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Broken glass is seen on the floor of the U.S. Capitol in Washington Jan. 7, 2021, after supporters of then-President Donald Trump occupied the building the previous day. (CNS/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

An organization that provided hefty sums of money to nonprofits that spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election and organized the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol building has also funneled millions of dollars in anonymous donations to right-wing Catholic nonprofits and official Catholic groups.

The organization, known as Donors Trust, has been described as a "dark money ATM" for the political right and has provided funding to groups linked to white supremacist and anti-democratic elements, as the Daily Beast reported on Nov. 22.

"This is really dark, scary money connected with some of the most radicalized extremists on the right. It's really just appalling," said Stephen Schneck, a national Catholic political activist who recently retired as executive director of the Franciscan Action Network.

Among the recipients of Donors Trust funds were traditionalist Catholic parishes, dioceses headed by conservative bishops, pro-life organizations, religious liberty law firms, a free-market think tank, and academic groups at Catholic colleges that advocate libertarianism and constitutional originalism.

Included in those receiving funds were the Diocese of Spokane, Washington; the Thomas More Society; the Acton Institute; and the San Francisco Archdiocese's Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship.

In total, nonprofits affiliated with the Catholic Church or that have worked closely with church officials on anti-abortion advocacy and other policy and legal matters received at least $10 million from Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that in 2020 doled out more than $182 million in grants to organizations like the VDARE Foundation and New Century Foundation, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League consider to be white supremacist groups.

Stephen Schneck (CNS/Tyler Orsburn)

"We're not talking about the moderate right here. We're not talking about the usual conservative financial interests. We're talking about real creepy stuff here," Schneck told NCR.

Other observers raised concerns about Catholic organizations receiving money from groups like the Donors Trust, which over the last 20 years has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to nonprofits that lobby against labor union protections, climate change mitigation policies, economic regulations, voting rights and immigration reform.

"People with economic interests have figured out that they can use the cultural antipathies that have grown out of the abortion debate to combat climate change [mitigation measures], COVID regulations, to do all these things that serve a libertarian agenda, which is inimical to Catholic social teaching," said Steven Millies, director of the Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

But others say the fact that conservative Catholic-affiliated organizations received money from a group that supports far-right political movements and causes in some ways mirrors situations in which Catholic nonprofits have accepted funding from and worked with left-leaning groups and nongovernmental organizations to provide charitable and relief services.

"Part of living in a world where things are morally messy is that to do good, you have to cooperate with people and organizations that are doing some things that you disagree with," said Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at the Catholic University of America.

Meanwhile, one Catholic organization that received financial donations from Donors Trust in 2020 pushed back against suggestions that the money would politicize or unduly influence its operations.

"The donations in question are within a normal tithing range of some of our parishioners and would not stand out as unusual or influence our decision making," said Mitchell Palmquist, a spokesman for the Spokane Diocese.

The interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes in Spokane, Washington (Wikimedia Commons/Antony-22)

The Spokane diocese led by Bishop Thomas Daly, an outspoken conservative prelate received $10,000 for its annual Catholic appeal and $500 to support a local Catholic school. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes in Spokane was given $15,000 for general operations.

Palmquist told NCR that donations are routed to the diocese through "a variety of means," including checks from financial institutions on behalf of donors.

The term "dark money" is often used to refer to political spending by nonprofit organizations that are not legally required to disclose their donors.

As a donor-advised fund, Donors Trust essentially is a clearinghouse it receives funds from outside groups, and then uses those funds to make contributions to recognized charities. People who donate to donor-advised funds can recommend where their money goes, but the funds themselves have final say over how the money is allocated. The donors may get a larger tax write-off than they would giving to other charities or foundations.

Steven Millies (CNS/Courtesy of Steven P. Millies/Mark Campbell)

Individual contributors to Donors Trust are mostly anonymous, but tax documents indicate that charities and foundations bankrolled by major conservative benefactors like the Koch and Mercer families have given tens of millions of dollars to the organization in recent years.

Millies told NCR that the church's involvement in the nation's culture wars has made Catholics "very exploitable" for wealthy and powerful interests with political agendas.

"As the culture wars now have their own momentum and their own life, it's not hard to imagine that Catholics look like an interest group that can be deployed if someone's got enough money to do it," Millies said.

First obtained by CNBC, the Donor Trust's 990 tax return for 2020 details the network of right-wing groups that received hefty donations: Tea Party Patriots Foundation, Turning Point USA, American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, among other nonprofits.

The Tea Party Patriots were one of the groups that helped organize the Jan. 6, 2021, rally preceding the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Turning Point USA helped transport busloads of Donald Trump supporters to the rally and participated in the "March to Save America" ahead of the event.

Supporters of President Donald Trump attend a rally in Washington Jan. 6, 2021, to contest the certification of the 2020 presidential election. (CNS/Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Donors Trust is the major donor-advised fund for the political right. On the left, organizations like the Tides Foundation dole out hundreds of millions of dollars every year to progressive groups in the United States and abroad. Left-of-center organizations that received $457 million in funding from the Tides Foundation in 2019 included nonprofits that advocate for abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, anti-racism initiatives, environmental protections and get-out-the-vote drives.

Catholic affiliated nonprofits that received money from the Tides Foundation in 2019 included Catholic Charities in the San Francisco Archdiocese; a homeless shelter in Venice, California; the Laudato Si Challenge Inc.; Catholic Partnership Schools in Camden, New Jersey; Mount St. Mary's University in Los Angeles; and the University of San Francisco.

"This cuts across both left and right. There are dark-money organizations on the left as well," said Moschella, who mentioned Arabella Advisers, a nonprofit that serves as a hub for a network of progressive dark-money groups. "This happens on both sides."

Melissa Moschella (NCR screenshot/Catholic University of America)

Moschella told NCR that she didn't see any ethical problems with Catholic organizations receiving money from nonprofits like Donors Trust if the money does not come "with strings attached." (Tax documents and other available public information do not indicate whether donations to charities are made with expectations for specific actions to be taken.)

"If accepting funding from this group would mean that they're only going to support you if you advocate for certain causes that are contrary to your mission or contrary to Catholic teaching, then obviously you would have to say, 'No, we can't take funding from you,' " Moschella said.

"But if it's just a matter that this group happens to support my position because I'm pro-life but they also support other things that I don't agree with, then fine, I can work with them because we share a common pro-life commitment even though I disagree with them on other things."

In 2020, Donors Trust directed $20 million to the 85 Fund, another dark money group formerly known as the Judicial Education Project that helps finance various conservative groups. The 85 Fund was founded by Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society who was critical in advising Trump to appoint conservative judges to the federal judiciary.

Founded in 1999 with the goal of "safeguarding the intent of libertarian and conservative donors," the Donors Trust also directed donations in 2020 to organizations that lobby for the decriminalization of sex work, as well as the legalization of recreational marijuana and physician-assisted suicide.

"It's clear that pure libertarianism cannot fit under a Catholic umbrella," said Schneck, who is also a former director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.

"Everybody should realize that by taking this money, they're opening the door to the far right's efforts to further politicize our church," Schneck warned.

Millies argued that Catholic organizations and leaders should be wary of accepting money from organizations with stated partisan goals and hardline political ideologies that run counter to Catholic social teaching principles in some cases.

"Taking the money can seem like it's rather helpful in the sense that it supports Catholic organizations," Millies said. "But in the long run, it's actually quite destructive because the tendency of polarization is to drive people toward the extremes."

Despite those concerns, several nonprofits affiliated with or having close ties to the Catholic Church in the United States received substantial donations from Donors Trust in 2020. Among them:

The Denver-based Little Sisters of the Poor speak to the media outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2016. The Becket Fund represented the sisters in their fight against the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate. (CNS/Reuters/Joshua Roberts)

A view of Wyoming Catholic College's campus in Lander (CNS/Courtesy of Wyoming Catholic College)

NCR contacted each of the organizations named in this article for comment about the donations they received, but only the Spokane Diocese responded.

Moschella said the criticisms that Catholic groups compromise their integrity, or risk damaging their reputation or independence by accepting money from groups like Donors Trust are unfair.

"If they can prove you took money and the money had strings attached and those strings actually compromised your ability to fulfill your mission with integrity, well then that's a fair criticism," she said. "But if the money doesn't come with strings attached that involve compromises on matters of principle, then it's not problematic."

Millies, of the Bernardin Center, argued that taking money from an organization like Donors Trust misrepresents the church and "positions it badly" in the public square while making it more difficult to fulfill the Great Commission's mandate to "make disciples of all nations."

"In the public mind, we have reduced Catholicity in the U.S. to a set of political positions or a side in the culture war," Millies said. "Taking money from an organization devoted to libertarian ideas continues and deepens, worsens that trend. In the long run, it's not a strategy for building the church."

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Right-wing Catholic causes got millions from group that funded some Capitol rioters - National Catholic Reporter

Harry Reids death may mark the end of the liberal Mormon tradition.

Thats the headline of a recent op-ed in the Washington Post. The former Nevada Democratic Senator and Latter-day Saint died last week at age 82.

The one-time Senate majority leader held steadfast to his party roots, despite the Churchs strong ties to Republicans.

But Benjamin Park writes that we may have seen the last of his kind. Park teaches American Religious History at Sam Houston State University in Texas. Pamela McCall spoke with him about Reids brand of faith and politics.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Pamela McCall: In your op-ed in The Washington Post, you cite Harry Reid's 2007 speech at Brigham Young University, where he said, "I am a Democrat because I am a Mormon, not in spite of it." What principles did he believe connected his political views to his religious beliefs?

Benjamin Park: In that speech itself, and in several other of his addresses to Latter-day Saint audiences, he would often reference Book of Mormon scripture [themes] that would say there shall be no poor among them, or that helping out the least of your brethren is aiding your God. So he believed that the communitarian impulse that comes through in LDS scripture was something that correlated with the Democratic message of trying to build the community all around, rather than a libertarian impulse of everyone fighting for their own.

PM: Why do you think Harry Reid held to those views when so many members of the Church became steadfast Republicans?

BP: Especially post-World War II and notably after the 1960s culture wars, many Mormons came to embrace a demographic politics that was pretty typical of the Mountain West in America during that time, that was much more libertarian, much more conservative [which] saw Mormonism as the fulfillment of an individualistic ethos. Whereas those like Harry Reid, who saw Mormonism more as a communitarian impulse, became more and more in the minority. So by the time Harry Reid died, he was one of the last few public Mormon politicians who leaned to the Democratic side.

PM: I want to go back a bit. You state that, historically, it was thought that when Latter-day Saints did seek federal political affiliation after dissolving their own People's Party in 1891, the year after they renounced polygamy, that it would be the Democrats that they would align with. What actually happened and why?

BP: The federal government basically told Utah, if you want to become a state, one, you need to give up polygamy, and two, you need to participate in our two-party political system. And most of the anti-Mormons living in Utah were Republican. The Republican Party was founded on opposing the twin pillars of barbarism: slavery on one hand, polygamy on the other. So it was very common to expect the Mormons to reject republicanism, even as they embraced the two-party system. But starting in the 1880s, the Democrats have resurging power on the national sphere. So the Republicans are like, our only future is if we dominate the American West and turn all these western territories into Republican-leaning states. And they tried to do that with Mormons in Utah in general to great success.

PM: You note that during that talk at BYU in 2007, Harry Reid said it wouldn't be long before Latter-day Saints returned to the Democratic Party over issues like global warming, economic inequality and civil rights. Fast forward to 2022, those issues are perhaps even more pronounced today. What do you think it would take, one day, to move Latter-day Saints, or a greater percentage, back into the Democratic Party, like Reid predicted?

BP: If you look at the younger generations of Mormons, they often lean Democrat. But the problem is many of those liberal Mormons end up leaving Mormonism altogether or, in order to fit into the Latter-day Saint tradition, they embrace more conservative ideals. What it would take for that to change is a change at the institution, because the institution needs to be able to demonstrate that these more liberal leaning [Latter-day] Saints have a place within their congregations. And as long as the LDS church maintains its rigid exclusion of LGBT people within its ranks, I don't think you're going to see the left-leaning younger generation remain in the faith as much as it would take for them to structure the Church in the future.

PM: What must it have been like for Harry Reid in his later years to be a Latter-day Saint and a Democrat in a deeply Republican faith?

BP: The interviews that he gave often showed him being quite beleaguered and tired and frustrated that the Latter-day Saints did not take the call that he issued in 2007. He did a Salt Lake Tribune interview earlier in 2021 where he basically said the harshest criticisms that he receives are from his fellow Latter-day Saints. And I think he took that personally, because he saw in Mormonism the principles that he believed could shape the modern world through progressive values. And the fact that his fellow [Latter-day] Saints chose not to follow that quest, I'm sure he found as a disappointment.

Harry Reids funeral will be held in Las Vegas on January 8.

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After Harry Reid's death, will the LDS Church ever see another liberal leader? - KUER 90.1

Nothing can separate the geniuses behind Reno 911 from their own brilliance. From Bush to Biden, every iteration of the show is consistently hilarious. Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon extends the franchises long record of greatness, and thats despite todays crippling pressures of groupthink.

Few comedic offerings have mocked the absurdity of post-Obama politics with much success. Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a holdover from the Bush era, which explains its ability to skewer right and left without forcing some vapid and ritualistic partisan endorsement. Reno 911! premiered two years earlier, all the way back in 2003, lampooning both sides of the culture wars just as they began congealing. The Q-centric film on Paramount+ retains that strength at a time when most comedy writers feel compelled to couch satire of the left with cheap signals of their progressivism.

The Hunt for QAnon also retains another key feature of the show from its Comedy Central days. Unlike most modern comedy, Reno (and Sunny) is perfectly comfortable as satire. Its absurd, its offensive, its crass, and its not going to take you on an emotional journey.

The Hunt For QAnon relies on some easy tropes and swings lazily at some low-hanging fruit, but the grand Q conspiracy, for all its insanity, is objectively hilarious. It always should have been seen as such, instead of breathlessly treated as a threat to national security, which helped the web of theories metastasize into something bigger.

Writers Robert Ben Garant, Keri Kenney, and Thomas Lennon (who you know as Junior, Wiegel, and Dangle) let us relax and see the grifty Q movement for what it isa collection of crazies, cynics, and disaffected people looking to make sense of a bizarre world.

Spoilers ahead.

The moment its clear they still get it comes when a Q cruise the officers are on turns out to be absolutely loaded with undercover law enforcement. Basically nobody in our political establishment or popular culture concedes this is a real part of the narrative. But, as always, Reno 911! is here to save the day.

Like Reno 911!: Miami, The Hunt For QAnon is a low-budget, low-logic romp, casting the shows best guest stars in new roles, taking the characters out of their usual environment into something even stranger. Its just fun. Its not trying to be anything other than fun. Doing that and doing it well is a lost art.

Even Quibi couldnt dull the spirit of Reno 911! When a new, bite-sized version of the show premiered on Jeffrey Katzenbergs ill-fated streamer, it was like the team hadnt missed a beat. The same is true of The Hunt For QAnon.

Given all the time elapsed since the show first hit the airwaves, the consistency of the humor and the characters is absolutely remarkable. Nothing from new formats, the politics of the Trump era, or the pressures of the Biden era has made so much as a dent in the quality of Reno 911! Thats pretty cool.

While I do have a very legitimate complaint about Terrys absence from the movie, it harkens to a freer time in comedy and culture, where 1) generally liberal comedians felt comfortable breaking boundaries and mocking everything that deserved mockery and 2) people put money behind comedy for the sake of comedy, not comedy delivered with a half-baked emotional subplot. If streamers can fund these niche projects to lure niche audiences, the next step is to make sure more artists are willing to make them.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation. Shes interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, and The McLaughlin Group. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center and a visiting fellow at Independent Women's Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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'Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon' Is A Work Of Art - The Federalist

Its not what you think. These local skeptics are not anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists. Their story is older than our current culture wars and originates from a 2007 message on Yahoo Groups by Susan Gerbic. While scientific skepticism is what brought them together, Monterey County Skeptics is, above all, a space to socialize. A talk featured at each meeting is just part of the fun; making friends is another.

The group has grown over the years there are currently 15-20 people at its core. They discuss everything, from Santa Claus to psychics. Speakers are often non-professionals, but theyve hosted speakers from local universities as well. There is no one subject they cover, the groups curiosity and appetite seem boundless but discussions tend to somehow end with the subject of North Korea.

They also have an active YouTube channel with many presentations archived. One of the classics is My Journey to Skepticism, in which writer Kathryn McKenzie talks about how her critical thinking had a lot to do with having doubts about Santa Claus as a child. She was mystified by the fact her house didnt have a chimney and demanded answers.

This first SkeptiCamp of 2022 will include presentations such as: Why the age of the Earth has oscillated wildly over time by Mano Singham (a theoretical physicist and fellow of the American Physical Society) or Facepalm the absurdities of the Truth Movement by Claus Larsen and Steen Svanholm. Larsen and Svanholm have been investigating conspiracy theories for decades, including years devoted to debunking 9/11 myths.

The pandemic didnt stop the Skeptics, but it changed things. Aided by Zoom, Monterey County Skeptics went worldwide and is now in touch with 50-75 people, locals and not, who help or participate in the camp. Sad as it is, its been really great, Gerbic says. These days speeches come from all over the world, from Australia to Copenhagen.

In times like these, when it can seem like people prefer social media echo chambers to rigorous intellectual pursuit, Monterey County Skeptics has been a good outlet, Gerbic says. Critical thinking is harder and less flashy than an Illuminati video your neighbor posted on Facebook, but its an option and this is a group that pursues it locally.

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Scientific skepticism brought this group together. Friendship keeps them going. - Monterey County Weekly

As we approach the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection/attempted coup/riot/assault on democracy/pro-Trump demonstration gone awry/righteous protest to stop the steal/patriots come to save America/false flag operation, one thing is clear a year later that Americans cant begin to even agree on how to describe the assault.

And thats just the beginning of the problem. It not only reflects the ever more dangerous divide in our country, made worse not only by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the rest of the Trump political sycophancy, but also by Tucker Carlson and others in the ultra-right-wingosphere for minimizing the assault or still pretending as Carlson does in his online, uh, special called Patriot Purge that the assault was actually a false flag operation and an excuse for Democrats to prosecute and eventually persecute Trump supporters.

Youd be tempted to laugh have you been reading about the January 6 trials and those born-again rioters who now say they were duped by Trump? and I admit I did, momentarily. And then I remembered that Carlson reaches millions of Americans every night as the leading voice on cable TV news, if, that is, you accept the prime-time offerings of FoxNews as something other than propaganda.

Or until you read the polls, like the recent one from the Washington Post/University of Maryland, which found, disturbingly but no longer surprisingly, 34% of Americans believe violent action against the government is sometimes justified. Thats 40% among law-and-order Republicans. More than 60% of those polled say Trump bears a great deal or good amount of responsibility for the Capitol riot, but 72% of Republicans and 83% of Trump voters disagree.

Theres more. Yes, despite the fact that all the phoney-baloney 2020 election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud, 62% of Republicans still claim to believe the Big Lie of a rigged election and 58%, even now, say they believe Joe Bidens presidency is illegitimate. Are the Big Lie numbers really that high or is this something that Republicans feel obliged to say? I dont know. I also cant decide which would be worse.

On the anniversary date, Democratic politicians will lament the assault on democracy, the contagion of state-level voter-suppression laws and the dangerous place weve reached with a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and then take up other battles in the culture wars.

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The question for Democrats is whether theyre sufficiently moved by these issues, which may determine nothing less than the nations future as a democracy. Try to picture a 2024 election in which critical red states, having passed laws allowing state legislatures to basically overturn election results, decide that Donald Trump has won an election he lost. What would happen when neither side red or blue - accepts the legitimacy of any election if their party loses? What are we left with then?

Meanwhile, on Jan. 6, Donald Trump will counter-program with a news conference, in which hell say that the real insurrection took place on Nov. 3, Election Day. What Trump wont do is blame the January 6 insurrectionists, the ones he said he loved and called very special people and refused for hours to call down.

So here we are, wherever that is.

Read more of Mike Littwins columns.

By nature and by profession, I am not an alarmist, but smart people who have studied these issues for years dont just state the obvious, that Republicans, particularly at the state level, have put our democracy at real risk. Some blame the outmoded American system, with its unrepresentative Senate and an Electoral College that doesnt work. But some of these same people are even saying that we might be approaching civil war although most dont think of this as an 1861-style Civil War, but as a rise in political violence, born of what some academics call pernicious polarization.

One academic sees a comparison to Italys long bout of violence in the 70s and 80s the so-called Years of Lead with violence from left and right. Others see the possibility of right-wing authoritarianism, as we have seen develop in Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, was recently endorsed by, yes, Donald Trump. Could Trump be making the case against Trumpism any more openly?

As the January 6 committee has learned, so much of what took place before and during the riot happened in plain view. And then once the committee dug a little deeper, it found text messages and calls to Mark Meadows from members of Congress, from Fox media, uh, personalities and even from the likes of Don Jr. to stop the riot. Weve learned of Ivanka Trumps failed pleas to her father to call off his supporters even as Trump watched gleefully, weve been told the insurrection play out on his wide-screen TV. They knew we all know this was a Trump-activated mob, openly hunting Mike Pence and openly allied with the president.

We know, too, what should have happened after Jan. 6, but didnt. Republicans had a chance to reclaim their party, to break the Trumpian spell. But after a few tries from a few of the leaders early in the game, they caved, virtually one and all. And now no one will be surprised if Trump is the GOP nominee in 2024, particularly given that the Department of Justice has shown little interest in pursuing whatever the January 6 committee reveals.

Remember Good Mitch McConell, who on the day he refused to vote to convict Trump of impeachment charges, blamed Trump for the insurrection and said the mob did this because theyd been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election? Soon, McConnell was saying that he would vote for Trump if he runs in 2024, and there hasnt been a Good Mitch sighting since.

For his part, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke loudly after the riot that Trump bore more than a little responsibility and then oh-so-quietly slipped away to Mar-a-Lago to make amends and to promise to never say anything like that again.

It was Bad Mitch who doomed any chance of Senate approval of an independent commission to study the January 6 assault. And so the House had to set up one of its own, which Democrats hoped to make sufficiently bipartisan. But the only two semi-responsible Republicans the committee could successfully recruit were anti-Trumpists Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

It was Cheney who said last Sunday that Republicans were faced with an existential choice We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution. But we cannot be both.

Democrats are faced with a similar choice. While Bidens $1.9 trillion safety-net, climate-change bill is being blocked by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, the far more important issue even more important than the checks, now stopped, from the poverty-fighting expanded child tax credit program is the protection of voting rights. That cant happen unless Senate Democrats all 50 of them vote to reform the filibuster, this time in a carve-out for voting rights bills.

Biden has now said he supports the filibuster carve-out, but his support has been sporadic and not nearly as pointed as it needs to be if he and Chuck Schumer are going to convince Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that saving democracy with voting-reform bills is more important than saving a Senate rule.

On Jan. 6, we will stop for a moment and presumably try to recall just what it is that American democracy means. And some will even wonder how many more chances well get to make things right.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.

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Littwin: As the January 6 Capitol riot anniversary nears, we're in no better shape one year later - The Colorado Sun