American Conservative Union

How about that? Again, it grinds these people to pay that money, but that's where the money's coming from, folks.

The remaining $2.5 million in that YouTube alphabet lawsuit went to other plaintiffs, including the American Conservative Union and Naomi Wolf, whom they disparaged publicly, and she should have gotten some of the settlement, and she did.

Critics of the Clintons point out that while President Donald Trump works for free and donates nearly all the money he receives in settlements, Hillary Clinton's net worth went from roughly $697,000 before Bill took office in 1992 to $120 million today.

How did it get there? How did he get there on $400,000 a year? You can't save or invest and make $120 million in 20 years or 30 years on $400,000 a year.

The formula is basically P times PVR equals the candidate's value to leadership, where P is the probability the candidate will prevail, and the PVR is the candidate's partisan voting record or voting reliability, that is, how often they vote with party leadership or along party lines.

There are various measures of this, but organizations like Planned Parenthood and the NRA do this on their issues, and broader conservative and left-wing organizations like the American Conservative Union give their own rankings.

And of course, since you're an aspiring megalomaniac authoritarian slash totalitarian party leader with your own goals and your own agenda that you want blindly conformed to, you can develop your own rankings.

To demonstrate this in practice, let's say you have two candidates competing in a primary.

And we're coming at you live and strong from the Gateway Marriott here in downtown sunny Crystal City, where we're celebrating the Conservative Political Action Campaign, put together once a year by the good folks at the...

American Conservative Union.

And we have assisted me in the Opani department, my weekly wrap-up regulars.

First, Chris Horner, conservative strategist, White House insider, and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

... certainly not what a Republican candidate would get.

Uh, but as a, um, senior fellow at CPAC, and because you've been involved with American Conservative Union and the conservative movement, you sort of seen the sort of changing tides and, and allegiances within the Republican establishment and the Republican Party.

What do you make of Ken Paxton's campaign right now as it stands in Texas? It, it seems like his biggest challenge right now are these, well, I call them butt-hurt Cornyn Republicans, who are just angry that their guy was even challenged for the primary.

John Cornyn-

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, so Matt, also, uh, the American Conservative Union named Matt the CPAC Blogger of...

Do you still, do you still, uh, interact with some of the folks from CPAC?

No, not at all.

They didn't mean any of it.

And, you know, there was a phrase that David Keene, uh, the American Conservative Union phrase.

He said, "You know, the Democrats are the evil party, the Republicans are the stupid party." But I've increasingly come to believe, you know, it just depends on what day of the week we're talking about and what issue we're talking about.

Uh, they switch their scr- their scripts with each other all the time.

Then they got me banned from CPAC.

Cassie Dillon called her friends at American Conservative Union, got me banned from CPAC, so I couldn't go in 2018.

That's wild, because, uh, I mean, again, you were kind of just up and coming at the time, not like a, a, a huge figure yet-

Mm-hmm