And if the president did send in United Nations troops, Mr. Head continued, “I don’t want ’em in Lubbock County. O.K. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carriers and say, ‘You’re not coming in here.’ And the sheriff, I’ve already asked him. I said, ‘You gonna back me?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll back you.’

“Well, I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there,” Mr. Head said. “I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me.”

Mr. Head, a Republican who serves as the county’s emergency management director and presides over the commissioner’s court, made international headlines. He has not apologized, though he said that his statements were taken out of context and that he was using civil unrest only as an example of how he must prepare for worst-case scenarios.

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On Monday, Mr. Head sat straight-faced and calm at the hearing as more than two dozen residents sounded off on the tax increase and his statements. In an interview, Sheriff Kelly Rowe said he never had any discussions with Mr. Head involving any Obama-related uprisings or invasions, but he declined to say what he thought of Mr. Head’s remarks.

To many in Lubbock, the notion of United Nations armored personnel carriers rolling down the brick-paved Buddy Holly Avenue, past the Greyhound bus station and the Disabled American Veterans thrift store, has been an outrage and an embarrassment.

Kenny Ketner, the chairman of the Lubbock County Democratic Party, has called for Mr. Head to resign, as did the local newspaper, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, which wrote in an editorial that Mr. Head “threw civility out the window and went in a bizarre direction that not only embarrassed himself but all county and West Texas residents.” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, publicly questioned Mr. Head’s “mental competency to hold elected office.”

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Ms. Rogers, 74, said after the hearing that she took matters further, placing a phone call to the Secret Service. “There is an element in this city that is so anti-Obama that I think they have lost grip a little bit on reality,” she said.

As the hearing on Monday made clear, Mr. Head and his statements have received a small but vocal chorus of support in a place that the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, based in California, once called the second-most conservative city in the country (behind Provo, Utah) among those with more than 100,000 people. A handful of residents said that Mr. Head was right in preparing for the worst.

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“I believe that we need a sheriff’s militia to protect Lubbock County, and get all the sheriffs in Texas to start a militia to protect Texas,” Kim Wade Gatewood, 48, told the commissioners and Mr. Head.

After the hearing, Mr. Gatewood, an agricultural contractor, identified himself as the counsel general of the interim government of the Republic of Texas, which he said was not active at the moment. “If secession happens,” he said, “it’ll be active in a split second.”

Down the street from the courthouse, blue United Nations flags flapped in the breeze outside the office windows of Rod Hobson, a criminal defense lawyer. The flags flew in jest, not in support of Mr. Head. Inside, Mr. Hobson’s 5 ½-pound Yorkshire terrier was on patrol, dressed as a “war dog” in a blue United Nations beret made by his wife.

It is hard to be pro-Obama in Lubbock, but it is even harder to find official-looking United Nations flags to wave outside an office. Mr. Hobson and his wife bought what were probably the only two in town, at A-1 Flags.

“They were the only ones I had in stock,” said the store’s co-owner, Steve Hayes, 50.