My own piece in the Manchurian puzzle is small, but perhaps, telling.
Scene: a New England Federalist house, with Mamie and me watching TV. She is the head of her garden club, and steward to a quarter acre of prime suburban real estate.
Time: sometime in the early Eighties.
We're watching the movie, and the North Korean bad guy is covering up the indoctrination with a lecture about hydrangeas.
Now, in this house, hydrangeas are a big deal. We have one of the few (at least then) Blue Lace Hydrangeas in the world, growing in our garden, along with a few extremely rare roses, all those insanely pretty flowers you see in early 20th century kid's book illustration, and a prickly pear cactus. (Yup. In Connnecticut. Makes tunas. Lies down and sleeps in the winter, too.)
Mamie:Hand me the White Flower Farm catalogue.
I do so.
She ruffles through, and hands it to me.
It's the same thing. The exact same words, to the letter.
Seed catalogues were, at that time, notorious for what we would call copypasta: year to year, the same text would appear, sometimes with humorous results. Not only that, but the White Flower Farm catalog, the absolute tops of mid-century horticulture, was known to be written by the wives of The New Yorker staff, including Edward B. White's wife.
Conspiracy theorists, take note.