81 Fall 2026 The Charlottesville rally was cleaner legally because, tragically, it turned violent. When a white supremacist drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, he killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer, injuring dozens more. The driver was convicted, as were other hooligans for assault and battery. The violence – which triggered over 100 trials − also led to four Californians from the violent Rise Above Movement pleading guilty in federal court to conspiracy to riot. Most boldly, in 2021 a Virginia jury found seventeen white nationalist leaders and organizations liable for over $25 million in civil damages to nine of those wounded that day. “Sines v. Kessler represented an audacious act of legal creativity on a grand scale. Four years of planning produced a weeks-long trial involving nine plaintiffs, twenty-four defendants, thirty-six witnesses, and five terabytes of digital evidence.” There were two resonant moments that have much to teach all Americans, right and left. The girlfriend of one defendant explained how the haters used “dog whistles” – Communist, Globalist, Zionist − to “see if someone was on the same wavelength as you.” Loeffler notes “the doubleness of anti-Zionism. In some cases, it can take the form of principled opposition to Zionism, while in others ‘Zionist’ serves as an antisemitic shorthand for ‘Jew.’” Most “shocking,” however, at the trial, was the welcome this new recruit received: “Welcome to the alt-right, where the Holocaust never happened, and we want it to happen again.” Loeffler avoids easy answers and happy endings. He understands why purists fear the dangers of overriding liberalism and facilitating authoritarianism by sacrificing free speech. But others justifiably see the toxic results of “refusing to curb hate speech, allowing hatred to infiltrate mainstream politics, and permitting social media to destroy privacy.” These realists want “to revise liberalism for the world we actually inhabit.” History teaches Loeffler that “Though antisemitism defies conventional categories of racism and religious prejudice, we must integrate it into our legal framework, preserving its distinctiveness while weaving it into the larger fabric of equality. Only then can we build remedies worthy of this moment and a liberalism worth defending.” Living with complexity – unlike so many academics today – Loeffler concludes: “There is no clean escape from the tension between free speech and group equality − nor should there be. These interdependent goods are bound together in the American democratic project. Personal freedom requires collective welfare; free expression nurtures pluralism; dissent depends on equal protection.” And while cleverly, practically, advocating stronger “privacy laws to recognize doxxing as the hate crime it is,” Loeffler won’t trust “the regulation of online hate speech entirely to private actors while shielding platforms from liability.” He also endorses “anti-masking laws that strip anonymity from both agitators and authorities alike.” But those are tweaks, not resets. Loeffler knows the tension will continue. Wisely, maturely, with the kind of justified faith in democracy and America too many lack today, he concludes this tour de force in American history, American law, and Jewish history, writing: This history offers not a road map but a reservoir of ideas and experiments − some promising, others cautionary. We must draw from this well not to re-create the past, but to forge a future where freedom and equality strengthen rather than undermine each other. Law must tame politics; it is up to us to design the framework for doing so.n Professor Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University and a Senior Research Fellow at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on U.S. presidential history, and nine books on Zionism, including The Zionist Ideas, and To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream.
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