Jan. 5, 2023 - Epoch Times
17:36
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| Right now, while the entire country is focused on the debacle currently unfolding in the House, with Kevin McCarthy's House Speaker bid seemingly falling apart, well, there are giant systemic problems that are just completely being ignored. | |
| Case in point, this surveillance footage right here, which shows a person stealing people's mail. | |
| Mail, I should add, which happened to include election ballots. | |
| Now, in several recent episodes, we covered some specific incidents of mail theft which involved ballots. | |
| However, having looked deeper into it, it appears that there is a lot more to the story than meets the eye. | |
| Because, unbeknownst to most people, even as this country has moved more and more towards conducting our elections by mail, well, it turns out that a lot of the safeguards which kept our postal system safe have actually been eroding away. | |
| And it appears that, by and large, the fact that more ballots are getting stolen is actually just a byproduct of more mail as a whole getting stolen. | |
| And while I should mention that it does not necessarily mean that the system is so bad that election results are getting changed, well, let me lay out what we were able to find. | |
| And by the way, if you appreciate content like this, which sometimes takes weeks of research, I hope that you take a quick moment to smash both that like button as well as that subscribe button. | |
| Now, to start with, the number of reports of mail-in ballots being either stolen or found discarded somewhere spiked in the year 2020, which frankly isn't that surprising given the fact that the pandemic ushered in a new age of mass-scale mail-in voting. | |
| To give you a picture of what this actually looked like, here are just a few of the reports that we were able to find pertaining to stolen mail-in ballots. | |
| In Chicago, in August of 2020, two men were caught on surveillance camera using arrow keys, which are universal postal keys, to enter the mailroom inside a high-rise apartment complex where they proceeded to steal as much mail and packages as they could carry, which included ballots. | |
| In September of 2020, police in Northeast Wisconsin discovered three trays of mail, which included absentee ballots that were found in a ditch near the Appleton International Airport. | |
| In that particular incident, the mail was supposed to be on its way to the local post office when it was actually discovered on the side of the road. | |
| Then, in October of 2020, over in the city of Escondido, California, footage from a surveillance camera captured a thief casually walking up to two residential mailboxes and stealing the content inside, which happened to include two mail-in ballots. | |
| In that particular incident, the neighbors of the homeowner who took the surveillance footage actually found a pile of mail tossed on the hood of their car, which they returned to the owner. | |
| Then, also in October of 2020, over in the city of Samamish, Washington, about 40 ballots were found discarded on the side of the road mixed with other types of stolen mail. | |
| Then, again in October of 2020, the Department of Justice charged a New Jersey postal worker with the crime of dumping 1,875 pieces of mail in two different dumpsters. | |
| And among the pile of discarded mail were 99 general election ballots. | |
| Then we can fast forward to last year. | |
| And in February, there emerged home surveillance footage from Houston, Texas, showing a postal worker allegedly dumping 38 voter registration cards in a garbage can. | |
| In May of last year, just ahead of the primary election, a woman who was walking her dog found a box of 104 unopened mail-in ballots just lying there on the side of the street in East Hollywood. | |
| Then, in November of last year, a woman in Santa Clara County, California, found an entire bag of almost three dozen valid and completed mail-in ballots, among other pieces of mail, in a ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. | |
| Then, just a few days ago, a Philadelphia man was charged with impersonating a postal worker and stealing people's mail after he was found to be in possession of three different arrow keys and approximately 15 mail-in ballots. | |
| Now, that was just a small sampling of the many such cases that we found across the entire Now, when we first started investigating this issue, our focus was specifically on the theft of mail-in ballots. | |
| However, very quickly, it became apparent that these reports of missing ballots or found ballots appeared to be just the side effect of an even larger-scale problem that's been sweeping our country over the past two years now, the dramatic increase in mail theft. | |
| Here was, for instance, what the police chief of a Pennsylvania township said during a meeting of the city's board of commissioners. | |
| Honestly, I don't trust the mail all anymore. | |
| Chief John Viola told commissioners thieves have struck around the township. | |
| They are coming out of the regular drop mailboxes. | |
| And indeed, just as he mentioned in that video, it's gotten so bad that the U.S. Postal Service actually advised Pennsylvania residents to avoid sending mail using the blue drop boxes after the last daily pickup on Sundays or on federal holidays. | |
| Here is specifically what a statement from the USPS said in the matter. | |
| Quote, The biggest variable enticing these criminals to steal are customers depositing mail into blue collection boxes after the last collection of the day or during Sundays and federal holidays. | |
| If customers simply used retail service or inside-wall drop slots to send their U.S. mail instead of depositing it to sit outside overnight or through the weekend, Furthermore, | |
| besides the boxes, these criminals have taken to robbing the actual mail carriers themselves for the purpose of stealing not only the mail, but also the arrow keys, which are the universal keys used to unlock all the different mailboxes, including the blue boxes that you see on the streets, as well as the letter slots that are inside of large apartment buildings. | |
| And these criminals, once they get these arrow keys, then they can use them to break in and steal people's mail, usually looking for things like cash, gift cards, and or checks. | |
| And checks are actually interesting things, because you would assume that a check not made out to you is useless, but it's actually not. | |
| These criminals have techniques to wash the checks. | |
| They can remove the name of the recipient as well as the dollar amount and essentially in that process create a blank check. | |
| Furthermore, some of the more industrious criminals, they actually make copies of the arrow keys and then put them up for sale on the black market, which is a pretty lucrative trade because depending on the type of neighborhood they're for, arrow keys can fetch anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000. | |
| And this is happening more and more. | |
| As we mentioned earlier... | |
| The theft, as well as sale, of both the arrow keys and people's mail have been skyrocketing over the past several years. | |
| For instance, right now you're looking at the website of the evidence-based cybersecurity research group based out of Georgia State University. | |
| And while speaking with a news outlet, here's what Professor Maymom, who is the lead researcher of this particular group, said regarding mail theft. | |
| Quote, I can tell you that we're seeing that in October of 2020, on an average week, the criminals uploaded around 114 checks a week on the platforms. | |
| Nowadays, in November of 2022, we're talking about close to 3,000 checks populating those 60 channels we are monitoring on a weekly basis. | |
| That, in my opinion, speaks volumes to the dramatic increase in the volume of stolen mail here in the United States. | |
| Think about that for a moment. | |
| From October of 2020 to November of 2022, in just a span of two years, they saw a 2,500% increase in the number of stolen checks. | |
| Furthermore, in an interview with Bloomberg, that same professor mentioned that these mail theft criminals don't really appear to be worried about getting caught, evidenced by the fact that many times they post photos of themselves on their social media channels with piles of money, with stolen mail, as well as even with the arrow keys themselves. | |
| And this is where the story, you can say, takes a weird turn. | |
| Because the timing of this dramatic increase in the amount of mail theft, as well as the cavalier attitude of the thieves themselves, coincided perfectly with the anti-police sentiment that gripped the entire country during the quote-unquote defund the police movement, which started in the second half of 2020. | |
| And as it turned out, the U.S. Postal Service was not immune from the impacts of this movement. | |
| That's because in August of 2020, at the very height of the defund the police movement, the chief postal inspector issued a directive. | |
| And this directive, it explicitly prohibited the postal police officers from doing any patrols on the street of either the routes that postal workers were taking and or any of the areas that were experiencing high levels of mail theft. | |
| Basically, the postal police officers were taken out of the communities and instead they were limited to only look after the federal facility locations. | |
| In fact, there was a great interview over on Fox that was conducted with the president of the Postal Police Office Association, where he outlined how sidelining all of these officers was a huge mistake by the USPS. Take a listen. | |
| Well, about a year ago, the Postal Service pulled postal police off the streets. | |
| We were protecting mail, we were protecting the postal infrastructure, we were protecting postal workers, and They made a policy choice to restrict us to Postal Service real property. | |
| We sued the Postal Service. | |
| Federal court Ruled that if the Postal Service chose to put us out on the street again to protect your mail, the Postal Service certainly could do that. | |
| But they have chosen not to do that. | |
| And it's inexplicable. | |
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| Furthermore, and this might just be a coincidence, but it is a bit strange that when you look at the front covers of the annual reports that were issued by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, you can clearly see what appears to be a transition away from a pro-policing attitude within the USPS, evidenced by the fact that there are no more cops appearing on the covers of the reports starting in the year 2020. | |
| Then, when we actually look inside of the report from the year 2021, we find the results of the USPS's internal audit, which indeed saw a dramatic increase in the number of both mail fraud as well as mail theft throughout the entire country during the period of the pandemic. | |
| This report showed that from March of 2020 through February of 2021, the Postal Inspection Service received 299,000 complaints related to mail theft, which was a 161% increase compared to the period of the previous year. | |
| However, the report then went on to say that during that same period of time, From March of 2020 to February of 2021, the Postal Inspection Service opened a grand total of 1,090 male theft investigations, which is a 4% decrease over the previous year. | |
| And so think about that. | |
| The number of reported thefts goes up by 163%, but the number of investigations that the USPS opens goes down by 4%. | |
| And ironically, the very next sentence in the report has the USPS essentially patting themselves on the back. | |
| Here's what they wrote. | |
| However, this was quite frankly not that surprising, especially when you consider the track record of this particular agency over the past six years when it comes to investigating mail theft. | |
| In fact, take a look at these two graphs. | |
| When you compare the figures in their annual reports throughout the years, you find that both the number of mail theft investigations that they initiated as well as the number of mail theft arrests that were made have both been tanking in recent years. | |
| And so really, take all this in for a moment. | |
| As the number of mail-in ballots skyrockets across the entire country, As the amount of mail that's being stolen also skyrockets, the USPS took police officers off the streets, and they initiated less and less investigations into the thefts themselves. | |
| That is, if nothing else, government at its very finest. | |
| And again, it's worth mentioning that what appears to be happening is that these thieves, by and large, aren't necessarily targeting mail-in ballots themselves. | |
| They're instead looking for more lucrative things, things like cash, checks, and gift cards. | |
| But inadvertently, as they steal ever more mail, they are also stealing ever more votes. | |
| Now, I will mention that there have been a few attempts to bring the USPS back in line over the last year. | |
| For instance, the National Association of Postal Supervisors sent a letter to the Postmaster General pleading for them to allow police officers back on the streets. | |
| A Democratic senator from Ohio sent a similar letter to the Postmaster General demanding an explanation as to why they removed police officers while crime was skyrocketing. | |
| And then lastly, a Republican member of Congress, he introduced a bill aimed at reforming the postal police and getting them back on the street. | |
| However, none of these three different initiatives have gone anywhere thus far. | |
| And so, that is where we're at as a country. | |
| Mail theft is on the rise, the Postal Service, for some reason, removed postal police officers from the streets, and they're investigating ever less incidents, all the while patting themselves on the back. | |
| And again, this issue of mail theft is exacerbated much further by the fact that the mail service is now one of the main ways that we conduct our elections, including federal elections, throughout the whole country. | |
| And so, whereas before, these problems might have caused your gift cards or your rent check to get lost in the mail, or rather stolen, which is of course not great, but now these skyrocketing crimes have the potential to affect whether or not your vote actually makes it to its intended destination. | |
| It can actually disenfranchise you. | |
| Regardless of whether or not that was the intention of the thief, that's what's actually happening. | |
| If you'd like to go deeper into anything that we discussed in today's episode, I'll throw all of my research notes down into the description box below this video for your perusal. | |
| And also, I'd love to give a big round of applause to Mr. | |
| Eric Schumacher, our awesome researcher who helped pull a lot of this data together and make sense of it all. | |
| And then lastly, if you haven't checked it out yet, over on Epic TV, we just published a phenomenal, great documentary called The Shadow State, which looks at the concept of ESG and essentially how its corporate communism manifesting itself at the very highest level both in America as well as across the entire globe. | |
| Here's the trailer. | |
| It's a framework for assessing risk. | |
| It's a complete fraud. | |
| It's much more of a risk mitigation tool. | |
| It's a fraud because it's not better for shareholders, it's not better for stockholders. | |
| Our research shows that companies that do well on ESG end up doing better or fail less. | |
| A movement has been growing to unite corporations, governments, and global institutions. | |
| Its purpose is to deal with issues like climate change, racism, inequality, and gun control. | |
| It is called ESG. If you can control the financial markets, if you can control the access to capital, you can dictate to any industry in the United States the way things are going to be run. | |
| BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, these are just three firms, control about $21 trillion. | |
| That's about the size of the U.S. GDP. Will governments and corporations decide what we can say? | |
| Will they decide what we buy, how we travel, what we eat? | |
| Government is able to use those companies to do through the back door what government could not accomplish through the front door under the Constitution. | |
| Basically, you're gutting the middle class by getting rid of small business. | |
| Those small businesses won't be able to keep up with the ESP report. | |
| Immediately when that happened, PayPal froze the account and wouldn't let us access any of the funds that had been donated to us. | |
| So you can build a huge following, but you don't own your audience. | |
| They own your audience. | |
| They're just giving you access to it. | |
| The tech companies, to some extent, are just an arm of the people in positions of power and government. | |
| Your primary concern is who has my back and the state is that entity. | |
| Those companies that reflect and reiterate state narratives will be rewarded and those who don't will be punished. | |
| I believe this may be one of the biggest cases to reach the United States Supreme Court in this century. | |
| We don't vote on CEOs. | |
| We don't vote on some global world forum. | |
| This is the United States of America. | |
| A year ago, I was very pessimistic. | |
| I didn't think people were going to catch on to this. | |
| Turns out it's not. | |
| Turns out I was wrong. | |
| If you want to check out that awesome documentary, as well as the plethora of other great content over on Epic TV, our awesome no censorship video platform, the link to it will be right there at the very top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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