>>Many of them are just symptoms of liberalism in general,
>>rather than being strings pulled from a room in the
>>basement of the Kremlin where all this was being plotted.
Ever heard of the “Popular Front”?
“The [Communist] Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some of them not party members but “fellow travelers,” to use art, literature, and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture. The murals of Diego Rivera, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the novels of Howard Fast—all exemplified this approach. It’s an irony that communists should seek to change the culture, of course, since Marxism holds that culture is merely a reflection of underlying economic structures, whose transformation will bring about capitalism’s inevitable collapse.
Still, the party kept sending its legions to the cultural front lines, even after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact abruptly ended the Popular Front coalition-building. The American Communist Party’s bluntest expression of the idea of culture as a revolutionary tool came in writer V. J. Jerome’s talk “Let Us Grasp the Weapon of Culture,” presented to its 15th national convention in New York in 1951. “Cultural activity is an essential phase of the party’s general ideological work,” Jerome observed. Federal officials cited the speech as an “overt act” seeking the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, landing Jerome in prison for three years.
It took a while for the Popular Front’s strategy to get results in popular music—and Pete Seeger was the catalyst. Many critics mark Elvis Presley’s arrival in the 1950s as a turning point in postwar American popular culture, not just because he injected a more overt sexual energy into entertainment, but also, they claim, because his rebellious spirit anticipated the political upheavals of the 1960s. But neither Presley nor the newfangled thing called rock ‘n’ roll had any explicit politics at the time (and Elvis would one day endorse Richard Nixon). A better leading indicator of the politicization of pop was the first appearance of a Seeger composition on the hit parade. ...”
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html
I don't dispute that at all.
But to imply that "Ben & Jerry's Schweddy Balls" are somehow the result of a Communist master plan is in my opinion a little ridiculous.