SAN JOSE — When the two unmasked men walked into Recycle Bookstore and whipped out their smartphone cameras, acting store manager Ryan Cage knew exactly what he was in for.

“Here we go,” he said aloud. “You gotta put on a mask or you can’t be in the store.”

These days, apparently, those are fighting words.

For the next half hour, the insults flew, captured and posted online by both sides.

The social media showdown over the store’s mask mandate was the latest in the ongoing culture war over COVID-19 that kicked up a notch Tuesday — the first day of the Bay Area’s latest mask requirements to combat a surge in infections from the highly contagious delta variant.

The campaign of anti-maskers has been ongoing the past couple of weeks, also targeting The LEGO Store and the Disney Store at Valley Fair shopping center in San Jose. Both stores had their own mask mandates already in place because children under 12 aren’t eligible for vaccination. Larger protests, some with several dozen people, have broken out around Los Angeles County in recent weeks, including at the Century City mall where anti-maskers carried signs and store employees locked the doors.

“It’s terrifying working in retail now,” Cage said. “How much trauma are we supposed to take? We’re just trying to make money for our families.”

At Recycle Books during the filmed altercation Friday, exasperated clerk Fern Alberts asked the men to “stop messing with people who have to do this for our living.”

“You have to be a mask Nazi for a living?” one of the men asked, laughing.

“I’m worried about my health,” she said.

“Are you really? Where’s your hazmat suit?” he replied.

The men posted the video to a YouTube channel and called it “‘Working Class’ Mask Nazi goes NUTS.”

While debates over masks often boil down to personal liberty versus public health, the showdowns a year-and-a-half into the pandemic have become nothing short of political theater. At the bookstore, one of the men picked up a book on Karl Marx and waved it around for effect.

To Cage, the whole experience was dehumanizing.

“They see you as a prop. You’re being used to get them more social capital or internet capital,” he said. “There’s no penalty. When we said, ‘Look, we’ll call the cops,’ they were like, ‘We don’t care.’ ”

Recycle Books has kept its own mask mandate intact, even after California shed most of its pandemic restrictions, including mask rules, on June 15.

But now, once again, they and other businesses have no choice.

The region’s latest mask mandate went into effect Tuesday in seven Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara and Sonoma — after a surge in new cases and new research showed vaccinated people could spread the virus.

At Valley Fair on Tuesday afternoon, where signs were posted at many of the stores, most shoppers complied and wore masks. Those who didn’t either were surprised by the ever-shifting mask mandates or defied them on purpose.

At Nordstrom, neither James Taylar nor Danette Meachem wore masks as they browsed through the sunglasses case.

“We got vaccinated for one reason — to not wear a mask anymore,” Meachem said.

“I’m vaccinated,” Taylar added. “I feel I’ve done my part.”

They both work out, take zinc and Vitamin C tablets each day and are skeptical of the evolving research that they are at risk to get sick or transmit COVID-19.

They don’t condone bullying by anti-maskers, and they carry their masks to put them on when asked. The Nordstrom clerk at the sunglasses case, who was wearing a mask, said she wasn’t about to make a scene and would leave any enforcement up to store security.

Anna Okruashvili, 22, wore no mask either as she headed across the shopping center concourse toward the exit. She was unaware of the new rules indoors.

“I thought it was OK not to wear it if we’re away from each other,” she said. “If I was in a small space, I’d wear it.”

She’s pregnant and not vaccinated, she said, and is confident she will avoid the virus because “it’s all about your immune system and living a healthy life.”

In the days before the anti-masker militants visited the LEGO and Disney stores, several other children’s stores in the same wing at Valley Fair received anonymous phone calls from people asking about their mask policies.

“We get paid minimum wage. Don’t harass teenagers,” said a clerk at the Build-a-Bear Workshop, who didn’t want to give her name because she was afraid that conservative groups would harass her or “dox” her online.

Last Friday’s run-in with the maskless men at Recycle Books was the second time employees had been accosted there. Two days earlier, two women arrived bearing computer print-outs that they claimed validated their defiance, what Cage called “legal mumbo jumbo.”

Their sole purpose, he said, is “to get footage. They want us to look bad. They want to get their clips so they do everything to harass us and get a reaction out of us.”

The group calling itself Easy Believism on YouTube could not be reached Tuesday, but in a statement to ABC7 News, it said it is encouraging like-minded anti-maskers to follow its lead into other retail establishments and to use as an excuse that they are medically exempt from wearing masks. The group said it doesn’t believe the science that masks can protect people.

“We are not saying COVID is not real. At this point, we are against mask mandates,” the statement said, adding “we are not against anybody, we are just against lies.”

Since the confrontation, Recycle Books has received overwhelming support from its customers, who are not surprised that the shop was targeted.

“We’re a liberal bookstore,” Cage said. “It’s going to be full of people who read the studies, who mask up and do what they can. They saw that as a perfect opportunity to get a rise out of people.”