“Go back to work, covid is only contagious for 3 days. Masks are no longer required and we will black bag you if you wear one to a protest.”

They’re already doing this and Americans don’t actually care what they say, they just do what they want to. “You can’t tell me what to do” only comes out when the government tells them to do the opposite of what they want. When told to do the thing they were already going to do, they just take it as permission to do it to an absurd extreme. It’s not oppositional defiance, so reverse psychology doesn’t work. It’s individualist ideology taken to its logical conclusion.