At an appearance on October 21, 2025, at Turning Point USA’s “This Is the Turning Point” tour stop at Indiana University Bloomington, former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson engaged in an exchange with a student who questioned U.S. foreign-policy consistency and mentioned Carlson’s father.
The student, citing frustration with both the Biden and Trump administrations for their handling of conflicts in Israel and Ukraine, asked Carlson:
“Your dad was in the CIA and I was wondering, does our government even want war to stop? … It seems like the deep state’s controlling everything and we have no control.”
Carlson responded initially by conceding that he “probably sense[d] that I agree with a lot of that,” but bristled at the reference to his father:
“Leave my father out of it. I’m gonna have to kick your ass — which I could do by the way — if you bring him up again ’cause he was a wonderful man, whatever, you know, he did for a living. So I really do hate that.”
For clarity: Carlson’s father, the late Richard Warner Carlson (who died earlier this year at age 84) did work in government roles and led the U.S.-government-funded Voice of America network, but there is no credible evidence that he ever worked for the CIA.
The event was not all about this one exchange. Carlson answered questions on U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, saying:
“I think Ukraine is the victim here. NATO is the aggressor, NATO did this under the command of Joe Biden, and it’s deranged.”
Later in the same Q&A, Carlson got even more heated: when a student accused him of being worth $50 million, Carlson retorted:
“Get off the f***ing internet.”
