I am writing a paper on how the KKK of the 1920s influenced the Charlottesville Rally. I need a specific thesis and am having some trouble pinpointing a specific way the KKK influenced white supremacist protestors at the rally.

First, let us provide some contemporary context for the rally. Then, we can examine its historical antecedents in the revived Ku Klux Klan of the Twenties. While comparing history to the present, I will provide some topic ideas that you can consider.
The Charlottesville rally was mainly influenced by contemporary identitarianism—that is, the belief that white Christian people should define national character in Europe, Canada, and the United States. In the United States, these specifications also extend to the insistence that citizens should also be Anglophone. Identitarianism is prevalent throughout Europe and North America, and many of its current ideas are derived from French writers, such as Renard Camus, Guillaume Faye, and Jean Raspail. The participants at Charlottesville and their sympathizers, such as Richard Spencer, are believed to be largely influenced—directly or indirectly—by these writers' ideas.
The United States is an ethnically complex nation that has long drawn its population from immigrants, but that has not stopped some groups from trying to define native identity.
The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was rooted not only in racism, but also in nativist ideologies. Nativism, like identitarianism, seeks to exclude immigrants, particularly those who do not fall into the racial or religious mainstream. The KKK of the 1920s had sympathetic legislators in Congress who passed The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), which provided quotas determining how many people of a particular ethnic group could enter the United States. The legislation excluded Asians altogether.
For your paper, you could write specifically about how the KKK of the 1920s, along with the racist policies of the period, fostered some of the nativist, anti-immigrant ideas that we see today. It might also be helpful to connect this to Islamophobia, the fear of Muslims. The KKK of the 1920s was also anti-Catholic. The Charlottesville protesters are hostile to Islam and probably dislike any organized faith that is not Christian.
It is also important to note that the revival of the KKK in the 1920s was directly influenced by the popularity of D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation. Griffith's dexterity as a filmmaker helped him reinvent history, recreating the Confederates as heroes and the antebellum South as a great, lost civilization. The Charlottesville protesters also value this reinterpretation of history and rallied to protest the intended removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, believing that the removal of such monuments negates a key aspect of American culture—symbols that validate white supremacy.
The revival of the Klan in the Twenties was a response to the increasing visibility and cultural influence of black people, and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which allowed women the right to vote. The increasing emancipation of women stoked fears of miscegenation, or racial-mixing. The KKK particularly disliked the idea of white women coupling with black men. As a result, there was a sharp increase in the lynchings of black people, particularly black men, in the South. The increased visibility and power of white women in politics today has stoked a backlash from white men, though one much less violent than what occurred in the 1920s.
Furthermore, the activism of the NAACP during that period is similar to that of Black Lives Matter today. Just as the KKK of the 1920s was a response to the NAACP, which specifically addressed the lynchings in the South, the Charlottesville protesters were reacting to Black Lives Matter and its protest of police brutality.
What is key to remember is that both the revival of the Klan in the 1920s and the Charlottesville protest were reponses to fears about the fall of white male supremacy. They were reponses to cultural and demographic changes that threaten white male supremacy. Though these organizations responded specifically to threats against white male hegemony, I do not want to diminish the presence of white women in these groups and their support of racist, nationalist principles. Both the KKK of the 1920s and the white nationalist groups of today have prominent white women as spokespeople and supporters. Generally, they tout the importance of traditional gender roles, in addition to white supremacist values. In the Twenties, some white women supported women's suffrage specifically in the interest of expanding the nativist voting bloc.
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/10/12/american-racists-work-spread-%E2%80%98identitarian%E2%80%99-ideology