Tucker Carlson threatened a student during a question-and-answer session at a university event who accused the podcaster and former Fox News anchor’s father of being in the CIA.
On Tuesday, Carlson appeared at Indiana University as part of the “American Comeback Tour” from Turning Point USA, the group founded by the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk. During a student question about why the U.S. continued to support the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, a questioner made an offhanded reference alleging Carlson’s father Richard Carlson had been in the CIA.
“Your dad was in the CIA and I was wondering, does our government even want war to stop?” the student said. “Do they want conflicts to end?”
Though Carlson grinned in response, the question appeared to set him off.
“Leave my father out of it,” Carlson said.
“I'm gonna have to kick your a***, which I could do, by the way, if you bring him up again because he was a wonderful man, whatever he did for a living,” Carlson added, saying that he “really” hated that aspect of the question and warned the student not to “test” him.
Richard Carlson, a former journalist and Reagan administration official who died earlier this year, has stated he had encounters with the intelligence world, but there is no public evidence he was ever in the CIA.
Carlson ran the U.S. government-supported Voice of America foreign media network at the end of the Cold War, and Tucker Carlson has said his father “worked in conjunction” with the CIA during his time in government.
The former official, who later served as the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles, told a 1993 oral history project that during his time at Voice of America, the media network was sometimes targeted by foreign intelligence services.
Richard Carlson has denied that his staff were spies and that U.S. intelligence services controlled the content of what they produced, though he acknowledged in the oral history that the VOA’s work often resembled spycraft in the hostile nations where it broadcast.
“The Voice of America correspondents weren't spies, they were reporters, but unfortunately in the kind of society with the rigidity of the People's Republic [of China] you end up doing your things covertly simply because you can't do them in any other way,” he said.
After leaving government, Carlson remained well-connected in Washington lobbying and think tank circles.
“The last 25 years of his life were spent in work whose details were never completely clear to his family, but that was clearly interesting,” Tucker Carlson wrote in an obituary. “He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues.”
The white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, a critic and rival of both Carlson and the late Kirk, has claimed in the past that Carlson’s father was in the CIA.
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