Yuba City is an old farming town established in 1850. It's pretty close to where gold was discovered in 1848, but nothing of note has happened there either before or since.
You can see why it has a lot of potential Trump fans. Of its 67,000 people, 65% are white, but only 42% are non-Hispanic whites. A quarter of its residents are foreign born. And only 20% have bachelor's degrees, versus 36% in the U.S. as a whole. The picture is of resentful whites of modest education in an ethnically changing town.
Now, consider the Church of Glad Tidings. Nobody's saying how big it is, but since it has a 7:00 p.m. service on Saturday as well as Sunday services, you know that the congregation has outgrown its sanctuary. Its website says "this is who we are, so you can decide whether or not to join us," but has nothing about its theology.
This is the church Michael Flynn went to visit last Sunday, where he spoke about topics that fed into conspiracy-theory thinking, and received from grateful QAnon- and Trump-loving fans a gift that reporters described as a Woodland Camo AR-15. “We were trying to come up with a rifle that we thought was appropriate for a general," said one man.
Flynn, whom Donald Trump pardoned for lying about his Russian contacts, smiled and said "Maybe I'll find someone in Washington, DC."
In context, he had made a joke about assassination -- about hunting human beings -- and the congregation clapped and cheered.
A crowd like this is so insular, so unacquainted with government, so powerless in its own eyes, that the only course of action they can think of is violence.
Yes, it is outrageous. And it is sad. It would be easy to demonize these people who are so prone to demonizing others unlike them -- the immigrants who are (they think) crowding into their community.
Maybe there will come a time when the rest of us can talk to them, but it seems, increasingly, that that time is not when Donald Trump is still bloviating at the edges of civilization, but when the Big Macs and Coca-Colas finally do him in. We can't even think of turning to the remedy these folks dream of.
As for Flynn? The wife of Alexander Vindman says he should be called back to active duty and then court-martialed. We wouldn't have thought of that, but you know, it's not a bad idea.
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