The conflict seems particularly pitched in Palm Beach County, where four people sued county commissioners this week over the mask order. They contend that masks are “harmful medical devices” with “well-known risks and potential for serious injury and death.”

Louis Leo IV, an attorney from Pompano Beach, represents those residents and spoke at the county commission meeting June 23.

“If we’re going to educate people, let’s learn about pseudoscience,” he said. “It’s coming largely from unethical organizations who profit from sickness and eliminating, not just civil rights, but human rights under the guise of disease prevention. You know what you’re doing is wrong.”…

A man in Dallas told The New York Times he got into a fistfight when another person at a convenience store tried to rip off his mask. An employee at a big box store in South Florida had to instruct her employees how to defuse tense situations, the Times reported.

Videos on social media show people trying to enter businesses with medical-looking cards professing that a mask would be dangerous for them, on authority of a fictional government entity called the “Freedom to Breathe Agency.”