Random Thoughts for September: Epstein, Gerrymandering, and More

Only one politician uses intelligence assessments to help ordinary Americans: Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Senator and former Representative. In 2006, he was one of ten senators to vote against re-authorizing the Patriot Act. His more recent questioning of ODNI Director Tulsi Gabbard established him as the smartest man in the room, and now, while his colleagues focus on the salacious details of Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct, Wyden alone has demanded to know Epstein’s influence origins. Epstein knew billionaires as a tax avoidance expert. Yet, we have zero disclosures years after the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, and Pandora Papers.¹ Why?

This is “a cover-up of epic proportions involving the wealthy, the well-connected, and even our own government—all the way to the top.” -- Representative Melanie Stansbury (September 2025) 

2. America’s empire from 1945 to 2001 assumed everyone would learn English, accept Western legal principles, and allow NSA protection of technological protocols and Naval protection of shipping routes. The assumption worked well: trillion dollar capitalizations have been created by monopolistic motivations tied to defending American technological standards. 

Facebook/Meta alone brought the following technology under American ownership: Snaptu (Israeli); Sofa (Dutch); Lightbox.com (British); MSQRD (Belarusian); and WhatsApp’s programming language (Sweden’s Erlang). From 2001 to 2025, however, other countries, notably China and Russia, built their own technology. They will not default to English or Western legal principles, and they don’t need the US Navy.² Though an American technological monopoly is no longer guaranteed, trillion dollar valuations still abound. Surprisingly, these valuations have not encouraged public school standards promoting widespread fluency in at least one other language and another country’s authors, meaning wealth so far continues to promote movement of goods and services but not individuals. The gap between world knowledge and American cultural knowledge has stretched to the point where AI must achieve competence. Yet, with millions of Westerners traveling to Asia annually, why can so few American parents trust K-12 teachers to teach basic history and language about a single Asian country? Why, with all the bombs dropped on various oil-producing countries, do so few Americans understand differences between light and heavy crude or a single author who wrote in Urdu, Persian, or Arabic? Was Trump’s 2024 election an admission by America’s security state that American-led globalization has failed? Or evidence Americans themselves have failed?

From CBS News. In a few years, absent major improvements, only one-third of eligible new American voters will be qualified to assess candidates or propositions.

3. As a cinephile, I am pleased to report Season 2 of Wednesday (2025) is as delightful as the first. Turning the heroine into a reluctant Harry Potter type surrounded by unsure mutants was brilliant. Sadly, Spike Lee’s much anticipated "Highest 2 Lowest" was a disappointment. Watch 25th Hour (2002) instead. Owen Wilson continues to elevate the feel-good film genre with AppleTV’s Stick (2025), about a Midwestern golfer and his reluctant caddie and pupil.³ Finally, I’ve just finished the fifth episode of Murderbot (2025), a series that becomes profound after imagining the writer as an autistic hacker who’s created his own fantasy universe.

4. I don’t know what I expected returning to the United States after four years traveling overseas, but it wasn’t 95 to 98% of my local retail stores being exactly the same except for Yemeni-themed coffeeshops. In my area, novelty clearly depends on immigrants, and because many have self-deported, non-tech sectors look bleak. As President Trump removes the veneer of American idealism, we ought to consider whether America’s globalization model relies on an unsustainable “smash and grab” policy: smash a country, grab its immigrants, then elevate a few of them to visible positions. Was it a coincidence a few years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Hamid Ulukaya, a Kurd born in Türkiye, was seen everywhere promoting jobs for Afghan refugees? If so, when America’s focus shifted from Afghanistan, why did he mysteriously disappear from mainstream media? On the bright side, maybe we’ll all see at least one Ukrainian entrepreneur and Venezuelan actress soon. 

5. Partisan re-districting efforts by Democrats and Republicans give the Supreme Court an opportunity to unite the nation. In Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993), former Justice Sandra O’Connor exposed blatant voter manipulation:

Centered in the northeast portion of the State, it [the voting district] moves southward until it tapers to a narrow band; then, with finger-like extensions, it reaches far into the southernmost part of the State near the South Carolina border. District 1 has been compared to a “Rorschach ink-blot test,” Shaw v. Barr, 808 F. Supp. 461, 476 (EDNC 1992)… and a “bug splattered on a windshield.”

In Brnovich v. DNC (2020), Justice Elena Kagan delivered her best reasoning to date; and one year before, her blistering dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) foretold 2025’s events:

"[P]artisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology… make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. Old-time efforts, based on little more than guesses, sometimes led to so-called dummymanders— gerrymanders that went spectacularly wrong. Not likely in today’s world. Mapmakers now have access to more granular data about party preference and voting behavior than ever before. County-level voting data has given way to precinct-level or city-block-level data; and increasingly, mapmakers avail themselves of data sets providing wideranging information about even individual voters… What was possible with paper and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, ‘we the people’ become sovereign no longer."

Kagan was right, and the 5-4 majority was wrong. When handling Texas and California’s tit-for-tat gerrymandering, the Court doesn’t need a new opinion—it can copy-and-paste Kagan’s dissent as long as one Justice discovers humility.

Why were Texan and Californian legislators so confident manipulating voters in the first place? Thus far, re-districting prohibitions have involved abridging votes in ways impacting racial minorities. Technically, “gaming the system” isn’t proscribed. I dealt with this issue as an attorney representing mostly rank-and-file employees. When an employee was mistreated by his or her employer, my avenue for redress would be some protected characteristic, including race; for white employees, I would look to disability laws, especially disability insurance policies. I saw nothing immoral about such a path because I was using the law to redress unfairness and unequal power, and the law provided no other options for justice.⁴ If a Filipina single mother performing well as a medical coder for ten years received no leeway in year eleven because her car broke down and she was late several times, I suppose I could have said, “It’s a no-cause [for termination] state,” but I got creative. Where I differed from other employment lawyers is that I only got creative when the employee was competent with a good work ethic. Right away, you can see how much America’s laws revolve around the discretion of lawyers, and how easily their power to pick and choose potential winners can be used or abused.⁵ I understand gaps in the law plus wide discretion fuel legal jobs, and my mostly hard-working clients certainly benefited from California’s attempts to redress historical inequities, but when handling election manipulation, it’s no longer viable for a respectable Supreme Court to look the other way merely because a state isn’t openly lynching certain classes of voters.

6. Americans may have rejected the crown but monarchies remain. Thailand is perhaps the most famous constitutional monarchy after England’s, but most people don’t know even the Netherlands is technically called Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, or Kingdom of the Netherlands. Why are monarchies still legally common? They provided cultural exchanges through marriage and charitable giving while fostering long-term relationships regardless of political winds. Now, they basically operate as hedge funds exempt from legal threats. In America, billionaires are the new kings, and despite legal checks and balances, the shift from kings to billionaires doesn’t seem to be working well for most Americans. I, for one, would happily trade Bill Ackman, Miriam Adelson, and Jeff Yass for King Charles III. At least America still has its core democratic principle of “one person, one vote,” no?

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (September 2025)

1. Anyone else surprised David Cay Johnston hasn’t written anything about Epstein’s tax loopholes? 

2. See also China’s Belt and Road Initiative. 

3. Owen Wilson has perfected the bumbling character Hugh Grant attempted. 

4. Unemployment insurance benefits are state-wide in California, and in California’s larger cities, too little even for high earners. 

5. Other countries don’t bother with such wide latitude—they require employers to give several months of severance pay upon termination, which makes hiring more complex.