Aftyn Behn Is a Sociopath. In Other Words, an AWFL

AP Photo/George Walker IV

When I first heard of Aftyn Behn, the Democratic candidate for Tennessee's special   election for Congress in the district that represents Nashville, I just assumed she was your garden-variety leftist who loved to virtue signal to her peers that she is better than the rubes she wanted to represent. 

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Now I understand that she is much, much worse. She is a smarter version of the Blue-haired radical who secretly fantasizes about upending society by working her way up the ladder, as Zohran Mamdani has in New York City. 

Both are reasonably intelligent, attractive, and profoundly dangerous figures, although Mamdani is by far the better talent. 

Behn burst on the national scene because some enterprising opposition researcher dug up her now-famous interview, where she revealed the fact that she hates the people she wants to represent in Congress. That's not an unflattering interpretation of what she implied; she said it outright. 

Once the ball got rolling, people started digging up other, uh, questionable things she said about defunding the police, and she has been unwilling to even walk those statements back so far. She went on the friendliest network possible and still couldn't give a straight answer about her beliefs. 

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Q: Representative, in 2020 you made some tweets that have since been deleted, that were very critical of police. You said, in those since-deleted tweets, that the Metropolitan Police Department in Nashville should be dissolved, another shared on a teacher's union tweet that Defund the Police should be a requirement for schools reopening, and another saying "Good morning to the 54% of Americans who believe that burning down a police station is justified." 2020 was a very fraught year. Do you still stand by those comments, and if not, is there anything you want to clarify?

BEHN: Uh – I'm not going to engage in cable-news talking points, but what I will say is our communities need solutions, we need local people deciding, solving local problems with local solutions. And that's not the overreach of a federal government or a state government, of which we are dealing with in Nashville and our cities across the state of Tennessee.

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But these incidents just expose that she is a garden-variety liberal, although farther left than many of them. She is arrogant, but not much more so than your typical urban liberal who looks down on the normies while pretending to care about their well-being.

But it turns out that she is much worse than that, which makes her emblematic of the radical leftward drift of the Democratic Party. 

She is a sociopath in the Jay Jones mold, which is to say just the kind of candidate that the Democratic Party has gravitated toward in recent years. She was likely chosen because she fit the "optics" of the kind of candidate who the party thought they could get past the typical voter in Tennessee. Young, attractive, and smooth enough, and not obviously radical unless you get to see behind the facade that she projects. 

But underneath? A sheer will to power and a willingness to dispose of all the things typical people value in the pursuit of that power. 

The goal is to present an "I'm just like you, only a bit smarter" vibe. But the reality is that just under the surface is a desire to rule over others.

Behn turns out not to be as smooth at this game as Mamdani, although I am past predicting that she cannot win. Democrats clearly don't care whether their candidates are sociopaths. They share that same will to power, and there don't seem to be limits to how far they will go to seize power. 

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Behn is running uphill in this race—this is a district where Republicans typically win quite easily. But you can be sure every Democrat will come out to vote because they hate Trump so much, while an early December special election is much less likely to get Republicans to the polls. 

If Jay Jones can win, perhaps even Behn can too. And if she does, expect Democrats to celebrate, despite the fact that she clearly hates the electorate and has contempt for the very people she is asking to vote for her. 

This is somehow called "saving democracy." 


  • Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at Hot Air, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical left and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve. Sometimes, however, we just point and laugh, and let the radical Left embarrass itself. This is one of those times.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 24, 2025
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