Remember Newt Gingrich? The former bombastic speaker of the House who gained prominence by denigrating his political opponents as “radical,” “sick,” and “traitors,” rhetoric that was not commonplace at the time, and sent shock waves through the body politic.
It was Gingrich who led the Republican Revolution of 1994 that brought the GOP to power in the House for the first time in 40 years, and many analysts cite his tactics of character assassination as opening the door to the coarsening of our political discourse and the hyper-partisanship that is so toxic today.
But there is another side to Newt, and that is his curiosity about and his fascination with all things scientific, from dinosaurs to space exploration and the frontiers of technology. When he was speaker, he kept the cast of a huge skull in his main meeting room in the Capitol, using it during tense times to remind lawmakers “that 75 million years ago the T. rex thought what she was doing was important.”
As speaker, he helped double the budget for the NIH (National Institutes of Health), and after leaving Congress in 1999, he formed numerous for-profit ventures, including the Center for Health Transformation, which filed for bankruptcy in 2012 but remains part of a web of companies headed by him or his wife, Callista Gingrich, currently the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.
Newt’s latest venture is as a pitchman for investment opportunities in companies that are working on the frontiers of gene therapy. Partnered with Marc Lichtenfeld, a biotech analyst and retirement income expert at the Oxford Club, a long-running financial newsletter, Gingrich was a featured guest in a 90-minute online presentation Thursday billed as the “2019 Health and Wealth Summit,” moderated by the political economy editor at Forbes, John Tamny, and open to all-comers with just one click.
A promo for his event Thursday touted, “How you can get smarter, healthier and a great deal wealthier by pulling up a chair across from the dream team prepared to give you a breakdown of the coming $1 trillion medical revolution.”
It promised viewers will discover how Newt Gingrich became a leading advocate for what’s being called “a cure for everything” by New Scientist magazine and “the holy grail” by Stanford University School of Medicine. And viewers will get investment tips from Lichtenfeld, chief income strategist at “Wealthy Retirement,” the best in the business when it comes to picking stock winners.
The two men got together after Lichtenfeld heard Gingrich’s podcast, “Newt’s World,” about a teenage musician with a rare genetic disorder leading to blindness missing his cue at an outdoor performance when he saw the moon for the first time. Gene therapy had cured him.
That is just one of the miracles the webcast touts as the basis for Newt’s pro-profit advocacy, and his belief that gene therapy is driving the next big wave of medical breakthrough that will ultimately save the U.S. health care system.
“Health is about saving lives first, then saving money,” he says, “It’s a moral issue.”
Gene therapy is expensive, but he believes that altering genes inside the body offers “potential cures for up to 4,000 diseases,” including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. “As the only Speaker in my lifetime to balance the federal budget, we will never have another balanced budget if we can’t figure out how to combat these costly diseases,” he says.
The promise is that online viewers will learn the names of five companies poised to deliver big gains in the stock market the way Merck and Pfizer did in 1942 and 1945 with penicillin, and how forward-looking investors cashed in at the dawn of the internet in the 1990s.
Now is the time to get in on the ground floor and invest in the biotech firms that will soon make history with groundbreaking treatments. Get rich, stay alive, and feel good about it!
The event Thursday was a pitch for high-rollers to fork over $4,000 for a one-year subscription to Lichtenfeld’s “Complete Gene Therapy Medical Guide—How to play the $1 trillion dollar Medical Revolution.” That’s where you would actually see the names of the companies he recommends, and if you sign up online they’ll throw in a Fitbit so you can monitor your health.
And you don’t have to be rich to get rich! One of the companies Lichtenfeld touts is trading for just under $50, he says. “It’s a steal right now,” he says. “If you’re interested in getting rich, this is a company you should check out.”
Newt is there to lend this stuff political heft and gravitas. He recalls running for Congress in 1974 and everywhere he turned, he heard horror stories about the health-care system. And for him like so many others, it’s personal, he says. His brother-in-law has had a liver transplant, and his father-in-law a lung transplant. His late mother had a number of ailments. His sister and mother-in-law are breast cancer survivors.
Newt and Lichtenfeld sat next to each other on white cushioned easy chairs across from moderator John Tamny from Forbes, on a couch facing them in a living-room setting. Tamny begins by noting that 7,453 people passed away the previous day, more than 1,000 from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, 1,500 from cancer, and 2,200 from heart disease.
“Imagine a different world,” he says, where we would treat cancer without toxic side effects, cure leukemia and sickle cell, reverse blindness, repair people’s immune systems—and fix our broken health care system.
“It’s not some fairy tale,” he continues. “We’re on the verge of new medical treatments that will create a boon in a certain class of stocks.”
Figuring out which companies will hit the jackpot is where Lichtenfeld comes in. Gingrich asks how he does it, how he sifts through the hundreds and hundreds of startups. “The timing is right only for a handful,” Lichtenfeld says. And if none of the five companies that he touts pan out, “I will work for you for free,” he says, looking directly into the camera.
“For free?” Gingrich exclaims. Yes, for free, says Lichtenfeld.
Asked if Gingrich has invested in any of the companies he is helping to tout, his public relations person told The Daily Beast, “Newt has investments in various mutual funds which may contain these or other biotech equities but he is not directly invested in any of them.”
There is a disclaimer on the event’s site that investment markets have inherent risks and there can be no guarantee of future profits. According to the site, 26,442 “smart investors” tuned in.
