the police, calling the effort "critical" in order 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 for policies and budgets that steer money away from police departments and toward "Black communities."
Metro Nashville Police Department cruiser sitting in downtown Nashville. (Metro Nashville Police Department)
Meanwhile, in addition to Behn's remarks in interviews and on podcasts, the Democrat House hopeful also repeatedly espoused defund the police rhetoric on a now-deleted X account, which was formerly 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 they 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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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dem-house-hopeful-exposed-far-left-activist-pushing-abolish-police-weeks-before-special-election