I have long been interested in the Battle of Vicksburg.

On the one hand, the Vicksburg campaign is one of the most well-designed, well-executed campaigns of the Civil War. The details of the campaign were well known even at the time, and even cursory investigation of those details shows Grant to be an outstanding tactical and operational commander. He appropriately assesses the importance of the objective and pursues a variety of innovative techniques for bringing Vicksburg under siege. Most of these fail, but Grant is not daunted and does not allow his men or his senior lieutenants to lose faith. He responds to each failure with the dogged determination that there Must Be a Way, and then he finds that way. He accepts casualties but does not recklessly spend the lives of his men. His opposite numbers are competent if not excellent, yet he systematically manages to curtail their options. It tells you all you need to know about post-war historiography that pop military historians somehow managed to forget the Grant of the Vicksburg campaign in preference for the Butcher of the Overland Campaign, when really the contrast between the two should demonstrate Grant’s flexibility as a commander, as well as the very real tactical proficiency of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.

On the other hand, the strategic and political significance of Vicksburg is immense. The Mississippi River System is the most important geographic-socioeconomic fact of the North American continent. Full control of the system grants immense military latitude and immense economic benefit, to the extent that I’m still sometimes a bit surprised that both sides didn’t commit more resources to its capture and control. In an alternative reality where Gettysburg goes differently yet Vicksburg remains the same, the problem for the Confederacy is existential. The Trans-Mississippi Confederacy effectively becomes non-viable after the Union takes full control of the river; even if Lincoln was deterred from making another effort at Richmond, the western Confederate states were basically indefensible. Possibly worse, control of the Mississippi introduced an escape valve for the huge portion of the Confederacy’s population that was in servitude. The viable Confederacy shrinks to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, east Tennessee (not friendly to Richmond), the Carolinas, and Virginia, and most of those areas are under dire threat from Union naval forces.

Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting battle. This week I am free of parental and work responsibilities, so I hopped in the car and drove the nine hours to Vicksburg, inaugurating what I’m going to call the US Grant Victory Tour. Vicksburg is a charming little town in all of the ways you expect a small Mississippi town to be charming. This morning I hit the Vicksburg National Military Park at sunup (it will surprise no one to learn that it’s fucking hot in Mississippi in July), and I was not disappointed. Some pics:

I’ll pause briefly here to note that while I generally hate Confederate iconography, I have no problem whatsoever with Confederate monuments on Civil War battlefields. These spaces belong, in an important sense, to the men who fought and died on them and to the families that supported them. If Mississippi wants to erect a monument to those who died on her behalf at a place like Vicksburg, I have no objection.

This fucker, however, should have every statue expunged from history.

Unfortunately, Grant Circle is off limits because of weather damage, so I couldn’t get a pic of the statue of Grant.

I spent the rest of the morning hitting a couple museums in Vicksburg. The Old Courthouse Museum is perfectly adequate and exactly what you would expect of a Civil War museum in a small Southern town; among other bits of Confederate nostalgia there’s an exhibit dedicated to largely imaginary Black Confederates. However, in a room set aside for general Vicksburg history I found this unexpected sight:

The history here is fascinating; quoting Wikipedia because otherwise I’d just be paraphrasing Wikipedia:

When the town of Vicksburg was incorporated in 1825, with a population of 3,000, there were approximately twenty Jewish settlers, who had immigrated from Bavaria, Prussia, and Alsace–Lorraine.^[1][6] The early Jewish population of men and women were business owners, community leaders, physicians, lawyers, and teachers in the city of Vicksburg.^[1] In 1862, fifty Jewish families came together and formed the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Anshe Chesed in Vicksburg, and received a charter from the state.^[6]

In the 1866 Vicksburg city directory, ninety Jewish families owned thirty-five businesses.^[1] By 1905, there were 659 Jewish people in the city of Vicksburg, which was the peak population (4.44% of the city population).^[1] As of 2014, only some twenty Jewish people were left in Vicksburg; this loss of Jewish population was due to many factors^[1] and occurred statewide.

The history of Jews in the South is weird and the history of Ashkenazi Jews in the South is even weirder, but there you go.

I also hit the Vicksburg Civil War Museum where the experience was… unexpected. The proprietor is a middle-aged Black fella who looked me up and down when I said I wanted to enter and asked “Where you from? You know much about the Civil War?” After I paid my dues he instructed me to begin at the Wall of Secession Declarations, beginning with South Carolina. He had highlighted all of the parts of these declarations that mentioned slavery, which were of course substantial and absolutely damning of arguments that the war was about anything but slavery. I was then guided to a reconstructed slave cabin in which the voices of Black slaves were played on loop. The rest of the collection was absolutely fantastic and supported the general ideological thrust of the museum. As I left, dude was interrogating a bewildered family on whether or not they considered Robert E. Lee to be a traitor. Good times.

I am now in Savannah, TN. Tomorrow’s agenda is ambitious; Shiloh, then Fort Donelson, then Belmont. Planning to start things early.

The post Vicksburg appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In a somewhat anticipated move, Belkin is killing most of its smart home products. On January 31, the company will stop supporting the majority of its Wemo devices, leaving users without core functionality and future updates.

In an announcement emailed to customers and posted on Belkin’s website, Belkin said:

After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to end technical support for older Wemo products, effective January 31, 2026. After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app. Any features that rely on cloud connectivity, including remote access and voice assistant integrations, will no longer work.

The company said that people with affected devices that are under warranty on or after January 31 “may be eligible for a partial refund” starting in February.

The 27 affected devices have last sold dates that go back to August 2015 and are as recent as November 2023.

The announcement means that soon, features like the ability to work with Amazon Alexa will suddenly stop working on some already-purchased Wemo devices. The Wemo app will also stop working and being updated, removing the simplest way to control Wemo products, including connecting to Wi-Fi, monitoring usage, using timers, and activating Away Mode, which is supposed to make it look like people are in an empty home by turning the lights on and off randomly. Of course, the end of updates and technical support has security implications for the affected devices, too.

People will still be able to use affected devices if they configure the products with Apple HomeKit before January 31. In these cases, users will be able to control their Wemo devices without relying on the Wemo app or Belkin’s cloud. Belkin says seven of the 27 devices it is discontinuing are HomeKit-compatible.

Four Wemo devices will not be affected and "will continue to function as they do today through HomeKit," Belkin said. Those products are: the Wemo Smart Light Switch 3-Way (WLS0503), Wemo Stage Smart Scene Controller (WSC010), Wemo Smart Plug with Thread (WSP100), and Wemo Smart Video Doorbell Camera (WDC010). All except the Smart Video Doorbell Camera are based on the Thread protocol.

In Belkin’s best interest

Belkin acknowledged that some people who invested in Wemo devices will see their gadgets rendered useless soon: "For any Wemo devices you have that are out of warranty, will not work with HomeKit, or if you are unable to use HomeKit, we recommend disposing of these devices at an authorized e-waste recycling center."

Belkin started selling Wemo products in 2011, but said that "as technology evolves, we must focus our resources on different parts of the Belkin business.

Belkin currently sells a variety of consumer gadgets, including power adapters, charging cables, computer docks, and Nintendo Switch 2 charging cases.

For those who follow smart home news, Belkin's discontinuation of Wemo was somewhat expected. Belkin hasn’t released a new Wemo product since 2023, when it announced that it was taking “a big step back” to “regroup” and “rethink” about whether or not it would support Matter in Wemo products.

Even with that inkling that Belkin's smart home commitment may waver, that's little comfort for people who have to reconfigure their smart home system.

Smart device bricking is too common

Belkin's abandonment of most of its Wemo products is the latest example of an Internet of Things (IoT) company ending product support and turning customer devices into e-waste. The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) nonprofit estimates that “a minimum of 130 million pounds of electronic waste has been created by expired software and canceled cloud services since 2014,” Lucas Gutterman, director of the US PIRG Education Fund’s Designed to Last Campaign, said in April.

What Belkin is doing has become a way of life for connected device makers, suggesting that these companies are getting too comfortable with selling people products and then reducing those products' functionality later.

Belkin itself pulled something similar in April 2020, when it said it would end-of-life its Wemo NestCam home security cameras the following month (Belkin eventually extended support until the end of June 2020). At the time, Forbes writer Charles Radclyffe mused that “Belkin May Never Be Trusted Again After This Story.” But five years later, Belkin is telling customers a similar story—at least this time, its customers have more advance notice.

IoT companies face fierce challenges around selling relatively new types of products, keeping old and new products secure and competitive, and making money. Sometimes companies fail in those endeavors, and sometimes they choose to prioritize the money part.

One reason tech companies may feel so emboldened to pull support and features from consumer devices is the general lack of awareness among people that this is even possible. In a recent Consumer Reports survey of 2,130 American consumers, 43 percent of respondents said that when they last bought a connected device, they were unaware that it could lose support.

With people constantly buying products that stop working as expected a few years later, activists are pushing for legislation [PDF] that would require tech manufacturers to tell shoppers how long they will support the smart products they sell. In November, the FTC warned that companies that don’t disclose how long they will support their connected devices could be violating the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act.

No simple solution

I don’t envy the obstacles facing IoT firms like Belkin. Connected devices are central to many people’s lives, and without companies like Belkin figuring out how to keep their (and customers’) lights on, modern tech would look very different today.

But it’s alarming how easy it is for smart device makers to decide that your property won’t work. There’s no easy solution to this problem. However, the lack of accountability carried by companies that brick customer devices neglects the people who support smart tech companies. If tech firms can't support the products they make, then people—and perhaps the law one day—may be less supportive of their business.

Smart tech businesses have many challenges that, for the sake of innovation, they hopefully overcome. But it’s hard to watch customers shouldering the burden in the meantime.

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by Katherine Mangan, special to ProPublica

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When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.”

Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open.

By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him.

One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.”

The similarities to recent events at another public university in Virginia were hard to ignore. The OCR’s George Mason investigation was opened just four days after the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, announced that he was resigning to help settle a federal probe into the university’s DEI commitments.

That happened after a group of conservative University of Virginia alumni, the Jefferson Council, published blog entries and newspaper ads decrying the president — in part for focusing too heavily on diversity efforts — and demanding that he resign. The council’s connections to board members and Justice Department lawyers led many observers in higher education to conclude that Ryan’s forced resignation was the result of a coordinated assault.

Now, Washington is feeling the same heat coming from similar sources.

The temperature cranked up several degrees Thursday morning, when the Education Department notified George Mason that it’s opening a second investigation — this one alleging the university illegally considers race in hiring and promoting employees. The department said it was acting on complaints from “multiple professors” at GMU.

In a press statement Thursday, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, suggested that the agency has already reached sweeping conclusions about the university’s hiring practices. “Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination — packaged as ‘anti-racism’ — was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” he wrote.

The university rebutted those accusations in a statement saying it is complying with all federal and state mandates and does not discriminate. The university “received a new Department of Education letter of investigation this morning as it was simultaneously released to news outlets, which is unprecedented in our experience,” the statement said. “As always, we will work in good faith to give a full and prompt response.”

Meanwhile, dozens of Jewish faculty members at GMU have signed on to a statement condemning “an attack on our university community and our GMU President that is quickly intensifying under a false, racially divisive, and deeply cynical claim of combating antisemitism.”

Even before Thursday’s announcement, Washington said he had detected a pattern that’s been playing out at other universities targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration: Multiple investigations are filed in quick succession and word leaks to news organizations.

“It seems like this is orchestrated,” Washington said during an interview Wednesday. “The same people who are kind of aligned that got rid of Jim Ryan are aligned against me.”

He finds the timing of the attacks against him and his university troubling.

“Given that the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t publicly announce who is under investigation, we were wondering how these conservative outlets even got the information in the first place,” Washington said. The “almost hateful discussions of me” in the City Journal article looked like “a concerted effort to try to paint the institution in a negative light.”

Washington said the piece seemed to be urging the Trump administration to take the investigation to the next level, the Department of Justice, which could levy punishments against the university.

Many faculty members at George Mason agree. They worry that despite the OCR’s insistence in its letter to the university that its investigation will be unbiased, the Trump administration has already reached a verdict on the institution’s president and wants him out. As evidence, they point to a web of ties between right-wing news organizations and politicians — including Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin — as well as some George Mason board members.

“The same unfounded and coordinated attacks that pushed Ryan out of UVa are now being leveled at GMU President Greg Washington,” the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an online post. “We think the DOJ, Governor Youngkin, and Youngkin’s appointees” to GMU’s governing board “are trying to force President Washington out so they can hire an ideological ally who will impose the Governor’s political ideologies on Mason’s governance and curriculum.”

Late Wednesday, Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, doubled down on those warnings, publishing an opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying that the Trump administration “appears to be eyeing its next target” with George Mason’s president.

“The accusations — which are pushed by bloggers with ties to ultra-conservative groups with histories of false claims about Mason and advocacy for the removal of university presidents — are eerily similar to those lodged against Ryan,” they wrote. “They include vague and politically charged accusations centered around ‘DEI’ and suggestions that the university’s administration has been insufficiently responsive to concerns raised by Jewish students about their safety on campus. That’s despite the fact that the university’s leaders have repeatedly and publicly condemned antisemitism and actually been praised by the local Jewish Relations Council and campus Hillel for their leadership and commitment to Jewish members of Mason’s community.”

The education department’s July 1 letter notified George Mason that it was investigating a complaint, filed in June, that Jewish students and faculty members faced a hostile environment at the Virginia university between October 2023 and the end of the 2024-2025 academic year. It gave the university until July 21 to turn over voluminous information about its response to antisemitism complaints.

It also assured the university it would take a neutral stance in evaluating the information.

Warner and Kaine are skeptical that the investigation will be fair and impartial: In their opinion piece, they said it’s more likely “to serve as yet another smokescreen to punish universities and leaders who don’t align with their ideological goals.”

Some George Mason faculty members share these concerns.

“When you start seeing these hit pieces come out one after another in a matter of days, you know it’s coordinated,” Bethany L. Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development, said in an interview.

Indeed, higher education leaders have accused the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which officially oversees investigations by several federal agencies, of ignoring procedures intended to provide due process, racing toward predetermined results, and then punishing universities by stripping them of billions of research dollars.

Washington’s critics have ties to right-wing advocates of eliminating diversity efforts and other examples of what they see as higher education’s “woke” policies. The author of the essay calling Washington a “disastrous” president, Ian Kingsbury, has co-published articles promoting conservative causes with Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation. Christopher F. Rufo, one of the nation’s most aggressive and influential opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, is among the contributing editors at City Journal.

Such critics are well represented in George Mason’s leadership as well.

Youngkin, the governor, appointed most of GMU’s governing board, known as the board of visitors. The university’s general counsel, Anne Gentry, is married to a longtime conservative activist and executive with the Koch Foundation, Letiecq pointed out. “At Mason, the foxes are in the henhouse,” she said. “It’s an inside job.”

Letiecq worries that Youngkin might exert the same kind of influence that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a fellow Republican, has in trying to reshape higher education to fit a conservative playbook. Neither Youngkin nor the board of visitors immediately responded to requests for comment.

“I have suspected that Youngkin, in his quest for political capital, has been following the DeSantis playbook and sees Mason as a potential New College that they can take over and take down,” she said. New College of Florida, once a progressive institution, underwent substantial changes to its curriculum and staff beginning in 2023 when DeSantis stacked its board with conservative members.

Neither Kingsbury, the author of the City Journal piece, nor the Department of Education responded to inquiries about the patterns Washington saw. Eliana Johnson, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, said in a statement that “our reporting speaks for itself.” City Journal did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington defended his record in a public statement on July 3. “As we prepare a response to the complaint, it is important that we all have an accurate understanding of how safe and welcoming the George Mason community is, particularly as we prepare to welcome tens of thousands of students to campus in just a few short weeks,” he wrote.

“George Mason has not been marred by the sort of violence that has rocked so many other campuses elsewhere in Virginia and around the nation following the Hamas attacks of 2023. It is a distinction we are proud of, and work hard each day to maintain.”

In 11 messages that were sent to the campus community detailing the university’s responses to the Hamas attacks and that were shared with The Chronicle of Higher Education, his office denounced “craven acts of terrorism as we have seen in Israel,” urged “civil discourse, understanding, and peaceable assembly” on campus and denounced the “disgusting behavior” of those who were attempting to distribute antisemitic leaflets. University leaders coordinated with law enforcement to respond to two violent antisemitic actions.

It’s been more than a year since the last campus demonstration related to Gaza, Washington said. That protest remained safe and legal and did not disrupt university business. “No encampments have ever formed at George Mason, and we will not permit them in the future,” Washington said. The university was one of the first to introduce a comprehensive safety and well-being plan, which remains in effect.

“Our data continues to show that our environment has dramatically improved since the horrific Hamas attacks of 2023, so we are perplexed to be receiving this investigation at this time. Nevertheless, we will respond in a forthright, direct, and timely manner to this and any inquiry.”

In the 2023-2024 academic year, the university received 31 bias-incident reports based on antisemitism, according to Rose Pascarell, vice president for university life. Last year, that number dropped to 12.

Plus, she said, the university “responded fully” to a previous OCR complaint related to antisemitism — but never heard back from the government.

Letiecq said that, in her view, Washington has overreacted, not underreacted, to complaints of antisemitism, instituting restrictions on protests and punishments for protesters that she considers “oppressive.”

“This is an insatiable campaign on the right and it seems there’s nothing you can do to satisfy them,” she said.

George Mason, with more than 40,000 students, is the most racially diverse public research university in the state, university officials say. To comply with Trump’s executive orders, the university has repurposed its DEI office to focus on compliance and community. It has cut six positions, eliminated diversity training and expanded a program in constructive dialogue. All of those changes are outlined in a lengthy report to the board. Washington insists, though, that the university won’t abandon its commitments to the underlying principles its diversity efforts support.

“When you are a diverse institution, you have to operate from that diverse framework,” Washington said. “I don’t run away from that. I run toward it.”

DEI expenditures represent 0.1% of the university’s budget, GMU officials say.

Asked why he agreed to speak out publicly when so many presidents have stayed silent to avoid angering the administration, Washington said the attacks were too personal to avoid.

“My philosophy is: Sunlight is disinfectant. We’re going to be transparent with the community throughout the process,” including the back-and-forth with OCR, he said.

Washington says if the university is asked to make significant changes without a standard investigation and discussion of the facts, it will deal with that as necessary. “We will work in good faith to move through this,” Washington said. “We will know if we’re given due process by how they manage our particular case.”

Katherine Mangan is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.