Topic: Newsmax
A recent promotion at Newsmax highlights what purports to be "A Breaking Report From Newsmax Media," with this scintillatingly written leadoff:
Imagine, for a moment, sitting at a prestigious steakhouse in Palm Beach, Florida, a hot spot for some of the wealthiest and most famous — Donald Trump, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, James Patterson, Rush Limbaugh, and hundreds more.
And, imagine dining with a handful of men you’ve only read about. Some of them are worth millions, others published best-selling books, and some have held prominent positions at the White House.
In essence, you’re sitting at a five-person table of VIPs.
Tom Luongo has worked extensively with the University of Florida on making crop yields more productive for third world countries, creating an intermetallic coating for gun barrels that dropped maintenance requirements on firearms by half, and assisting in the development of cures for diseases.
You’re about to take a bite of your New York strip when one of the men, a top U.S. intelligence agent, slams a 164-page document in the middle of the table.
This document, you soon find out, contains damning evidence that a network of politicians, corporations, and scientists have conspired together to promote the fear of “global warming” . . .
Despite evidence clearly stating no such “global warming” exists.
The motive: $22 billion per year.
That’s $22 billion of taxpayers’ money . . . to stop the “global warming” epidemic.
This overwrought prose, presented as being told by somebody named Tom Luongo, is all about the story of John Casey, described as "a former White House space program adviser, consultant to NASA headquarters, and space shuttle engineer. He is now one of America’s most successful climate change researchers and climate prediction experts." What follows are a bunch of discredited claims typically peddled by global warming deniers, such as "global warming reversed its rise in 1998."
The piece even touts how "a petition was signed by more than 31,000 scientists that states 'there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate'" -- a claim we've pointed out is more than a little dishonest.
There are numerous other false and misleading claims made in the promotion, many of which are debunked here.
But who is John Casey? He first surfaced several years ago spouting his denier claims as leader and sole employee of something called the Space and Science Research Center (whose website is currently defunct with the domain apparently for sale). Casey has no training in climate science and his never published a peer-reviewed paper in the field, which would seem to run counter to the Newsmax promotion's claim that he's "one of America’s most successful climate change researchers and climate prediction experts." Even a fellow global warming skeptic suspects him to be a "scam artist trying to get his hands in your pockets."
Well, now he's found a way -- by hooking up with Newsmax.
The whole point of this dishonest exercise is to sell you something -- in this case, a package of something called "The Cold Truth Initiative," which includes a book by Casey called "Dark Winter." Turns out the book is published by Humanix Books, which is the publishing division of Newsmax.
In a WorldNetDaily-esque move, there's also a film version of "Dark Winter." If you look at the spine of the cover image supplied in the pruple-prose promotion, it states that the film is a production of "Newsmax TV Original Films."
Since this is Newsmax, there's also the obligatory "four-month subscription to the award-winning Newsmax magazine" (which you must cancel prior to the subscription period ending to avoid being automatically charged for an entire year's subscription) and a three-month subscription to the "Resolute Wealth Letter" (same opt-out deal), which turns out to be written by Luongo and published by Newsmax, who calls Luongo "our gold expert."
Newsmax and Casey have been working together for a while. A November 2014 "news" article by Clayton Reid, for example, falsely touts Casey as a "climatologist" and promotes the "provocative" book "Dark Winter" while unethically failing to disclose that it was published by a Newsmax operation.
So Newsmax is on record teaming up with a thoroughly discredited "climate change researcher" for the apparent sole purpose of selling more Newsmax stuff. Given Newsmax's history of scammy dealings, we're not really surprised.
