A few days ago, RedState reported on a video of a Florida grocery store. It had gone viral and was eventually picked up by CNBC’s Shepard Smith, host of some low-rated show on the business network. Smith, in his typical style, had a passive-aggressive meltdown over the fact that people would dare buy groceries without wearing a mask.

(see Shepard Smith Calls Footage of Maskless Floridians ‘Shocking,’ Then Gets Wrecked By Data)

Seriously, watch this science ignoring, beta breakdown and it becomes more than clear why this guy is no longer employed by Fox News.

WATCH: This shocking video from @SamBrockNBC shows a market in Naples, FL where many customers and employees are not wearing face masks.

Florida does not have a mask mandate, but the CDC has said that wearing masks can help control the Covid pandemic. https://t.co/WFatRrjnYa pic.twitter.com/IMQJz4p0Ox

— The News with Shepard Smith (@thenewsoncnbc) February 4, 2021

Tucker Carlson, after seeing the clip of Smith, didn’t hold back. He went on his top-rated show that evening and swept the leg.

#Tucker out here absolutely body-bagging former FNC colleague-turned-CNBC anchor Shepard Smith over the Sam Brock video of a maskless Florida grocery store 🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/QDhQ9mRBrc

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 5, 2021

The Daily Caller provides some excerpts.

Jokingly describing Smith as a “genuine investigative journalist,” Carlson called the clip the “story of a lifetime” during a Thursday night segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“This was the scene, a woman smiled in a grocery store,” Carlson quipped. “Actually, it wasn’t quite what we thought it was. We believed the hype, I guess. Maybe when you spend 30 years reading scripts about car chases everything seems like a car chase. The problem is not everything is a car chase. Sometimes it’s just people just smiling at each other in a grocery store. Sorry, overheated news guy. That’s not actually, uh, news.”

The religious devotion to mask wearing is probably the most ridiculous thing to come out of the current pandemic. Over and over, data shows they don’t work. We’ve seen larger infection spikes in heavily mask mandated states than states that don’t have mandates at all. There appears to be almost no correlation between mask wearing and infection levels, likely because masks are simply an ineffective means of mitigation. You can blame that on a variety of issues, whether it be the type of mask, a lack of proper sanitation, or not “double masking,” which is the latest fetish. Regardless, the fact that masks aren’t working remains almost undeniably true.

Further, when specifically talking about Florida, Smith’s outrage is more than misplaced. Florida has done things right. They’ve remained open so as not to destroy their economy, they’ve protected the most vulnerable, and they’ve created one of the top vaccination regimes in the country. All of that has added up to a death rate that’s barely half of the most disastrous blue states. The continued focus on them by hacks like Smith is purely political. You know what’s much more “shocking” than some happy people buying groceries in Florida? The fact that New York continues to be a dumpster fire, or the fact that California, for all their lock downs and mask mandates, is doing terribly right now. You’d think a journalist would have an ability to separate the wheat from the chaff in this situation and do some real reporting.

Tucker’s take down is deserved because these people need to be shown for what they are. Shepard Smith is not a newsman. He’s a partisan, and an especially cynical one given his propensity to play-act mental breakdowns on air over things he deems impure. Florida doesn’t deserve his scorn. They deserve his praise. Past that, he should focus his attention on one of the many blue states that can’t even get their vaccines given properly, not some Twitter video of people deciding to not be miserable in a state that’s doing well.