Intelligent Masculinity

Sick of this Shit Pub

A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. sickofthis.substack.com

  1. Intelligent Masculinity | E31 - Tim Whitaker

    8 MAY

    Intelligent Masculinity | E31 - Tim Whitaker

    “We are the freaking problem. We are the agent of chaos.” ~ Tim Whitaker ~ Masculinity In Review Tim Whitaker walked into today’s Intelligent Masculinity discussion with years of experiences - through a faith community that raised him, a church that eventually removed him, and public-facing projects — Tim Whitaker Speaks and The New Evangelicals — built explicitly to help Christians find a path forward that doesn’t end in nationalism. This is the first half of a two-part Intelligent Masculinity sit-down, and Nick frames it accordingly: today is the wider cultural conversation; part two will be the masculinity questions proper. What ends up happening in the meantime is that Tim and Nick map out, in real time, the entire infrastructure that the second half will sit on top of. The episode is a rare thing in this series — a guest who has done his deconstruction work in public, talking with a host who has done his thinking about masculinity in public, and the two frames keep finding each other. Tim’s exit story has a structure he calls the unholy trinity of movements, and he is unusually clear about why each one mattered. Trump was the dam break — not because of policy, but because the same Sunday school teachers who had spent his childhood teaching the importance of sexual purity and saving yourself for marriage suddenly demanded he vote for the man on the cover of Playboy who bragged about assaulting women. He puts the contradiction in its honest form: I’m just doing what you taught me to do — why am I now suddenly the bad guy? Black Lives Matter was the second wake-up call, the moment when friends started sending him videos engineered to turn Ahmaud Arbery into the bad guy and he realized the tradition of truth he thought he’d been standing on was actively lying to him. COVID closed the loop. He watched pastors he respected reframe public health as tyranny, and he kept asking the same theological question: why wouldn’t I wear a mask during a global pandemic, as a Christian, if loving my neighbor as myself is the actual instruction? None of this was political to him at the time. It was a slow recognition that the people teaching him integrity were not, themselves, applying it. The Christian nationalism mapping is where the conversation becomes a useful piece of reporting on who is actually running the federal government. Tim names them without hedging. Pete Hegseth runs the Department of Defense with Crusader iconography tattooed on his body — Tim’s question is how much more obvious you need an example to be. Russell Vought, the architect behind Project 2025, is the quieter version of the same project. Stephen Miller, despite being Jewish, is described as enhancing and leading the Christian nationalist project from inside the administration — a useful reminder that Christian nationalism is a political coalition, not a coherent theology. Paula White, one of the biggest names in the New Apostolic Reformation, has the direct ear of the president on how to think about things. Tim acknowledges the squabbles between the factions — Catholic nationalists, charismatic Christian nationalists, the more reformed Doug Wilson and Hegseth wing — but the political alignment, he says, is functional. They will fight each other over theology and still vote together on policy. That’s the load-bearing observation. The ecumenical disagreements don’t slow down the takeover. Midway through, the episode is interrupted by a YouTube troll — and what would normally be a derail becomes one of the strongest segments of the hour. Nick takes the live shot, and Tim doesn’t flinch. The argument is not about the troll. It’s about the framework the troll is using. America, Tim says, is killing kids, kidnapping five-year-olds, and executing people in the streets — the radical problem in the world is not Islam, it’s the radical Christian nationalism that is taking healthcare from millions of people. Nick extends the thread. The reason most so-called shit-hole countries are considered shit-hole countries is that we spent twenty years bombing them, and the nations that came before us spent decades doing the same. We invented the Global South as a category to bucket nations away from everybody and then blame them for being lesser. He pivots, exactly where you’d want him to, to what’s happening at home — his state shutting down its entire child health food network because there’s no funding, while the same government bombs schools elsewhere. The closing line lands where the title of the second clip in this episode lives: we are the agent of chaos. The 42% of all weapons exported globally is not a minor metric. It is the country’s posture in the world, expressed in dollars and ordnance, and Tim refuses to let the conversation shrink it. The toxic empathy segment is the philosophical core of the discussion - and worth slowing down for and listening to again. Tim names Allie Stuckey as the person who coined the term in its current form — anything that embraces a lie — and then dismantles it with a precision that the analytical-literary frame rewards. He grants the surface case: yes, empathy can be misapplied. The judge who handed a rapist a light sentence because he felt bad for the man’s career was practicing a kind of toxic empathy that hurt the victim and the wider system. But Tim refuses to let the rebuttal stop at definitions. The way the term is actually used today, he says, is to make cruelty defensible — toward queer people, toward women seeking abortion access, toward populations being bombed, toward anyone who suggests the president might not be a great guy. Toxic empathy as a phrase is doing the work of laundering cruelty into virtue, because cruelty is the point. Nick reads the diagnosis back through his masculinity frame and gets to one of the better formulations of the night: men were taught three primary emotions — happy, mad, sad — and we are now down to two, because happy leads to joy, and joy leads to questions, and questions are dangerous to the project. Toxic empathy, in his reading, is the operation that takes happy off the table so that the only languages left for men are mad and sad — the two most explosive, least articulate, most easily weaponized. Tim agrees and extends it. The whole alpha-male performance — the cars, the six-packs, the curated aesthetic — is gay in the structural sense. It is built for the male gaze, addressed to other men, and married to a homosocial economy where women are an afterthought. Nick and Tim spend the closing stretch arguing for a model of masculinity that doesn’t have to perform for any of it, and the contrast lands because they keep grounding it in their actual lives. Tim is almost ten years into a marriage he describes — without any false modesty — as the best freaking marriage ever. He is not walking around ruling his roost with an iron fist. He is empathetic, his wife is a good listener, and they have learned how to do conflict resolution in a way that promotes the flourishing of the marriage rather than scoring points inside it. He notices, with some delight, that the alpha bros are usually divorced or married to someone who isn’t happy. Nick celebrated his eleventh anniversary the week before recording, and the math becomes its own argument: maybe the men who don’t look like alphas, but stay happily married for over a decade, have figured out something the men selling the alpha brand have not. Both men keep returning to the same point — the actual courage in this culture is to be vulnerable on camera, to hug your kids, to cry with them, to admit that the masculinity you’re being sold by Myron Gaines or Andrew Tate or Donald Trump is a sheep imitation of strength masquerading as the wolf. The episode closes on Samwise Gamgee, which is more on-theme than it sounds. A YouTube comment from Queen Home Slice points out that women, by an overwhelming margin, simp for Samwise — the gardener who carries his friend up a mountain — not for the alpha bros. Nick frames it as the male model the second half of this series is going to keep coming back to: caring, kind, gentle, helpful, a good friend. Be a Samwise and not an Andrew Tate. It is a goofy line, said in good humor, and it is also the closest the episode gets to a thesis statement. Tim’s whole project — The New Evangelicals, the Substack, the YouTube, the Instagram, the open DMs, the no-paywall content — is a Samwise project: someone walking alongside other people inside the same world he came from, helping them carry the weight far enough out of it that they can stand up on their own. What makes Tim a useful guest for this series, in the end, is not just his story. It is that he has done the deconstruction work and is still doing it in public, with no paywall and no brand to protect, and he is doing it as a Christian and as a man — the two specific axes that the series cares about. Part two will get into intelligent masculinity directly, with Nick’s working definition — the refusal to offboard accountability, the willingness to live with the consequences of your own actions and values — held up against the cultural machinery this episode just spent an hour mapping. By the time Tim comes back, the listener will have the whole structure in front of them: who runs the government, what they mean by Christian, what cruelty is doing in the language of empathy, and why the alpha brand is the weakest version of masculinity on offer. Tim Whitaker, today, is the guest who makes that map readable. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law en

    32 min
  2. Intelligent Masculinity | E33 - Ellie Leonard

    7 MAY

    Intelligent Masculinity | E33 - Ellie Leonard

    “When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you. And so I feel like they don’t know I’m coming. And so I’m just tiptoeing in.” ~ Ellie Leonard ~ Masculinity In Review Nick Paro sits down with Ellie Leonard — Substack writer, mother of four, and one of the independent journalists pulling Epstein survivor stories out of the place legacy media stopped looking — for a conversation that begins as a check-in and turns, by degrees, into an argument about who gets to tell which stories, what it costs to tell them, and what kind of men are produced by the homes that raise them. Ellie has been on the show before, back when she was still introducing herself as “the unpaid writer.” She rebranded to the Panicked Writer; Nick floats “the less panicked writer” as the next iteration, since her rent is paid now and the panic in her face has visibly loosened. The joke holds the whole episode in miniature. Ellie has always done serious work. Now the work is finally feeding her, and the rest of us are catching up to what she’s been doing all along. The path here was not short and it was not glamorous. Ellie reached out to over 200 literary agents and was rejected by 153 of them; the rest ghosted. She wrote two books that nobody would publish. She came up through transcript correction work — the kind of behind-the-scenes labor that, as Nick points out, can make or break a case in court — and through years of fly-on-the-wall proximity to the Weinstein, Woody Allen, and Kanye stories. When she pitched her own writing on those subjects, the publishing industry told her, in so many words, that they were tired of women reclaiming their narratives. They were bored. That sentence, casually delivered by a literary gatekeeper, is the thing the rest of the episode keeps circling. The bored editor is the Maxwell-letter problem in microcosm. When the institutions that exist to surface these stories decide they are bored of them, the stories don’t stop being true. They just stop reaching the public — until someone like Ellie picks up a Substack and starts writing them anyway. She came to Substack at the urging of her close friend Tiffany Torres Williams of The Modern Jezebel, who told her to come write because she loved it. The plan was cathartic. Memoir-esque. A little fiction for her kids. And then the election happened, the Epstein stories started moving, and her writing turned. She doesn’t claim it was strategic. She calls it curiosity. Curiosity, in Ellie’s case, turned out to be a discipline — the kind that produces investigative reporting at the rate she now produces it, with a network of sources and survivors and other writers she could not have imagined before this year. Her word for the year, borrowed from Tiffany’s habit, is “plot twist.” She means it. What she has stumbled into is something the rest of journalism has nearly forgotten how to do. She talks about Maritza Giorgio of the Grounded Podcast scooping her up — the calls at 11 p.m., the texts at 2 a.m., the constant low-grade communal triage of writers and journalists who have decided that the work matters more than the byline. Katie Phang and Jim Acosta call her up to ask what she’s working on, what’s stressing her out, how they can help. People share information instead of hoarding it for the scoop. That, Ellie says, is what true journalism looks like when you actually find it — and it does not look like the news as we have been trained to understand it. It looks like dishes being washed and dinners being eaten while people break down what they know on the phone with each other. The legacy version of the business — the one obsessed with breaking news and exclusivity and access — has been so thoroughly captured by celebrity and money that the actual work of telling the public what it needs to know has migrated to Substacks and podcasts and group threads. Ellie is one of the people the work migrated to. The Michael Wolff line lands like a thrown punch and lingers like a bruise. Wolff called Ellie and several other women who have been writing about the Epstein files and called them opportunists. He told them they were caught up in hysteria. Ellie’s read of that is precise: when men of his stature in the industry use words like “hysteria” against women who are reporting on the abuse of children, they are not describing the women’s behavior. They are describing their own discomfort at being reacted to. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” she says of the men whose work she now critiques, “but you did it, and now I’m reacting to it.” That sentence is half the thesis of this whole episode in one breath. Powerful is the word she keeps using for women who do not perform smallness on cue. Hysterical is the word the people who built the structure use back at her. The gap between those two words is where the work lives. The conversation about the language we use lands hard, and it lands without becoming a lecture. Ellie is unsentimental about which words have to go and which we are still pretending are fine. “B*tch” still gets a free pass in music, in casual conversation, in books — Nick names the Dungeon Crawler Carl series specifically and agrees with affection and frustration in equal measure. “Karen” has no male equivalent that lands the same way. “C*nt” is normalized in MAGA discourse against women in the administration whom Ellie and Nick both consider monstrous. Both of them refuse to use it anyway. Ellie’s argument is the unfussy one: we have moved on from words about other groups when we decided to. We can move on from these too. It is not, she says, a burden to learn something new. She mentions a trans person in her life and the work of relearning pronouns and a name; it was not intuitive, and it was not impossible, and it got easier quickly because she stayed consistent and did not make the relearning somebody else’s job. That is the whole argument she’s making about language, scaled up. Nick offers his own corollary, half joke and half operating principle: if you have to insult someone in the regime, use male anatomy, because men’s anatomy is the weak one. Kick a man in the balls and he falls down. Kick a woman in the same spot and she does not. He’s making a point with a grin, but the point is real. The slurs we have been handed are almost all built from the assumption that female bodies are the soft target. They are not. The bodies the slurs were supposedly built around belong to people who carry, deliver, and feed children — the most physiologically demanding work the human animal does — while the actual fragile equipment hangs off the men insisting otherwise. The joke, in Ellie’s hands and Nick’s, becomes a small piece of evidence in the larger case the episode is making. The story we have been told about who is strong was a marketing campaign, and the campaign has been losing for a while. The hour’s most generative thread is the one about raising boys. Ellie has three sons and a daughter, and she talks about her household with the matter-of-factness of someone who long ago decided that the home is not a small project. Her boys come home from school saying things — “that’s a boy job,” “boys can be soccer players, Charlotte can’t” — and they do not get condemned for it. They get a conversation. Their pockets are deeper than her pockets and they notice it; she tells them yes, that is a great question, here’s why. She breastfed all four kids tandem-style well past the cultural cutoff, which means the woman’s body in their household was first a thing that fed them and only later, somewhere out in the world, a thing the magazines sexualized. Her boys grew up associating breasts with hunger and care. The grocery-store checkout aisle was the place that tried to teach them otherwise. Some grocery stores, she notes, have figured this out and gone to family-friendly checkouts. The fact that the rest haven’t is one of the small structural ways boys are quietly trained, before any of them have language for it, to read women as decoration. She is similarly clear about why she will not let her boys’ rights be eroded by the work of teaching them about her daughter’s. Equality, in Ellie’s house, is not subtraction. The boys are not made smaller so the girl can be made bigger. They are taught that all four of them are full people and that the things they will hear at school and on screens are stories, not facts. She watches them grow up gentle and she does not mistake gentleness for weakness; she names it as the result of hearing real conversations at home about real things. This is where Ellie quietly answers the show’s central question without being asked. The home, she says, is 80% of how a small child develops. You do not get to control everything that comes at them out in the world. You get to control what they hear from you. That is what she’s done. Nick brings the definition into the room — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Ellie immediately folds it into something she’s been working on independently. Even the worst men in public life, she says, would tell you they think they are trying to be better every day. The ones doing the most damage are very often the ones with the strongest internal narrative that they are the heroes of their own story. The work, then, is not just the disposition; it is the willingness to actually look at whether the disposition is producing anything. She tells the Antioch, Tennessee story to make the point. She and her husband worked at a car dealership outside Nashville right after they got married. The casual racism was not casual. She set a single boundary on her first day — if I hear it around me, I leave — and the people around her recalibrated immediately. S

    1hr 1min
  3. Intelligent Masculinity | E30 - AngryMaleVet

    7 MAY

    Intelligent Masculinity | E30 - AngryMaleVet

    “That oath never expires. And I still have that raging fire to help the people of this country get a better life.” ~ Angry Male Vet ~ Masculinity In Review Nick Paro sits back down with Angry Male Vet — retired Air Force intelligence officer, 23-year combat veteran, and one of the sharpest voices connecting military reality to civilian political life — for the follow-up conversation they couldn’t finish at E26. What begins as a news-desk reckoning with the Strait of Hormuz, the firing of the Secretary of the Navy, and the structural gutting of Pentagon leadership becomes, slowly and deliberately, a conversation about something quieter and more durable: the work of knowing yourself, the courage it takes to sit still long enough to do it, and what it means that the forces trying to prevent it are doing so on purpose. The episode opens in the middle of things. An indefinite ceasefire with Iran, vessels being seized back and forth in the Indian Ocean, John Phelan removed as Secretary of the Navy, General Randy George fired from the Army Chief of Staff position — all of it mid-war. Angry Male Vet’s read on the chaos is precise without being clinical: Hegseth is a soft individual who cannot tolerate disagreement, and the military is now being stripped of the experienced, opinionated senior leaders who would have said so to his face. He names the Apache pilot investigation that Hegseth shut down within hours — pilots using taxpayer money to perform for Kid Rock — as a crystallizing example of what that softness looks like in practice. Any leader worth his salt would have let the chain of command handle it. Hegseth reached. That’s the tell. The pattern since then has been consistent: fire whoever says something uncomfortable, and call it strength. Nick brings Kristofer Goldsmith’s observation about gas prices — that they’re one of the few things Americans see every day, and therefore one of the few metrics that converts abstract policy into visceral personal experience. Angry Male Vet extends it. In a moment when billionaires are already under a spotlight — making money on insider trading while services dry up and people stop going to the doctor — the pump price becomes the aperture through which the whole structure becomes visible. It’s not the most important cost. But it’s the one that makes you ask the question out loud. He runs the numbers on Arkansas: $2.50 to $4.00 for regular, diesel nearly at $6.00. That’s real math in the South. And it’s moving the conversation in a direction the war’s architects did not anticipate. The Palantir segment lands somewhere between geopolitical analysis and alarm. Nick has looked at the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget proposal and describes it flatly as a Palantir wet dream: drones, AI automation, and full integration into every piece of domestic infrastructure. Angry Male Vet agrees without hedging. It’s the acceleration of something that’s been going on since trickle-down economics — the selling of the country to companies — but now they’re not hiding it. They’re openly using FISA renewals, surveillance infrastructure, and the language of national security to build the monitoring architecture of an oligarchy. The defense against it, he argues, is not primarily legislative. It’s building the kind of community and awareness they’re trying to prevent. Protests, primaries, voter registration, conversation — all of it. He mentions the “No Kings” protests growing to historic proportions. He names Keira Havens and the Citizens Impeachment Coalition as one of the networks doing structural work in the space. Nick connects her to Walter Rhein and Will Fullwood, to candidate interviews he never expected to be doing, to a level of movement infrastructure he’s watching materialize in real time. The formal Intelligent Masculinity segment opens with Nick restating his definition — the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and contrasting it with what Hegseth, Trump, Vance, and Miller actually are: men who perform masculinity for an audience to get likes and clicks and views, and who hold none of the consequences of any of it. He asks Angry Male Vet how he models this in his own life. The answer is one of the more interesting moments in any episode of this show. Angry Male Vet declines the frame. He doesn’t even define it as masculinity or femininity, he says. It’s intelligent humanity. The question he returns to constantly is: am I being honest with myself, and am I being honest with others about how I actually feel? That’s the whole thing. Everything else — the accountability, the self-reflection, the courage to look at your own fractures — is downstream from that one honest question asked without a mask on. He is not particularly gentle about what the mask-wearers are actually afraid of. Hegseth and Miller and those guys — there are deep fractures inside of them that they’re covering with an alpha-male performance because some small group of people will like them and they won’t have to be afraid. But in doing so, they are treating other human beings in inhumane ways to protect a construct that isn’t even real. They call themselves followers of Christ while praying every bullet hits its mark. They are not happy people. They’re shells. And they’re making money selling a dream that is only going to make the lives of the people who buy it worse. Joe Plenzler’s article on Hegseth’s war on woke — specifically on the declaration of empathy as the enemy — becomes the through-line for the middle portion of the episode. Angry Male Vet’s military experience gives him standing here that no think-piece writer has. He was in Afghanistan working the hearts-and-minds approach, sitting across from tribal chieftains and infrastructure discussions and the plain reality that the civilian population either sides with you or you never leave. That is not a woke policy. That is the actual doctrine of winning. If you don’t understand who the people around you are, if you can’t see their values and what they want for their lives, you are creating more warfighters from the people you’re supposed to be helping. Empathy isn’t kindness. It’s intelligence in application. And when Hegseth strips it from the doctrine because it doesn’t fit the brand — he loses before the first engagement. The self-reflection tools discussion is practical rather than therapeutic. Angry Male Vet is not selling a framework. He’s describing a discipline. Unplug. Sit with yourself, which a lot of people are afraid to do. Ask: how am I feeling right now, and why? Not seven seconds after the feeling hits — proactively, before the limbic treadmill takes over. He names a specific habit: noticing when he’s agitated by something that seems objectively minor and pulling it apart. Where is this actually coming from? Is it the thing in front of me, or something underneath it? He locates self-reflection as monumentally important to magnifying your life — not because it’s virtuous, but because it’s how you know whether what you’re thinking and feeling is actually yours, or whether it was put there by two sources hitting you with the same message over and over until you stopped questioning it. That’s the MAGA voter, he says. Not stupid. Victimized by the systematic removal of their own thinking. Nick brings up Nieta Greene and the conversation about the disabling effects of war — specifically what happens to service members coming back from this conflict if the support infrastructure isn’t there ahead of time. Angry Male Vet’s answer is direct: you get red-pilling, black-pilling, accelerationism, addiction, suicide. He’s seen all of them. The antidote is not complicated. Talk about it. Make it okay to say you’ve been traumatized. Create communities — veteran support groups, any support groups — where people can hear that they are not alone. Because the alternative is sitting in it alone until the only escape route that offers relief, even temporarily, is the one that makes everything worse. He describes VA group therapy as one of the most important things he has ever done in his life: a community of people he could talk to without judgment and listen to without judgment and know that not even close was he the only one going through this. The Hegseth anti-woke movement, in his telling, is specifically going to cost lives here. Service members who have bought into the messaging that mental health is weakness, that asking for help is unmasculine, will come back traumatized and will not get better. They will live sadder lives. And they will not understand that they don’t have to — that it can be different — because the possibility was deliberately obscured from them. Depression feels like normal, he says, until you’ve been out of it long enough to realize what you were living in. Those people will never know. The larger thesis lands in the isolation discussion, and it’s where the episode finds its sharpest edge. Nick names it first — this anti-woke b******t, this personal and national isolationism, is so damaging and destructive to your well-being, and it leads to suicide, and I know because I’ve been there. And then Angry Male Vet frames it structurally. It is a strategic objective. If you’re isolated, you’re not talking to people. You’re not more aware of things. You don’t have empathy for folks who are a different color or love different people — people who are in every meaningful way the same as you, just trying to get through the day and take care of their family. Isolated, you look at those people as objects, as things to hate. That’s the design. This administration can have all the answers. Only listen to me. And it never gets better. There’s no more money in your pocket. You’re not feeling bett

    1hr 3min
  4. Intelligent Masculinity | E29 - K.R. Byers

    19 APR

    Intelligent Masculinity | E29 - K.R. Byers

    “Admitting that I did something wrong was the first step, and it was incredibly difficult. It took me years to actually fully believe — not just say so that my probation officer didn’t ride my ass — but actually believe: I, Kenyon Byers, have done something wrong. And I have to change.” ~ K.R. Byers ~ Masculinity In Review Nick Paro sits down with K.R. Byers — writer, creative satirist, and self-described “just a dude” — for a conversation that moves from video games and Oregon Trail nostalgia into something considerably weightier: creative resistance under authoritarianism, the cost of absent fathers, and the difference between performing accountability and actually living it. K.R. came up in a small mountain town in Idaho, born in 1987, raised by a mother who once threatened to kill him if he turned out gay and a grandmother who told him to just be himself. He writes under his initials by choice, builds Legos, plays Civilization 7 until he wakes up in the nuclear age, and has recently started gold mining on weekends. That contrast — the whimsical life of a curious creative and the very serious journey he’s had to get here — runs through everything he says. The conversation opens on creative resistance, and K.R. is direct about why he shifted his approach. Early on, he wrote whatever he felt — notes about how horrible the president was, the occasional “fuck Trump” when the mood struck. He’s moved away from that, and not because his convictions changed. He doesn’t want to say the name. He doesn’t want to feed the algorithm for someone who, in his read, does ridiculous things specifically to dominate the news cycle and get people talking about him no matter the valence. Instead, K.R. writes allegorically: a recent article on the similarities between cult leaders and serial killers was not labeled as such, but it wasn’t subtle either. He wants to create stories that poke fun at the administration without naming it — to be useful without being another amplifier. He likens the old approach to changing in front of an open window for a stalker. He’d rather close the window and call the cops. The creative shift has mostly helped his mental health. He feels less on edge, less obligated to grind out news content just to stay relevant. He misses, a little, the feeling that he was doing enough for his country. Both things are true. The discussion of influential masculine figures lands on two people who couldn’t be more different in context but point in the same direction. K.R.’s father worked on IBM mainframes when computers filled entire rooms, drove long-haul trucks, split logs, and never once leveraged his intelligence or capability for intimidation. He treated people with empathy and courtesy, lived a strong life without performing it, and modeled what it looks like to face the enemy within rather than projecting it outward. The second figure is Tupac — not the image, but the lyrics. K.R. describes a kind of emotional complexity and systemic awareness in Tupac’s work that he didn’t find in the men around him growing up: a voice from a masculine space that was willing to name grief, name poverty, name the humanity of people the world was throwing away. Both the father and the rapper, in K.R.’s telling, understood that strength doesn’t require an audience and doesn’t require contempt for the vulnerable. That’s his model. The most striking section of the episode concerns K.R.’s biological father — a man who was 38 years old when he impregnated K.R.’s mother at 15. He avoided K.R. for most of his life to escape the consequences of what, legally, was statutory rape. K.R. eventually went to see him, once, because he didn’t want the guilt of being in the area when the man died and having never said hello. The visit lasted long enough for a handshake. His father wouldn’t get out of the chair. Nick’s response is careful and clear: you don’t owe guilt to people who deserve no pity. A man who spent decades running from the consequences of what he did to a child — consequences that were never external, only self-imposed — is not owed a visit, a call, or a feeling. That frailty, Nick says, is exactly what they’re here to name. The refusal to face consequences is the core failure. K.R. listens. He already knows it. Nick shares his working definition of intelligent masculinity: the refusal to outsource accountability onto others and the discipline to live with the consequences of our actions and values — consequences good and bad. K.R. has had direct experience with this. About fifteen years ago, in Idaho, he was caught with three and a half ounces of marijuana — a felony under Idaho law. He stood at a fork: become a statistic, keep breaking the law, keep performing the version of himself that the trauma of his upbringing had built, or take accountability and change direction. He chose the latter, but he’s honest that it took years to actually believe he’d done something wrong rather than just saying so. That gap — between saying “I did something wrong” and believing it enough to reorganize your life around it — is the real work. He did the work. The felony was dismissed the year before last. He hasn’t been back. He names self-evaluation as his ongoing practice: he caught himself using dismissive gendered slurs on another show recently, corrected himself on air immediately, and didn’t make it a production. The hardest ongoing work, he says, is fighting the voice that tells him if he’s not making a billion dollars an hour, he’s a failure as a man. That one, he still fights every day. The episode closes with the Mulan-derived lightning round that ends every Intelligent Masculinity conversation. K.R.’s answers land exactly where his arc has been pointing all hour. Swift as a coursing river: “Make decisions more decisively than I just did.” Force of a great typhoon: “When I come in a room, you know I’ve been there because everything is wrecked.” Strong as a raging fire: “I dance to pop music in the living room by myself, and I’m not ashamed of it.” Mysterious as the dark side of the moon: “I seem like an open book, but there is a lot more to my story and past than I have ever once discussed online.” That last one lands with weight. K.R. has shared a lot today — a mother who called him sissy, a grandmother who told him to be himself, a father who shook his hand and sat back down, a felony, a girlfriend he calls his wife. And underneath all of it, there’s more. That’s not evasion. That’s a man who has learned the difference between being open and being exposed, between sharing what’s useful and giving away what’s yours. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Thank you ShālahBPookie - TheRebelCrone, Eric Lullove, Ms.Yuse, Lynn, Ashleigh Alauren, and many others for tuning into my live video with K.R. Byers! Join me for my next live video in the app. 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! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso | Millicent | Courtney 🇨🇦 | Eric Lullove | Terry mitchell | Carollynn | Julie Robuck | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 3min
  5. Intelligent Masculinity | With Rachel Maron

    10 APR

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Rachel Maron

    “Your responsibility as a human being should be to care for people in your community, care for people and whatever your community is, whether it’s your preschool, whether it’s your family, these are all little community spaces for you.” ~ Rachel Maron ~ Masculinity In Review In this 27th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro brings Rachel Maron on as the series’ first female guest, and she arrives with hard-earned credentials: seven adult children, six of them boys. The episode stakes are immediate and concrete—Rachel spent 26 years raising large families across two marriages, negotiated household dynamics with real male partners, and emerged with boys who check in with each other in group chats, call home for mediation when relationships get rocky, and openly admit when they’ve read feminist theory that changed their thinking. The episode is a masterclass in how parental modeling shapes the next generation’s relationship to emotions, labor, gender performance, and power. Rachel’s core conviction runs through every story she tells: kids learn behavior through modeling, not through lessons. When her ex-husband was perfectly willing to ride as a passenger on his Harley to a biker bar—and defended it to other riders by saying “she rides better than I do”—he was teaching their sons (and other men) something about male security that no lecture could match. When he took laundry as his domain without turning it into a performance of emasculation, he modeled that adult competence doesn’t require gender posturing. When he called his friends to tell them he loved them in the pre-woke 1990s, he created permission for her sons to have emotional intimacy with their peers. None of this required him to identify as feminist. It required him to be present, direct, and unbothered by the performative demands of masculinity. Rachel is unsparing about what breaks boys, and the mechanism is disarmingly simple: when adults tell a child “don’t throw like a girl” or “don’t cry like a girl,” they are teaching the child that “female” and “feminine” are categories of lesser-than. She watches this play out in real time on TikTok—dads visibly resentful when their sons lose jiu-jitsu matches to girls with actual training and skill—and names what’s happening: the beginning of red-pill ideology. Start with contempt for girls, spiral into contempt for women, end in hatred. The antidote is coaches, fathers, and male role models who celebrate a girl’s dominance because it’s achieved through practice and skill, not because she’s performing vulnerability. It’s a father who paints his nails sparkly with his son because there’s nothing shameful about wanting sparkle in your life. The conversation pivots, crucially, to what women actually find attractive—and Rachel is withering about what the manosphere thinks the answer is. A bigger car, a bigger gym body, an unsolicited photo. None of it. What moves her toward another human being is being seen—someone who knows her coffee order, who cares enough to order her water without ice while she’s in the bathroom, who shares her library and reads her books because her thoughts matter. She was married to a man who could not tell you how she took her coffee. She now partners with someone who reads her library. The difference is a meaningful form of intimacy and it’s observable. Rachel says it clearly: “women want to feel like you see them. That’s it.” It’s an observation about human longing that so many are trained to miss. She recommends two books—both by Bell Hooks—as essential reads for any man serious about not being exhausting: Feminism is for Everybody (thin, loving, accessible) and The Will to Change (about how patriarchy damages men by denying them emotional experience from infancy). Her own son read Feminism is for Everybody at 29 and called her hurt that she’d never shown him “that kind of feminism”—the broad, inclusive, loving kind. Her response was sharp: he’d only ever seen embattled feminism because that’s the only kind women get to have. Women fight for everything, so feminist spaces become rigid and rigorous. It’s not that the loving version doesn’t exist. It’s that it can’t flourish in conditions of scarcity and constant opposition. That reframe—holding tenderness and fierceness in the same hand—lands harder than any both-sides appeal. As we close our discussion, we see Rachel Maron. She’s a mom of six boys and a daughter who are now adults who call each other, support each other, gather to cook for one another, and reach out when they’re stuck. She did not achieve this through permissiveness or helicopter parenting. She ran a tight household with clear rules: if you say “I hate you,” you stand in the kitchen hugging your brother until you can look him in the eye and say “I love you, I just hate what you’re doing.” She built non-hierarchical spaces that were still structured. She modeled ambition and boundary-setting alongside her ex-husband’s emotional presence and reliability. She refused to perform gender or demand her children perform it. And she refused to accept the terms of either toxic masculinity or the version of feminism that requires women to be embattled all the time. Her sons turned into the kind of men who read feminist theory and call their mother asking why she didn’t insist earlier. That’s good parenting and great humaning. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Thank you NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, sandy bassett, Lisa, Jack (he/him), Acejonesz, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me and Rachel @ This Woman Votes for our next live video in the app. 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! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso | Millicent | Courtney 🇨🇦 | Eric Lullove | Terry mitchell | Carollynn | Julie Robuck | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 14min
  6. Intelligent Masculinity | With Angry Male Vet

    8 APR

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Angry Male Vet

    “The most productive investment anyone can make is to look within and figure out what you haven’t come to grips with. Are there things from your past that you’re still dealing with but don’t want to face? Having the courage to turn inward and face yourself — that allows you to navigate life in a better way.” ~ Angry Male Vet ~ Masculinity In Review For this 26th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro sits down with AngryMaleVet — a retired combat veteran, Air Force intelligence officer, and outspoken political commentator — for a conversation that moves between war, leadership, accountability, and the kind of strength that doesn’t ask for applause. The two met at the Abolish ICE live event in Minneapolis, a tribute to Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Goode, and the connection carried forward into this episode. What emerges is a grounded, direct examination of what it means to lead with professionalism and empathy — on the Pakistani border, in the halls of military command, and inside your own head. Angry Male Vet spent nine months on the Pakistani border working with villages and tribes on infrastructure and security — a mission that demanded more than tactical competence. He describes the work as requiring two things above all else: professionalism and empathy. He recounts sitting with a tribal chieftain through an interpreter, discussing road and school construction, while the chieftain explained plainly that the Taliban or the Haqqani Network would return as soon as American forces left. That kind of clarity — understanding the impossible position of a community caught between armed factions — is what shaped his leadership. Professionalism means you follow your oath and execute your mission. Empathy means you don’t lose sight of the human beings on the other side of it. The conversation shifts to the present moment, and Angry Male Vet does not soften the picture. With U.S. forces striking Iran, conscientious objector filings spiking service-wide, and commanders raising reservations up the chain, the military is under pressure from multiple directions. His message to active service members is straightforward: remember your oath, follow lawful orders, refuse unlawful ones, and take notes — because accountability will come. He points to specific moments of pushback already happening: the AH-64 Apache investigation that Hegseth shut down within two hours, the U.S. SOUTHCOM commander who resigned over the Venezuela strikes, and the behind-the-scenes resistance that likely prevented any move on Greenland. The institution is not monolithic. There are people inside it paying attention. The conscientious objector filings, he argues, are not a sign of weakness — they are one of the clearest expressions of masculine strength in this moment. It takes more courage to stop, name your objection, and put it on record than to go along with the current. He draws a direct line between this kind of moral independence and the masculinity the show is built around: not bravado, not performance, but the willingness to stand for something at personal cost. The U.S. strike on a school in Manab that killed 175 elementary schoolgirls — brushed aside by Hegseth and Trump — is exactly the kind of action he says military members have a legal and ethical obligation to refuse if the target sets expand further. That refusal is not insubordination. Per the UCMJ and the oath every service member takes, it is the requirement. When Nick asks who shaped his model of masculinity, Angry Male Vet names his father and Barry Sanders. His father worked on IBM mainframes and drove long-haul trucks, split logs and raised a family — and never once leveraged his intelligence or capability for intimidation. He treated people with courtesy, practiced empathy, and believed the real battle was the one inside yourself. Barry Sanders gets named for a different reason: he would make a run that left the entire stadium stunned and then hand the ball to the referee and walk back to the sideline. No dance, no speech. He did his job and got ready to do it again. Both examples point to the same thing — strength that doesn’t require an audience. Angry Male Vet brings 23 years of service, deployments across three theaters, and a practitioner’s understanding of what it actually costs to lead well under pressure. This conversation threads military ethics, political accountability, and the internal discipline required to be the kind of man — and the kind of soldier — who does the right thing when no one is watching. Nick closes by naming what the series is building toward: more voices, more perspectives, and a clearer picture of what intelligent masculinity looks like when it’s lived rather than performed. In Angry Male Vet, that picture is sharp — a man who measures strength by the courage to face yourself first, and the world second. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Mack Devlin, LeftieProf, Susan Gaustad, sandy bassett, and many others for tuning into my live video with AngryMaleVet! Join me for my next live video in the app. 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! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso | Millicent | Courtney 🇨🇦 | Eric Lullove | Terry mitchell | Carollynn | Julie Robuck | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    39 min
  7. Intelligent Masculinity | With Forrest Page

    3 APR

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Forrest Page

    “It was a very unique spot. You could tell that they’ve been through something, some kind of trauma. There’s almost a look to trauma that I deal with a lot in my day job that you can usually see. But at the same time it was conflict-free. An event with thousands upon thousands of people in a small parking lot, shoved together in front of this space, and I just don’t recall conflict. I don’t recall yelling, anger, anyone having any sort of exchange that wasn’t positive.” ~ Forrest Page ~ Masculinity In Review Forrest Page walked into the George Floyd Memorial in Minneapolis carrying a camera and left carrying something he wasn’t expecting: clarity about what community actually looks like when it’s built to last. For 18 years, he’s been a teacher in Michigan - and is currently a physical education teacher at a Juvenial Detention Center. For decades, he’s been a father, a photographer, and a quiet radical. In this discussion, Nick and Forrest dig into what that means — through the work of raising kids, showing up to events, and building institutions that don’t replicate the failures of the men who came before. The spine of this conversation is privilege and responsibility. Forrest grew up in a home where his father chose teaching over money, where his mother held the household together while carrying an impossible load, where being “good” wasn’t optional. He internalized early that being a man meant sacrifice for others and willingness to grow when challenged. Those lessons shape everything: his work with Valor Media, his approach to parenting four children through a time of political violence, his quiet presence at events where the community is still processing collective trauma. Forrest doesn’t perform activism. He lives it — and he’s teaching his kids - both at home and as a teacher - to do the same without pretense or moral grandstanding. The Abolish ICE event forced Forrest to reckon with something deeper: the power of a community that has learned to hold space for trauma while refusing to reproduce violence. The thousands of people gathered in that parking lot had come through George Floyd’s murder, the uprisings, the backlash, and the ongoing occupation of their city by federal agents. Instead of fracturing, they held. Instead of cycling violence, they created something rare — a space where anger and joy existed at the same time, where people who had been traumatized by the state could still laugh, still sing, still recognize each other as human. That’s what Forrest photographed. That’s what changed him. But this conversation isn’t sentimental. Forrest is frank about what he can and can’t control as a white parent, about the limits of being nice, about the weight of carrying four kids through a moment when democracy itself is contested. He talks about traveling with his family knowing that ICE agents are at airports, knowing he has options that immigrant families don’t have, and committing anyway to being present — to using his privilege as a tool rather than a shield. That’s the work of intelligent masculinity: not the fantasy of standing apart from power, but the harder practice of standing in it and redirecting it toward what the community actually needs. Forrest’s father modeled this for him — a man who stepped off the ladder in his late twenties, took a pay cut, worked nights at a pizza place while going to school during the day, and chose to spend decades teaching kids in public schools. His mother modeled something equally important: the work of caring for a household, making good people happen, doing the invisible labor that allows other people’s dreams to matter. Forrest inherited a practice, not a checklist. And he’s spending his life teaching it — in a classroom, at an event, to his kids, to whoever is paying attention. The question at the heart of intelligent masculinity is simple but relentless: What are you willing to sacrifice for something larger than yourself? Forrest’s answer isn’t heroic. It’s domestic. It’s the disciplined work of choosing people over status, growth over ego, and community over the comfort of being right. Forrest Page — teacher, father, photographer, and activist — shows up to this conversation without performance and without pretense, and expands the series’ argument that the most durable form of masculinity is the kind built quietly, across decades, in service of people who are counting on you. ~ Nick Paro Support Our Guests Other Work Take a moment to follow and scubscribe to Forrest’s other platforms: * Valor Media Network * Forrest Page Photography Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Skutt Hope, Laurel Fairchild, Education is a lamp, Beffy, and many others for tuning into my live video with Forrest J Page! Join me for my next live video in the app. 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! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso | Millicent | Courtney 🇨🇦 | Eric Lullove | Terry mitchell | Carollynn | Julie Robuck | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 5min
  8. Intelligent Masculinity | With Joe Walsh

    27 MAR

    Intelligent Masculinity | With Joe Walsh

    “What's masculine is to be tough enough to sit down and not debate and not fight — but to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation. That's what, in my mind, a real man should learn how to do." ~ Joe Walsh ~ Masculinity In Review In this 24th interview of Intelligent Masculinity, Nick Paro sat down with pro-democracy advocate, former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, for a conversation that refused to stay comfortable — and was better for it. Joe, who once occupied a seat inside the Tea Party machine and voted for Trump in 2016, has spent the better part of eight years publicly dismantling the version of masculinity that got him there: loud, reactive, and allergic to accountability. This episode tracks that dismantling — not as a political story, but as a human one. Joe walks through how the inability to lie, a stoic Irish Catholic father who softened before he died, and the discipline of listening to understand rather than to respond all reshaped the man he is today. Nick and Joe don't agree on everything — they say so plainly and often — and that tension is exactly the point. What we take away from this conversation is a concrete, unpolished model of what it looks like to actually do the work of becoming a better man. Joe’s change didn’t begin with an ideology shift — it began with the refusal to lie. When the right-wing media apparatus told him his job was to tell listeners what they wanted to hear, he couldn’t do it. He describes colleagues sitting him down and spelling it out: say what the audience wants, or lose the platform. Joe chose truth over the gravy train. That choice cost him professionally, but it’s also what made the path forward possible. The lesson for men is direct: integrity under pressure isn’t a personality trait — it’s a decision, made repeatedly, often when the cost is high. Accountability showed up not as a concept but as a practice. Joe has publicly apologized, by his own count, thousands of times in eight years. He describes the early years as standing naked in front of a camera — fully exposed, fully accountable — and finding that process genuinely healing. He draws the sharpest contrast to Trump’s response after accidentally killing school children in a military strike: no ownership, no apology, no acknowledgment. Joe’s framing is simple and surgical — a real man apologizes when he f***s up. He doesn’t caveat it. He doesn’t negotiate around it. He owns it and moves. The conversation between Joe and Nick about listening splits the act in two. Joe names the old version: listening to respond, to pounce, to demolish a point before it finishes. He describes sitting on TV panels in full attack mode, barely hearing the person across from him. The shift to listening to understand changed how he processed everything — from Black Lives Matter to transgender identity to his own father’s late-life evolution. He didn’t agree with everything he heard. He learned from it anyway. Nick and Joe demonstrate this live throughout the episode: on the SAVE Act, on Israel, on voter access, they hold their positions and keep the conversation open. That’s the practice, not just the theory. Joe’s most pointed critique isn’t aimed at the right — it’s aimed at Democratic men. He argues directly that the manosphere filled a vacuum the left created by refusing to engage on culture. Too many Democratic men, in his view, won’t roll up their sleeves and be guys — won’t fight, won’t speak plainly, won’t hold the floor on culture war terrain. He came to the Democratic Party not because of policy alignment but to help defeat what he calls an existential threat. He believes Democrats already hold positions most Americans support. He just needs them to say so out loud and stop flinching. That’s not a partisan observation — it’s a masculinity one. In the end, we see Joe Walsh — a former Republican Congressman, Tea Party architect, and Trump voter who has spent the last eight years doing the opposite of what the culture rewarded him for: apologizing publicly, listening deliberately, and building bridges to people he once dismissed. This episode isn't a redemption story — Joe resisted that framing — it's a working document of what masculine accountability looks like when it's actually practiced instead of performed. He brings the insider knowledge of someone who helped build the machine and the credibility of someone who walked away from it at personal cost. In a series built around the refusal to outsource accountability, Joe models what it means to own your consequences — not once, but as a sustained, daily choice — and expands Intelligent Masculinity's argument that the work of being a better man never stops. ~ Nick Paro Actions You Can Take * Check out the new: Sick of this Shop! * Check out the new network and affiliate calendar: BroadBanner Submit questions, feedback, and artwork for Notes of the Week with Nick and Walter: * Sick of this Shit Community Comment Form Call your public servants on important issues: * 5calls.org Join the efforts to unmask law enforcement and de-flock the States: * deflock.me Service members can get un-biased information on legal vs illegal orders: * Orders Project * Reach out on Signal: @TheOrdersProject.76 Learn empathy forward, human centered, experiment based Leadership & Growth Courses for Higher Ed & Non-Profit Professionals: * B. Cognition Labs Thank you NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Sean Talbeaux, Ms.Yuse, Donna Dupont, Sharon Rousseau, and many others for tuning into my live video with Joe Walsh! Join me for my next live video in the app. 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! Join the uncensored media at the 1A Collective Support as a paid subscriber however you can — to help get you started, here are a few discounted options for you * Forever at 50% off * Forever at 60% off A special thank you to those who are a part of the Sickest of Them All ~ Soso | Millicent | Courtney 🇨🇦 | Eric Lullove | Terry mitchell | Carollynn | Julie Robuck | Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙 ~ For support, contact us at: info@sickofthisshitpublications.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sickofthis.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 2min
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A series dedicated to reclaiming what true masculinity is - not an old, fragile masculinity of domination; rather, a new, intelligent masculinity built on accountability. sickofthis.substack.com

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