Masculinity In Review

This episode takes a man the public knows as a footnote in an impeachment and asks him the question the news never does: not what did you do, but what changed you. Lev Parnas — Soviet-born immigrant, recovering Trump-world insider, the figure at the center of the Ukraine pressure campaign, and now one of the most relentless voices for the Epstein survivors — joins Nick Paro for an hour that is less confession than autopsy of a conversion. The interview moves from a postcard slipped under a prison door to the 1920s gender politics being sold to teenage boys today, but its spine is a single claim that the Intelligent Masculinity series keeps circling: that the measure of a man is whether he will hold his own accountability rather than outsource it. Lev arrives having lived both halves of that proposition — the outsourcing and the holding — and the value of the hour is that he can describe, from the inside, exactly where one becomes the other. What emerges is a portrait of masculinity defined not by proximity to power but by the willingness to live with what power costs.

The most analytically useful thing Lev does is refuse the redemption-story shortcut. Asked what shifted, he declines the clean narrative — no single morning, no waking from a coma a different man — and reaches instead for the language of cults. He describes the mechanism with unsettling precision: the way a leader can tell you the black table is white until you believe it, the way you start, almost without noticing, “looking at ways of how to excuse it for him” rather than agreeing with your own wife. His turning point is not noble. It is a jail cell, ten days of solitary confinement under espionage charges, the enforced silence that — by accident — gave him the first uninterrupted stretch of thinking he’d had in four years. That detail matters because it inverts the usual masculine fantasy of self-made transformation. Lev didn’t conquer the cult; circumstance pried him loose, and only then did the work of accountability begin. The honesty about that sequence is itself the argument: a man who tells you he simply chose to be better is selling you something, and Lev has stopped selling.

From there the conversation widens into cultural diagnosis, and this is where Lev’s biography becomes a lens rather than a spectacle. He links the Trump rally moment that first unsettled him — the mocking of a disabled reporter — to a national arc, the slow normalization of cruelty as a style of strength. He names the manosphere directly, the Andrew Tate economy of Bugattis and private planes sold to boys who “don’t see the cost that comes with it,” and connects it to a politics that wants women back in the 1920s. The throughline he draws is that the lack of accountability he practiced personally is the same lack the country has practiced collectively: nobody pays, so the behavior compounds. For a man raised by his mother, grandmother, and sister after his father died when he was eleven, the misogyny is not abstract — it reads as a betrayal of the only people who taught him strength. His insistence that “women is a very important subject” is not a talking point bolted onto a redemption tour; it is, by his account, the oldest and most stable thing about him, the part the cult had to override before it could use him.

The Epstein survivors are where the episode’s ethics get concrete, and where Lev’s reframing of accountability does its real work. He rejects the framing that he advocates out of personal stake — “it’s not about what I have to do with the survivors, it’s what we all have to do with the survivors” — and insists the courage belongs to them, not him. But the most pointed argument of the hour is structural: the people who enable abuse, he says, deserve scrutiny equal to the abusers, because Trump and Epstein alike “wouldn’t be able to get away and do the things they’re doing if they didn’t have the enablers.” Then he turns that same blade on his own side of the aisle, calling out journalists he says sat on Epstein-related reporting for eight months to save it for a book. It would be easy to read this as grievance; it is sharper than that. Lev is applying one standard — you don’t get to profit off other people’s harm — without checking the political jersey of the person it lands on, and he is open that it has cost him, including attacks from groups he thought he was fighting alongside. That willingness to be disliked while applying a consistent rule is, in the series’ terms, the discipline of living with the consequences of your values.

What keeps the hour from sermonizing is that Lev never lets himself off the hook he’s hanging everyone else on. He talks about the children he wasn’t present for, the pressure he loaded onto his older kids because he was, by his own admission, parenting off a collision of The Godfather and The Brady Bunch with no manual of his own. He admits the pull toward powerful men may have been a search for the father he lost at eleven — a piece of self-knowledge offered without melodrama and then set aside. Even his answer to Nick’s closing Mulan question lands on this register: asked how he is “mysterious as the dark side of the moon,” the former mobster’s reveal is that he is, underneath all of it, “really a mama’s boy.” The vulnerability is not performance; it is the same accountability turned domestic, the recognition that being a good man is “a learning curve” because “we’re not born with a booklet of how to be a father.” This is the show’s thesis rendered in a single life — that better masculinity is just better humaning, practiced out loud, including the parts that don’t flatter you.

Lev Parnas is what accountability looks like when it is still in progress rather than safely in the past. He is running for Congress as an independent, archiving what he says he never got to release, and showing up week after week for survivors who owe him nothing — and he does all of it while conceding he would undo nearly everything that made him famous. The conversation Nick draws out is not a victory lap; it is a man narrating, in real time, the difference between the version of himself that excused cruelty to stay close to power and the version that now absorbs the cost of speaking against it. That contrast is the entire point of Intelligent Masculinity, and few guests have embodied both poles of it as starkly as Lev does here. If the series is an argument that strength is the willingness to carry your own consequences, then Lev’s hour is its hardest and most human piece of evidence: proof that the work is available even to someone who spent four years proving the opposite, and that the door out of the cult, once you find it, only opens by walking back through everything you’d rather forget.

~ Nick Paro

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Nick’s Notes

I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!

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Thank you 🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦, Gretchen Theodorakis, Agent#99, Jack 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈(he/him), Acejonesz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas! Join me...