Carlson wants Republicans to support the Pennsylvanian but doesn’t want to actually have to defend any of his conduct. So he simply conceals the details from his viewers, suggests Mastriano has been unfairly attacked, and lets the candidate connect with his viewers on a shared reverence for the military and distaste for violent crime. This encourages Republican leaders to similarly look past Mastriano’s conduct and get more firmly behind his candidacy.

Carlson’s promotion of Mastriano is not an anomaly. He regularly champions Republican politicians others might view as having disqualified themselves.

As the Fox host pointed out during his interview, Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee “Kari Lake was” treated the same way as Mastriano until recently. As Media Matters has noted:

Lake is a prominent election denier linked to Nazi sympathizers and QAnon figures. The former local news anchor is a regular on far-right propaganda outlets like Steve Bannon’s War Room and One America News Network. She has aggressively promoted the debunked “Sharpiegate” conspiracy theory, called to replicate the bogus, QAnon-linked Maricopa County audit “in every county in Arizona,” and repeatedly called to “decertify” the 2020 election. Lake maintains she would not have certified Arizona’s presidential election results had she been Arizona’s governor at the time due to debunked conspiracy theories. (There is no legal pathway to decertify or change the results of a presidential election.)

Lake’s extreme views explain why the state and national GOP establishment had supported her primary opponent “in an attempt to push their party past the chaotic Trump era,” as The Associated Press put it. But when Carlson hosted Lake for the first time a month ago, he promoted her laughable claim that election denial is about free speech and claimed she had been smeared as “a big lie adherent.”

“Do you believe the media uses that slur to make certain people won't hear what you're saying about the issues?” he asked her.

Lake used the interview to hit on issues Carlson commonly focuses on, like immigration, fentanyl, and the perfidious mainstream media. After she commented that “we're not going to let Joe Biden drag the state of Arizona down while he is trying to destroy this country,” the host replied, “Amen. Boy, I can see where they're trying to stop you.”

Soon after, major Republican politicians flew to Arizona to appear alongside the would-be governor, while other Fox hosts gave her access to their viewers for the first time.

Then there’s Greene. She was a pariah within her party when she entered Congress in 2021 because she is a conspiracy theorist who has also promoted racist, anti-Muslim, antisemitic, and violent rhetoric. She had been exposed as an adherent to the violent Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories, as well as numerous others. She had suggested that the U.S. government perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged, and that the Stoneman Douglas school shooting was a false flag. She suggested the Rothschild banking family controls a space laser used to start the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced by a body double. She endorsed the wild notion that Hillary Clinton was implicated in the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and that the former secretary of state and her former aide Huma Abedin had sexually assaulted a child, filleted the child’s face, wore her face like a mask, and then drank her blood as part of a satanic ritual.

None of this gave Carlson the slightest pause. He has been her greatest champion, downplaying her extremism as merely unapproved opinions and “unauthorized questions,” praising her as a “Washington outsider,” promoting her in an hourlong soft-focus interview on his streaming podcast, making her a fixture on his Fox prime-time program, and even donating to her campaign. His support didn’t falter after revelations that she had given a speech to a convention of white nationalists and suggested following the January 6 insurrection that Trump be informed that other Republican members were urging him to implement martial law in order to “save our Republic.”

With Carlson firmly in her corner, Greene built a sizable power base within the Republican Party and was embraced by its leaders. A strong midterm showing will increase her stature, according to the AP: “If Republicans win the House majority in the November election, Greene is poised to become an influential player shaping the GOP agenda, an agitator with clout.”

Carlson’s support and eagerness to provide access to his platform was also crucial for J.D. Vance and Blake Masters as they sought the GOP nominations for U.S. Senate in Ohio and Arizona. Both are henchmen for the fascist tech billionaire Peter Thiel and have long records of toxic rhetoric and election denial.

Carlson’s treatment of once-fringe GOP politicians is of a piece with his dedication to mainstreaming extremist ideas. He has defended the QAnon movement, January 6 insurrectionists, the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, and Russian propaganda about its invasion of Ukraine. He is eager to collapse any and all distinctions between right-wing extremists and mainstream Republicans, urging his viewers to treat policies targeting violent white supremacists and rhetoric warning of rising “semi-fascism” as attacks on themselves.

The Republican Party is walking through the door Carlson opens, cleaving toward the most extremist elements as they seek to subvert democracy, oppose the rule of law, and embrace political violence.