This week marks the third anniversary of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, VA. From August 11–12, 2017, hundreds of neo-Nazis descended upon Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” “blood and soil,” and “Seig Heil.” Students at the University of Virginia and community members recounted harrowing stories of watching their college town overrun by antisemites, who violently attacked peaceful counter-protesters. They were surrounded by neo-Nazis, who punched and maced them and attempted to set them alight with torches and lighter fluid. A car-ramming killed one woman and injured many others. On August 6, 2020, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (the Brandeis Center) cosponsored an event featuring the Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP legal team, who represent some of the individuals attacked at the Charlottesville march in a lawsuit against the white supremacist leaders who planned, incited, and actually carried out this violent demonstration. The case is set for trial on October 26. During the event, the legal team, led by renowned civil rights lawyer Roberta A. Kaplan, described the legal theory of the case and the unique strategic challenges they have faced. The suit was brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, passed by the Reconstructionist Congress to give a private right of action to victims of conspiracy to commit violence against racial and religious minorities, including members of those minority groups and non-minorities attacked for supporting minorities. The key defense put forth by the defendants—a who’s who of white supremacy leadership in America—is that they engaged in protected First Amendment activity; defendants argue the white supremacist demonstrators merely responded to violence initiated by counter-protesters. The plaintiffs’ response, as Kaplan attorney Michael Bloch succinctly stated, “This is not a First Amendment case.” If the white supremacists had only worn swastikas and marched together while chanting their Jew-hating slogans, there would be no cause of action. Indeed, one of the Kaplan team members described the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement as “savvy” manipulators of the First Amendment because they had previously been successful at keeping their demonstrations within the bounds of the law by claiming their violent messages were jokes or sarcasm. But Charlottesville was a breaking point. Violent strategies were coordinated before the march and implemented that weekend; and afterwards, the perpetrators congratulated one another on a mission accomplished. A watershed moment in the case occurred when third-party hackers publicly exposed the discussions between the neo-Nazi leadership and rank-and-file on the chat platform Discord. A thread titled “Charlottesville 2.0”—named for the second local action by the neo-Nazis—revealed high-level planning between the assorted white supremacy groups to come together and “fight.” They discussed who their targets would be and the type of action they would take, including car-rammings. And the plans they engineered were executed at the Unite the Right rally. Such details are crucial to prove that the defendants’ claim that they were protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statute in Charlottesville is pretextual, and that the true motivation for and purpose of their march was to violently act upon their racist beliefs. Plaintiffs obtained Defendants’ extensive private communications during an arduous 3-year discovery process that defendants impeded at every turn, by hiding devices and refusing to comply with motions to compel. Defendants’ communications revealed a racially violent conspiracy. This is not protected speech. There is evidence that these strategies not only led to Charlottesville, but have also inspired subsequent antisemitic attackers, including the shooters at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2018, and at the Chabad of Poway in California in April 2019, in which a total of 12 Jews were killed. Asked what they hope this case will achieve, the Plaintiffs’ lawyers expressed three goals: obtain justice for the plaintiffs from a jury of their peers, encourage neo-Nazis to crawl back into the basements from which they have emerged and set necessary precedent for future litigation, as Charlottesville was sadly not an outlier case. The event was hosted by the D.C. Bar and cosponsored by Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that has provided support to the Kaplan team, the American Association of Jewish Lawyers & Jurists, and the Brandeis Center.