What far-right conservatives have in common with ‘60s liberal hippies

I’m a liberal Democrat, so I try to watch Fox News every night.

Yes, you read that right. If I watch CNN or MSNBC, I will simply see my worldview confirmed. But when I change the channel to Fox, I actually learn some new things.

For example, did you know that the FBI is a rogue agency bent on depriving Americans of their liberties? That the CIA leaked misinformation about Donald Trump? And that our support for Ukraine — like so many American overseas adventures — is propping up an undemocratic state and lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex?

For the record, I don’t believe any of that. But it’s almost exactly the same thing I heard from my fellow liberals when I went to graduate school in the late 1980s.

» READ MORE: Want to save our democracy? Talk — and listen — to someone you don’t agree with. | Jonathan Zimmerman

I was a former Peace Corps volunteer, which made me automatically suspect to many of my peers. Every correct-thinking lefty knew that the Peace Corps was a front for the CIA, which visited all kinds of harm across the globe during the Cold War.

There is no evidence — none — that the CIA infiltrated the Peace Corps, which has barred former CIA agents from serving as volunteers. But the students weren’t wrong about the ugly history of the CIA. It helped topple leaders in Iran and Guatemala, installing U.S.-friendly despots in their place. It tried to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and even attempted to drug him with something similar to LSD. More recently, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it tortured detainees at secret CIA-operated “black sites” around the world.

And the FBI? It illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson. It sent a cassette tape of the sounds of King having sex with several women to his office in Atlanta, accompanied by a threatening note saying, “There is but one way out for you.”

Everything that’s old is new again.

The FBI also infiltrated Students for a Democratic Society and other groups protesting America’s war in Vietnam. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where an estimated 1,000 FBI and Secret Service agents were on duty, some of them grew out their hair to mix with the “hippy” crowd. That defied an order by the straight-laced FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who said agents should keep their hair short even when undercover.

Does that mean one in six of the protesters at the 1968 convention was an FBI agent, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) recently claimed? Probably not. But the fact that she invoked the iconic left-wing Chicago protests tells you how much the political tides around the FBI have turned.

“Law-and-order” Republicans used to support the FBI, including its hard stance against anti-war protesters. No longer.

Earlier this year, a poll found that just 17% of Republicans had a positive view of the FBI, while 56% have a negative one.

That’s because of the multiple investigations of Donald Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which Rep. Greene and others have falsely attributed to FBI infiltrators. But we should be able to refute Greene’s lies while still acknowledging the historical truths about the agency, which continues to flout the law.

As a court found last year, the FBI violated its own policies by using a vast trove of foreign intelligence information to search for data about Jan. 6 protesters and participants in the 2020 demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Again, that doesn’t mean the FBI incited these protests. It simply means that we need to be vigilant about monitoring it.

Ditto for American policy in Ukraine. On Fox, I watched the since-deposed Tucker Carlson claim that Ukraine is “not a democracy,” but is instead “a client state of the Biden administration.” He also charged that lawmakers like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) wanted to arm Ukraine because they received donations from military contractors like Raytheon.

That’s a near-perfect echo of Russian state-run media, which has highlighted Carlson’s falsehoods in its propaganda. (After Fox fired Carlson, in fact, a Russian TV network offered him a job.)

But what Carlson says sounds awfully familiar to a child of the 1960s like me: America has surely propped up dictators in the past and awarded too much power to the military-industrial complex, a term coined by a Republican president — and former Army general (Dwight D. Eisenhower) — as he departed office in 1961.

So, as they say, everything that’s old is new again. But now, the mistrust of government surveillance is coming from the right, not the left.

We need to be watchful about American aid to Ukraine, to ensure we don’t repeat the worst chapters of our history. For me, that means watching Fox News. Sometimes, Fox simply lies. But it can also keep us honest — and, I hope, humble — by reminding us how much former hippies like me once had in common with it.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was released last year in a revised 20th-century edition by University of Chicago Press.