Guest column by Renaissance Horizon
Corey Lemley, 33, is a self-described member of the group Nashville Antifa. For years, he helped organize protests against the American Renaissance conferences. He was even arrested and charged with disorderly conduct during an Antifa riot outside the 2019 American Renaissance conference. He was photographed at a violent Antifa event as recently as 2022. As recently as November 2022, he was interviewed in a YouTube video as a spokesman for Nashville Antifa. He has also represented the group in media interviews. Lemley was photographed at a 2020 Louisville BLM/Antifa riot in which two police officers were shot.
Lemley is now being charged with selling cocaine and fentanyl out of his parent’s house in Nashville. An undercover officer called Lemley’s cellphone and asked to buy drugs. Police say Lemely directed him to the house and conducted the sale. Police came back with a search warrant and found more drugs in a closet.
Nashville Antifa is one of two rival Antifa groups based in Nashville that have even fought against each other. They are one of the most notorious Antifa groups in the nation. Another member of the group, Elijah Hartman, was charged with a violent sexual attack in January of 2018. He was later convicted and sent to prison.
In March of 2018, Great Lakes Antifa [GLA] accused members of Nashville Antifa of violently attacking them during an Antifa riot at Michigan State University. GLA accused them of hospitalizing an IWW member, referred to as a “Jewish comrade,” by bashing him in the head with a metal club. Nashville Antifa was at the forefront of a violent war internal Antifa war spanning multiple states. This involved Daryl Lamont Jenkin’s Torch Network, primarily representing older Antifa groups founded in the 90s, fighting with newer competing Antifa groups.
Corey Lemley says he joined Nashville Antifa in 2016. Ironically, in his November 2022 interview, he had no idea where the name “Antifa” came from. He thought that “Antifa” was a modern slur invented by conservatives and that “we just ran with it.”
Modern Antifa adopted its name and logo from the paramilitary wing of the German Communist Party [KPD] from 1929-1933. This group sometimes fought with Hitler’s Storm Battalion but also conducted joint riots alongside the Storm Battalion on numerous occasions. The primary enemy of Antifa was the German Social Democrat Party [SPD]. The leader of Antifa, Ernst Thälmann, believed that the Nazis were primarily a “national Bolshevik” heresy of Marxism. Antifa referred to the Social Democrats as their primary “fascist enemy” for abandoning them during the November Revolution of 1918.
The SPD had its own paramilitary group called Iron Front. This group fought against KPD/Antifa, NSDAP/Storm Battalion, and the Center Party/Monarchists. American Antifa also co-opted the three-arrow logo of Iron Front, even though one of the arrows represents the fight against Antifa.
