Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was seen before a press conference telling students that were standing behind him to take off their masks if they so choose, calling mask-wearing “Covid theater” that “does nothing.”

“You do not have to wear those masks. Please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything. We’ve gotta stop with this Covid theater. So if you wanna wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous,” he could be heard saying before starting the press conference at the University of South Florida.

The governor has recently cranked up his criticism of mandatory masking, having recently released a statement, and releasing a video on Twitter condemning mask mandates.

“People want to live freely in Florida, without corporate masking creating a two-tier society and without overbearing isolation for children,” said Governor Ron DeSantis in a statement co-released with Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joe Lapado. “We are empowering health care practitioners to follow science, not Fauci’s status quo.”

Governor DeSantis is at the University of South Florida to announce investments in cybersecurity workforce education. https://t.co/hfcVPmDacb

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 2, 2022

The video released on Twitter carried the same tune, where he said that it was no longer reliable to go on what the CDC is advising, and it trails real-world data.

“Simply relying on outdated CDC guidance when the experience has completely undercut that is not really a reasonable thing to do at this point,” DeSantis said via video.

“Every time I go to these places, I’ll be in these big events and you have all these people having such a good time and the poor servers are forced to mask and I will ask them, ‘Are you allowed to take the mask off?’ They say ‘not yet. They’re all waiting for it. They all want to be liberated. They want to be treated normally,” DeSantis added.