Good news. CNN was able to track down Santa Claus last night. Using footage that made CGI from the 90s look good, the liberal news network didn’t just find a fat guy riding a sleigh, though. They also found a member of a cult.

You see, Santa Claus was wearing a mask because doing so while riding above the atmosphere in complete isolation is totally when you should do so.

On this night before Christmas, we were following the official NORAD Santa tracker in the @CNNSitRoom and noticed that Santa is wearing a mask. pic.twitter.com/PgY3DpQpxR

— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) December 25, 2020

This shouldn’t bother me that much. I understand it’s just an overwrought attempt at politicization of something that used to not be political. That’s not exactly breaking news in today’s environment.

Yet, I’m just not a big fan of politicians and people in positions of influence (i.e. the media) ignoring empirical data to stroke their own egos and push religious observance to something that clearly doesn’t work.

Note this chart, which I wrote on a few days ago (see One Chart Shows How Useless Dr. Faui’s ‘Advice’ Is).

It’s been a while since I updated the chart of Florida, Fauci’s favorite target for criticism, vs. all the states that blindly follow his advice

Shockingly, nearly 3 months after he said Florida was “asking for trouble”, they’re still having the best results pic.twitter.com/f8yHPgRz1Z

— IM (@ianmSC) December 22, 2020

All of the states above Florida, which does not have a state-wide mask mandate, have had a mask mandate in place since the spring. Now, I’m no scientist, but when something shows zero correlation to the spread of the virus, continuing to promote said thing in cultish fashion seems rather silly to me. And no, this isn’t a matter of people just not following the mandates. While my personal experience is that adherence to mask mandates is almost absolute in public places, even in the South, let’s assume 15-20% are breaking the rules. That should still result in a linear reduction in infections if masks truly reduce spread. Instead, we are seeing states without mask mandates do better than those with them. What’s that tell you?

It tells you that slapping a mask on Santa Claus is dumb propaganda propagated by a smart set that can’t just admit they don’t have the answer to everything.

But enough ranting. Merry Christmas!

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)