Governance by Scapegoat
The use of a scapegoat in politics is nothing new, and for Custer County Commissioner Bill Canda, who has proven himself incapable of actual governance, relies heavily on what I have come to call governance by scapegoat. For the past ten weeks, his devoted followers, who now style themselves as “The Investigative Citizens Committee,” have filed into public meetings looking for a new scapegoat victim since they succeeded in recalling Commissioner Tom Flower. This time of year, budget hearings should be the focus of the Custer County Board of Commissioners (BOCC), but instead, each meeting is focused on deciding if they will scapegoat Commissioner Kevin Day or former employee Braden Wilson next, or perhaps both. Canda not only encourages the “Citizens Committee” but has made it a custom to approve every request the committee brings to him. So far, two executive meeting records have been released, and more are being requested, along with waiving the cost of all the requests the committee has asked for. The committee, which is made up of Sangre de Sentinel employees plus close political friends of Canda, is not interested in the truth they claim to be uncovering as they have proven repeatedly to be immune to facts.
But as I said, the scapegoat is nothing new. As the insightful Luke Burgis points out in his 2021 book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, the practice goes back to the start of known civilization. The Torah holds an account that once a year on Yom Kippur, two male goats were decided by lot to be either sacrificed to God or sent into the desert to be taken by the evil spirit Azael. All the sins of the people were expelled with the goats. In 1530, English Protestant scholar William Tyndale’s translation of this story from Latin called it in English the “Scapegoat.”
As Burgis highlights in his book, the Jews were not unique. The Greeks had their own version where instead of a goat, the community would select a “pharmakos” a human castoff from society such as a slave, beggar, or deformed person, and stone them to death. Aristotle called the killing of pharmakos a “catharsis” moment in which the process of releasing strong emotion through an external event discharged the hateful energy of the community and brought unity and peace. It was during plague that the use of pharmakos seemed to be the most used as a single person to blame was impossible by rational means and so the community would randomly pick a person that they considered an outsider and heap all of their rage and fear onto the unfortunate victim.
It needs to be made clear that we cannot expect ancient peoples to have had the same moral foundations that we posses now. As the classicist and writer of Roman history, Tom Holland has stated repeatedly, “Before the crucifixion of Christ, the moral order of the ancient world was that the strong did as they pleased, and the weak suffered what they must.” And imposing their strength is what Bill Canda and his followers do in meeting after meeting, trusting in the complacency of the majority of the citizens to not care as they sling the mud of an endless stream of baseless accusations on people they have decided to make their own pharmakos, to brand community members into something evil that they can openly ridicule and drive away.
And as Burgis points out, the person being accused does not actually have to be guilty to be made into a scapegoat. “A wave of accusation, in which enough people model belief in another person’s guilt, can transfigure an accused person before our eyes. We don’t see them as they are because they are a mirror of our own violence… in a single moment, the guy standing on the outside… takes on the appearance of a monster — a murderer… all because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
To cover up his lack of understanding and competence, Canda has spent his past seven years as commissioner transforming community members into something that his supporters can ridicule and metamorphicly stone out of the community. He first tried, unsuccessfully, with this author, violating his oath of office and the First Amendment by using his government power to try and punish the Tribune for protected speech. He then turned on Commissioner Tom Flower, encouraging and signing a recall against Flower for a mistake Flower had made and that Canda remained silent about while it happened. With Flower gone, Canda has now turned his attention to scapegoating an excellent former employee, Braden Wilson. Not satisfied with publicly firing Wilson to the cheers of followers in a public meeting, Canda went over the head of another elected official (detailed on page two) to alter bank documents and try to stop a severance check to the terminated Wilson. If the scapegoating campaign against Wilson fails, Canda has already set the stage to try and oust Commissioner Kevin Day, who, unlike Canda, knows a thing or two about how the county operates and is interested in actual governance.
The practice of scapegoating in the ancient world came to an abrupt end when the Jewish high priest Caiaphas tried to bring peace to troubled Judea with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The problem was that Jesus had spent his life teaching the opposite of the existing moral order. When the crowd, heavily influenced by Greek culture, tried to stone a woman accused of infidelity, he stated, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
In John Gray’s review of Tom Holland’s book on the history of Christianity Dominion, he summed up that our culture has rejected the collective need for a scapegoat in favor of the liberty of the individual. “If you regret the rise of Christianity, you must regret the rise of liberalism, human rights, and belief in progress as well.” Liberalism is a product of Christianity, both of which reject the use of the scapegoat sacrifice in favor of a New Testament. Those new testaments are what give our culture the liberties we currently enjoy. The acceptable use of scapegoating community members for the catharsis of the angry few ended 2000 years ago on Calvery.
It is time for this community to demand that the ongoing and barbarous campaign of trying to resurrect the practice of the scapegoat method of governance directed by Commissioner Bill Canda and Sangre de Cristo Publisher George Gramlich come to an end. For as we have seen these past years, there is no satisfying their desire for more goats to be sacrificed.
Jordan Hedberg
