I’ve never used a VPN, and from numerous posts, many of them in my native, non-english language, it would be easy to derive that I’m not an American citizen. I’ve even stated that fact in a number of posts.
I still got an invitation. I reported it as spam.
If a conservative “think” tank wasted that amount of money and went nowhere, I’d say the money was well spent. That’s $40m they cannot spend on other things.