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They disagree about a lot, but these singers figure out how to stay in harmony
The North Fork Community Choir practices at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia, Colo., on Nov. 6 — the day after Election Day.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Over the last few years and through this year’s contentious campaign season, which was rooted in America’s deep divisions, there has been a coarsening in the way people talk to each other. We wanted to explore how some are trying to bridge divides. We asked our reporters across the NPR Network to look for examples of people working through their differences. We’re sharing those stories in our series Seeking Common Ground.
PAONIA, Colo. — On a Wednesday night at a spacious, contemporary-looking church on the edge of Paonia, a small town in western Colorado, the 40 or so members of the North Fork Community Choir ran through their regular warmups.
“Really pay attention to that ‘E’ vowel,” said music director Stephanie Helleckson, as she guided the singers through various scales and arpeggios from behind a music stand. “See if you can make that a little bit rounder as a group.”
Helleckson listened carefully to how the singers’ voices blend; the details matter in an art form that’s all about achieving harmony.
Helleckson, who comes from a musical family and has spent most of her life in Paonia, said harmony is important — not just musically, but also socially.
“Because we’re all coming from different backgrounds and different perspectives, and we’re coming together to do something together, we have to learn how to not agree with somebody, but still work with them,” said the vivacious and businesslike music director.
A view of Paonia, Colo., and the surrounding West Elk Mountains.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
The North Fork Community Choir is based in a part of the country where the politics are all over the map.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Paonia has farming and ranching families, artists, winemakers, remote workers — and a mix of political views, one choir member says.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
The North Fork is an ideologically diverse community
Cooperation is not a given, since the North Fork Community Choir is based in a part of the country where the politics are all over the map. The singers have had to come up with creative ways to continue to sing in harmony.
“We’ve got people from pretty far right to pretty far left in the chorus,” said choir member Jan Tuin.
Tuin has been living in the area since 1964. He said his dad, an auto body repairman, moved the family from near Denver in search of a slower pace of life. Over coffee at Paonia Books, a hip, newish bookstore and cafe in downtown Paonia, Tuin said the mining, farming and ranching families who’ve been around for generations have in recent decades been joined by an influx of artists, winemakers and remote workers in fields like tech.
Choir member Jan Tuin, who helped found the first community singing group in the area, at his home in Hotchkiss, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
“And so the people here now are much more diverse, I would say,” Tuin said.
Nearly everyone in the choir is white, reflecting the area’s racial demographics. But the members range in age from 11 to 87. Some of the singers believe in God; others do not. Some own guns; others do not. When the choir required masks and/or vaccines for rehearsals at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic in accordance with federal recommendations, some were happy to comply. But at least one member quit.
Tuin said people avoid bringing up potentially controversial topics during rehearsal. “We talk about our gardens a lot,” he said, laughing.
No matter their politics and values, all of the 20 or so singers NPR spoke with for this story said they focus on music-making as a uniting force and as a way to at least temporarily forget differences. This includes choir members Mary Bachran, the recently retired mayor of blue-leaning Paonia (“We make harmonies together. It’s just so wonderful.”) and Chris Johnson, the recently appointed mayor of red-leaning Crawford, a nearby ranching community. (“We’re just all there to sing.”)
Mary Bachran, community choir member and former mayor, in downtown Paonia, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Everything’s not good in “America”
Yet the music itself sometimes draws the differences out.
The choir’s Broadway program back in the spring is a case in point. It involved medleys from well-known musicals such as My Fair Lady, Rent, Pippin, Dear Evan Hansen — and West Side Story.
The song “America” from the latter, which premiered in 1957, might be one of the most famous in the American musical canon. But some of the lyrics describing Puerto Rico as an “ugly island” rife with disease and poverty did not sit well with singers like Ellie Roberts.
“I really struggled with that because it sort of implies that Puerto Rico stinks and why wouldn’t they leave?” Roberts said. “And it just sort of encouraged some of those stereotypes.”
Roberts, a local schoolteacher, said the chorus discussed the issue at rehearsal. “What are we celebrating and what do we not want to celebrate?” she said.
They thought about changing the lyrics, but ended up doing the song with a disclaimer that music director Helleckson made from the stage.
“You have to think about context for this piece,” Helleckson said in a video of the performance captured in May. “This piece has some things that are maybe not as acceptable in today’s day and age as they were when it first came out.”
The North Fork Community Choir practices at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia, Colo.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Music director Stephanie Helleckson, who has spent most of her life in Paonia, leads community choir practice at the church.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
During community choir practice at the North Fork Baptist Church in Paonia.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
“Master of the House” an issue too
Meanwhile, other members of the ensemble brought up a different concern to do with the raucous showstopper from Les Misérables, “Master of the House.”
In the song, a seedy innkeeper and his entourage of petty criminals invoke Jesus as they fleece their customers.
“It bothered me, because I did not want to use the Lord’s name that way,” said singer Kim Johnson, a Christian counselor. Johnson said she and some others from the group discussed the matter with Helleckson and came up with alternatives to singing “Jesus.”
“I sang ‘cheeses’ instead of ‘Jesus,’” said Johnson. “It worked.”
Pushing boundaries to launch conversations
Helleckson said she knew the Broadway program would be a little bit provocative.
“It’s pushing boundaries that some people are not comfortable with in our little rural pocket of America,” Helleckson said. “And so part of programming some of this music is to actually have those conversations. So we don’t just assume that everybody’s the same as us and everybody believes the same things and acts the same way.”
According to a Chorus America report assessing the impact of group singing, choir members are more adaptable and tolerant of others than the general population. “Almost two-thirds of singers (63%) believe participating in a chorus has made them more open to and accepting of people who are different from them or hold different views,” the study noted.
New York University sociology professor Eric Klinenberg said the mere act of coming together to undertake a regular, shared activity with others, such as choral singing, can promote bridge-building. But it’s possible for such groups to go further.
“If your objective is to just get a group of people together to sing well, forget about everything else in the world, maybe you don’t need to encourage those other conversations about politics,” said Klinenberg, who studies how people gather and connect both within and across ideological lines.
But, he said, if the objective is also to create a more decent society and bridge differences by using the relationships that you build while making music together as a foundation of trust to advance a conversation about something like politics, “that could be an amazing thing.”
Choir member Chris Johnson, the recently appointed mayor of Crawford, Colo., says: “We’re just all there to sing.”
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Choir members hug at practice the day after Election Day.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
Small steps toward greater understanding
In a small way, the issues that arose with the Broadway concert point toward this aspiration. Choir member Chris Johnson, for example, said he didn’t have a problem with West Side Story. But he doesn’t fault those who pushed for the disclaimer.
“I don’t think that explanation was necessary, but it’s OK,” he said.
And singer Linda Talbott said her mind has been expanded as a result of the faith-based objections other singers in the group had to Les Mis.
“I think I’m much more aware now of what could be objectionable to certain people,” she said. “I don’t think I thought about it. There it was in front of me, I wanted to sing it, and I did.”
Helleckson said she would like to continue to program more material that inspires these types of conversations.
The North Fork Community Choir has been prepping for upcoming holiday performances.
Luna Anna Archey for NPR
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Luna Anna Archey for NPR
In the meantime, the ensemble is prepping for a pair of holiday performances of Handel’s Messiah. The singers said the music is challenging. But so far it’s not been too controversial.
The fans see the games, the crowds, the food and the beer. But behind every World Cup watch party is a team working long before kickoff and well after the final whistle. We go behind the scenes at a beer hall in Brooklyn to see what it takes to serve a room full of soccer fans on game day.
Members of the group Patriot Front ride the subway as a commuter looks on, in Washington, D.C., on July 4.
Cheney Orr/Reuters
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Cheney Orr/Reuters
The sight of hundreds of masked men roaming the streets of Washington, D.C., on July Fourth weekend, wearing khakis, blue shirts and uniform patches, was chilling to some of the city’s residents.
For many Americans, it was the first they heard about Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization that was born out of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. A now-viral Reuters photo prompted reflections on the experience of a lone African American woman who was photographed in a Metro subway car, surrounded by white supremacists.
The planned demonstration of force was timed to bring a fringe group of extremists into public view as the nation marked 250 years of its independence. Indeed, the stunt succeeded in earning the group media coverage across mainstream outlets, amplifying its brand and potential to reach new recruits. On this occasion, the members refrained from engaging in violence and property damage, projecting an image of law-abiding, orderly activism.
But those who are closely familiar with Patriot Front’s history and operations warn: Don’t believe what you see.
“That is not who they are in private,” said Len Kamdang, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Although they were on their best behavior [last] weekend, this is a dangerous group that commits acts of violence all over the country.”
Patriot Front’s history of violence and property damage
Kamdang’s organization sued members of Patriot Front for vandalizing a public mural dedicated to the tennis legend and Black activist Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., in 2021. Ashe, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985, was born in Richmond and his legacy is a continuing source of pride to members of that community.
“A couple of Patriot Front members showed up under cover of night and vandalized the mural,” Kamdang said. “They painted white stencils all over. … They literally tried to whitewash him and they put their symbols of hate all over — their stencils, their slogans. And all the while they were caught on video. And that video leaked using some of the most horrible language that you can imagine.”
In many jurisdictions, law enforcement can seek additional hate crime charges or sentencing enhancements in cases where illegal acts appear to have been motivated by racial bias. But in this case, Kamdang said, Patriot Front members faced no criminal charges and their identities were only revealed when online activists later infiltrated the group and leaked internal records.
In another civil case, Patriot Front was ordered to pay almost $2.76 million to an African American musician whom they assaulted in Boston in 2022, at another July flash rally they staged. Despite a police detective concluding that the attack “appeared to be more likely than not motivated in whole or in part by Anti-Black bias,” nobody was criminally prosecuted.
Neo-Nazi ideology in patriotic colors
In 2020, Kristofer Goldsmith said that a fellow veteran invited him to partner up on infiltrating Patriot Front. Goldsmith, who later established the Task Force Butler Institute to recruit Army veterans to counter fascist groups through open source online research, was not closely familiar with the group at the time.
“Frankly, when my friend used the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ I thought he was using hyperbole,” Goldsmith said. “It wasn’t until I saw them doing things like debating the merits of national socialism versus fascism versus monarchy that I truly understood that neo-Nazi was not hyperbole, that these people actually praise Hitler. … These people have dedicated their lives to promoting white nationalist, fascist and genocidal ideology.”
Patriot Front’s founder, Thomas Rousseau, was formerly a leader of a group called Vanguard America, which was prominent in planning and a presence at the 2017 Unite the Right rally. That gathering, the largest public white nationalist event in generations, turned fatal when one extremist drove a car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer. Ultimately, Goldsmith said that rally further smeared public perception of the white nationalist movement as violent and un-American — lessons that Rousseau took to heart.
“Rousseau needed to rebrand Vanguard America,” Goldsmith said. “So he basically stole all of its assets, its digital assets … and made it into Patriot Front and literally painted everything in red, white and blue so that it would be more attractive.”
The group has also shown up at natural disaster sites, namely in Central Texas last summer, ostensibly to assist local residents. Goldsmith said these missions and the group’s outward aesthetic are meant to project an idea of patriotism and service. He said the group maintains a strict code of conduct. Among other things, they do not display swastikas or give Hitler salutes in public.
“The goal of their propaganda, of their public actions like this, is to beat MAGA and conservatives and Republicans into defending them and to saying, ‘I don’t see anything wrong with this group. They clearly love America,’” he said.
Patriot Front described as a “cult” and a “pyramid scheme”
The show of force in D.C. has raised questions about the group’s financing, and whether members’ travel was sponsored by outside individuals or groups. In fact, Goldsmith and Kamdang said that members of Patriot Front appear almost entirely to shoulder the cost of operations and Rousseau’s lifestyle. They said it’s most likely that those who traveled to D.C. had to cover their costs themselves.
“All of them funnel resources to the top,” Kamdang explained about the group’s general financial structure. “In order to be a Patriot Front member, you have to engage in acts of what they call ‘activism.’ And usually what that means is vandalism: putting up banners, spreading the slogans of hate all over the country. And in order to do that, they will have stickers, stencils, branding. All of that has to be approved from the top down, and all of it has to be purchased from the top down. So all the members who do this multiple times a month send cash to Thomas Rousseau for essentially stickers and stencils.”
Goldsmith said that from his time infiltrating the group, the costs could run up to hundreds of dollars a month per member. Kamdang, who said that attorneys are actively seeking to collect judgment in the settlement over the Arthur Ashe mural, noted that Rousseau appears not to hold any additional paying jobs.
“This seems to be what he’s doing full time,” Kamdang said. “So he appears to be being propped up full time by his members.”
Goldsmith likened the financial operation to a pyramid scheme. But he said even more substantial than the financial investment that Patriot Front members are required to make to retain membership is the control they give up over their time and personal choices.
“I describe it as a cult, not to be offensive, but because it is like Rousseau needs to have complete control of all of his members,” Goldsmith said. “[The group] requires its members to give up all of their lives, all of their relationships. All of their priorities in life need to be focused towards growing the organization or continuing the organization [and] enriching its leadership. So, it’s costly.”
NPR reached out to Patriot Front for comment. The group did not respond by deadline.
Goldsmith also noted that Rousseau often gives lengthy speeches that members are expected to listen to, via online platforms.
To Kamdang, the publicity that Patriot Front earned through the group’s D.C. stunt presents a danger: It amplified a presentation of the group that was deliberately crafted to make Patriot Front appear orderly and patriotic.
“I think the reason why it got a lot of attention is because Patriot Front was very careful in their language,” he said. “They try to mask their replacement theory, the white supremacy and in ‘Americana’ terms and patriotism. But that is not who these guys are.”
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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CJ Gunther/Getty Images
Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
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