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Tucker Carlson was in his element. For two hours on Tuesday night the former Fox News host held court at Indiana University, railing against 'woke' ideology and illegal immigration; excoriating interventionist foreign policy and condemning abortion as 'ritualistic.'
Even when one student asked about his 2021 text message to a colleague, in which he confessed to hating Donald Trump 'passionately', Carlson was unruffled: he bantered with the questioner and ended with the audience whooping and cheering in his defense.
Yet there was one question that appeared cut to the bone. And it was truly telling.
A tracksuit-clad student from Fort Lauderdale took the microphone and asked Carlson, 56, about US activity in Israel and Ukraine, adding: 'Your dad was in the CIA and I was wondering, does our government even want war to stop? Do they want conflicts to end?'
Carlson's chummy demeanor immediately changed. 'Leave my father of it,' he said, an undercurrent of menace in his voice.
Trying to regain his jovial composure, he joked: 'I'm going to have to kick your ass - 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.'
The discomfort, however, was clear.
'Don't test me, son,' said Carlson of the question a split-second later, looking down and shaking his head in thinly-veiled anger.
Why was Carlson so shaken?
It wasn't the reference to the CIA: Carlson himself has speculated that his father, Richard Warner Carlson, may have been engaged in covert activity, despite there being no public evidence of it.
Richard Carlson worked as a journalist on the West Coast before Ronald Reagan made him head of Voice of America - he would go on to become VOA's longest-reigning director in its 50-year history. In 1991, George HW Bush made him ambassador to the Seychelles, perhaps as a thanks for his service.
He would hold the position for less than a year, however, before returning to the US and managing various broadcast interests - among them the company that syndicated The Oprah Winfrey Show - and heading up numerous policy forums and think tanks. In June 2024, Carlson told podcast host Shawn Ryan that his father 'worked in conjunction with CIA', adding: 'A lot of my father's friends served as operations officers.'
When Richard died in March, aged 84, Tucker Carlson wrote of his father on X: '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. He worked in dozens of countries and breakaway republics around the world, and was involved in countless intrigues.'
So was it the fact that the death was only seven months ago that Carlson appeared angry? Perhaps.
Or was it instead that any mention of Carlson's parents is complicated, bringing back painful memories and forcing filed-away facts to the fore?
Carlson adored his father, telling Megyn Kelly in 2021: 'I really revered him. And I still do.' But behind the father-son solidarity lies a devastating family history, which has undoubtedly shaped Carlson into the man he is today.
'Sometimes people who undergo hardship as kids become really bitter, and then there's another group that become just relentlessly optimistic, and cheerful, and never complain about anything, and are always charging forward to a happier future,' Carlson told Kelly. 'That is very much my father.'
Richard Carlson certainly had more than enough to be bitter about.
Born to a 15-year-old girl in Boston, who had starved herself to try and hide her illicit pregnancy, he was given up for adoption immediately on birth. His teenage mother's diet left him with rickets: he would walk with bow legs the rest of his life.
When he was two, his biological father - who was 18 when Richard was born - tried to convince Richard's mother to come with him and steal the toddler from an orphanage. Then, the plan was to run away and get married. But she refused, protesting that she was still in high school: the father then shot himself dead two blocks from her home.
Richard was then placed with a loving foster family on a temporary basis: they already had three children, and the orphanage administrators wanted the child to be raised by a couple without children of their own. One day, a woman arrived to take Richard for a ride in her car: he would not see his foster family again for 40 years.
When Richard was 12, his foster father died from a heart attack at the age of 44.
'The death of my adopted father was somewhat of a trauma,' said Richard in 2024. 'But I already had some trauma in my life, so I could handle it. I did handle it well, and I used it to some extent in the development of my own character and my own interests.'
But more turmoil was to come – for multiple generations.
Richard moved to California and married an artist, Lisa McNear, with whom he had two sons: Tucker and Buckley. But when Tucker was six and Buckley four, their mother disappeared to France, never to see her sons again.
'Boo hoo, poor me,' said Carlson in the 2024 interview with Ryan. 'I don't want to get into the woe is me stuff. I don't think she liked us for some reason. Not clear, but she was pretty clear about that.'
With such generational upheaval, is it any surprise that Carlson Sr held tight to his son, and vice versa?
Richard raised his two sons alone until he married for the second time, to heiress Patricia Swanson, when Tucker was around 10. Tucker has said that the bond he forged with his father - hunting and shooting, fishing and exploring, reading and discussing - was iron-clad. The pair were incredibly close - frequently dining at adjoining tables at The Palm, a power lunch spot in Washington DC. They also had weekly lunches at The Metropolitan Club. Tucker said they spoke every day.
So perhaps, as Carlson was confronted on stage in Indiana by the specter of his father's CIA work, it was his job as a father that hit home. Being a good father was certainly something that Richard seemed to prize above both his own and his sons' professional accomplishments.
'I have a great relationship with Tucker and Buckley,' said Richard, the year before his death. 'They've been very successful in the things that they do, but mostly successful as parents. They're really good at their jobs as father and as a husband.
'I'm happy about that and I think they are too.'