I was involved in the antiwar protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and we all knew that the guy who was being the most outrageous was probably a cop. I strongly suspected that the ones who berated returning service people were cops, as well, because that served only to turn people against the protesters.
I had career military relatives serving in Vietnam. One of them served two tours, the second tour on the patrol boats on the rivers. The same service where John Kerry lied about an injury to get sent home early but my relatives both served honorably. We didn’t appreciate it when they were spat upon and called baby killers by anti-war protesters at the airports. We despised Lyndon Johnson who sent them there as well as the protesters who treated them so poorly. It’s not why I have voted Republican all these years but it helped to confirm what I had already been taught about Democrats. Much division and bitterness began in those years and lives on in this country today. The reasons may change a bit but not that much. Vietnam was a Democrat war, as is Ukraine, as will be Taiwan and China.
I never saw that. I only heard about it from the media and strongly suspected that if the media wasn't outright lying about it, the people doing that were cops or paid agitators hired to try to get legitimate protesters to say or do something that could either get them arrested or turn the crowd against them. I was a member of the War Resister's League, and that was never a tactic that anyone approved of.