American Allegiance US government erases 190 flags from historic building in searing message over ‘who we work for’

OVER 190 flags have been taken down from a historic building as government officials warn employees to remember who they work for.

The move sparked backlash in the diplomatic community. A long row of American flags hangs vertically along a large glass wall inside a modern building with a high, geometric ceiling. 4 The State Department swapped out all the flags, representing other countries, in their atrium for rows of American flags Credit: Instagram/statedept.

State Department employees applaud as colleagues walk through the lobby of the State Department headquarters in Washington, with numerous international flags hanging from the ceiling in the background.

All of the State Department’s colorful world flags have been taken down Credit: AP

The State Department’s main atrium in Washington DC has lost all of its international flags.

The hall previously held 190 flags of countries the US has diplomatic relations with.

Ahead of the celebration for America’s 250th anniversary, the flags were swapped out for all American flags.

“It’s a good reminder of who we work for — the American people!” Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, wrote on X when the flags were unveiled in June.

You are absolutely correct to point this out.

Before WWII and into it, we had people from the "old guard" working at State sick as Hull and Stettinius who were part of the rational and sober "old guard". Beginning with James F. Byrnes in July 1945, the "old guard" was unceremoniously forced out.

in one of the best books in my library Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his fight against America's Enemies the author, M. Stanton Evans describes this "transition" in chapter 12 titled Inside the State Department:

AT THE close of World War II, the federal government, like other American institutions, faced problems of conversion to the ways of peace, or what were thought to be such. Nowhere were the changes more abrupt, or fraught with meaning for the future, than at the venerable, rococo quarters of the “old” U.S. Department of State (now the Executive Office Building), due west of the White House.

Despite the peculiar early security episodes discussed in Chapter 6, the department of that era still had a reputation as a conservative place, famous for its straightlaced ways and regard for custom. Beginning in late 1944, however, State would undergo an extreme makeover that drastically transformed this image. The process took a quantum leap in July of ’45, when Edward Stettinius stepped down from a brief caretaker stint as Secretary, to be replaced by South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes, a former senator and Supreme Court justice and power in the Democratic Party. A few weeks later, the veteran diplomat Joseph Grew would resign as Under Secretary, to be succeeded by Dean G. Acheson, a relative newcomer to the department. These top-level changes, coming in rapid-fire succession, would have profound impact on U.S. policy overseas and security practice on the home front. Though Byrnes was an experienced politician with few equals then or later, he perforce knew little about the inner workings of the State Department and made no great attempt to change this, managing things through a few trusted aides he brought in to help him. His generally hands-off approach became the more so as he left the country for long spells, attending meetings on global postwar problems. In his absence, whoever was Under Secretary would be Acting Secretary, wielding day-to-day control of the department. Thus the near-simultaneous double switch at the top two positions meant Dean Acheson was now in many respects, if not quite all, the dominant figure at State.

This transition was of critical nature, as Grew and Acheson were then about as far apart on certain pressing issues as could be imagined. Though of similar social and educational background (Groton and Harvard for Grew; Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law for Acheson), they were of different generations and saw things through different lenses. Grew was a respected old-line figure, a forty-year member of the diplomatic corps, and doyen of the Foreign Service. A man of traditional views and courtly mien, he was often at odds with so-called progressives of that day, both in and out of the department.

Most to the present point, Grew was the official at State who in June of 1945 blew the whistle on the Amerasia culprits, saying there had been a noise in the “chicken coop” and that a serious effort was under way to crack down on such offenders. While his role in the affair was otherwise tangential, it ignited a furious outcry by radical elements in the press, denouncing him as a reactionary and calling for his resignation. Two months after this protest erupted, Grew did in fact resign, to be followed rapidly to the exits by some of his closest allies. A mainstay of the older diplomatic culture had been removed from office.

Dean Acheson, a well-connected Washington lawyer and former Treasury official, was of another breed entirely. He had been in the State Department only since 1941—one-tenth as long as Grew—but had already made his mark as a rising figure and point man for the “progressives.” This may come as a surprise to modern readers, accustomed to recent books and essays portraying him as a Cold War hawk and ardent foe of Stalin. In 1945, when he assumed the reins of State, Acheson had a very different profile. He was known as an advocate of conciliating Moscow, in sharp contrast to hardliners in the diplomatic corps who wanted to take a tough anti-Red stance in the postwar era. The nature of this backstage struggle would be described by former Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, testifying in the case of Alger Hiss:

"As I think many people know, in the fall of 1944 there was a difference of opinion in the State Department. I felt that the Russians were not going to be sympathetic and cooperative…. I was pressing for a pretty clean-cut showdown then when our position was strongest. The opposite group in the State Department was largely the men—Mr. Acheson’s group, of course, with Mr. Hiss as his principal assistant in the matter…. I got trimmed in that fight, and as a result, went to Brazil, and that ended my diplomatic career."

Yes. The Leftist Dean Acheson set in motion the Deep State State Department we have seen for decades.

Such a big arena this world...

From https://mises.org/mises-daily/rockefeller-morgan-and-war

...It should be clear that the name of the political party in power is far less important than the particular regime’s financial and banking connections. The foreign-policy power for so long of Nelson Rockefeller’s personal foreign affairs adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, a discovery of the extraordinarily powerful Rockefeller–Chase Manhattan Bank elder statesman John J. McCloy, is testimony to the importance of financial power — as is the successful lobbying by Kissinger and Chase Manhattan’s head, David Rockefeller, to induce Jimmy Carter to allow the ailing shah of Iran into the US — thus precipitating the humiliating hostage crisis.

Despite differences in nuance, it is clear that Ronald Reagan’s originally proclaimed challenge to Rockefeller-Morgan power in the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and to the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission has fizzled, and that the “permanent government” continues to rule regardless of the party nominally in power. As a result, the much-heralded “bipartisan-foreign-policy” consensus imposed by the Establishment since World War II seems to remain safely in place.

...

Oh, yes. You see it as I do.

For the last 20 years, I have tried to learn all I can about who Joseph McCarthy was.

What I have found is that almost every single thing we were taught, every single reference to him in the history books we read from in school, every single article we read about him in the media, every single Hollywood production that mentions him, is...wrong.

It is wrong, and it is driven by malice to this day that has been handed down from generation to generation by the Left, who want to salt the ground he is buried in so that nothing can grow there ever again.

This is an excerpt detailing this mindset of the Left in that excellent book:

"One further instance in this vein is worth a bit of notice, as it illustrates not only the ignorance problem but the unwillingness or inability of some who write about such matters to get the simplest facts in order. In this case the offender was the New York Times, which in May 2000 published an obituary of a recently deceased New York professor with a domestic Cold War background. This ran on the Times obit page under a four-column headline reading, “Oscar Shaftel, Fired After Refusing McCarthy, Dies at 88.”

This article said Shaftel, once a teacher at New York’s Queens College, had lost his job back in the 1950s when he refused to answer “some questions” about alleged Red connections posed by the “investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee headed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” The obit then went on to offer a lengthy tribute to Shaftel, describe his lonely years of exile, and suggest that, despite this ill treatment, his gallant spirit had remained unbroken.

The errors in this story were stunning, starting with the bedrock fact that Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with the late professor, the committee that brought him to book, or his alleged hardships. Indeed, there was no such thing as “the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee.” The security unit, as the name clearly says, was itself a subcommittee (of the Judiciary Committee), its chairman at the time of the Shaftel hearing Sen. William Jenner of Indiana. McCarthy wasn’t even a member of this panel, much less the chairman of it.

Almost as odd as the obit itself were the events ensuing when, in my self-appointed role as part-time ombudsman on such matters, I wrote the Times about it, giving the facts above related, plus some pertinent data on the case the Times account omitted. Over the course of a month and a half, I sent the Times three different missives on the subject without having a letter printed or receiving an answer, made two references to it on C-SPAN talk shows, and enlisted the aid of the late media critic Reed Irvine, who wrote directly to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger trying to get the thing corrected. This apparently did the trick, as the Times at last provided on September 1 (the Friday of the Labor Day weekend) an obscure retraction, tucked into a corrections box between two numbingly soporific items (confusion of Mexican local politicians in a photo, misidentification of birds in Brooklyn). This confessed in bare-bones terms that the Times had erred as to the name and chairman of the committee that heard Shaftel. It thus took six weeks, half a dozen efforts, and the labors of two people to get a terse, nit-sized correction in no way comparable in scope or impact to the original mammoth error.

The point of this vignette isn’t merely the slapdash and remarkably ignorant reporting of the New York Times in its casual slurring of Joe McCarthy, but the extreme difficulty of getting the mistake corrected. The experience has been repeated in other attempts to set the record straight on media treatment of McCarthy and his cases. Responses to these sporadic efforts have always been the same—reluctance to admit or fix the problem, or even to run a letter pointing out the miscue. The prevailing attitude seems to be: We will print any off-the-wall assertion about McCarthy that comes along, without bothering to check any facts whatever, and if we get called on it won’t correct the record.

Why such a mind-set should exist, and what it says about the state of journalistic ethics, are intriguing questions, but less important than the effects of such slovenly reportage on our understanding of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy’s involvement in it. Multiply such episodes many-fold, over a considerable span of years, and the cumulative impact in terms of spreading disinformation on McCarthy and his times is obviously enormous."

This is one of the characteristics of the Left that fully and immovably transitioned me to whole skepticism and disgust on any and all stances on issues that originate from Leftists at all levels.

These tactics they have practiced since the time of Joseph McCarthy have not changed. The technology has changed, the people have changed, but their vile tactics are no different then than what we see today.

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