On a recent Wednesday afternoon, content creator, lawyer, and TikTok journalist Aaron Parnas sat with one of his closest friends, Sam Schmir, in Parnas’s living room. Until January, Schmir did digital strategy at the White House, and had texted earlier that it was a “slow news day” — a seemingly impossible thing during the Trump 2.0 administration. Then, he texted: “I think we have something.”
Schmir watches as Parnas films a TikTok about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement getting customer’s information from Expedia and Booking.com. Previously, the private data sent to the Airlines Reporting Corporation, an intermediary between the airlines and agents, wasn’t shared in this way. Parnas says, “And now your data is in the hands of ICE.”
The entire process is over in a flash. A few minutes after Parnas shoots, he’s already posted the video without a single edit.
Less than an hour later, it’s been played over 125,000 times, liked 14,000 times, and accrued more than 500 comments. It’s just one of the thousands of clips Parnas has brought to his viewers over the past six months. His brand is talking — and sometimes, walking — looking straight into the camera and delivering the headlines of the day in bite-sized, 90-second bits.
“Breaking news!” he says, a face of concern during some moments, and a wry smile in others: “Donald Trump has just nominated Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to be the assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia” — he pauses, and seems to be repressing a giggle. “I’m….I’m not kidding.”
Parnas, 26, boasts 3.9 million TikTok followers and another 2 million across his other platforms. Though the left has long been calling for its own Joe Rogan as a way to connect with younger voters, he’s become a sort of 20-something Walter Cronkite — a trustworthy presence delivering the facts with the urgency needed in a nonstop news cycle. It may be the only way for the news to reach the elusive Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience.
“When I was growing up, my parents would turn on the nightly news and watch broadcast journalists tell the stories that were written by people earlier in the day. What Aaron is doing is the same thing,” says his friend and fellow political content creator Olivia Julianna, a 22 year-old progressive political strategist from Texas. “People have short attention spans, and people don’t want to read,” says Julianna.
Or as Parnas puts it himself, “It’s just getting back to what once was.”
Though former CBS News anchor Cronkite is legendary for Americans of a certain age, it is a name that Parnas wasn’t familiar with until recently. It was he who told Americans about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and John Lennon; who narrated the space-race and talked to astronaut Neil Armstrong live on the moon. He was steady and authoritative, and with a few exceptions (after visiting Vietnam, he told his viewers the U.S. should pull out of the war), Cronkite rarely shared his own personal opinion.
Compared to the long-winded political diatribes of some other TikTok creators who dive deep giving political opinions and analysis, Parnas’s brevity is unique for the space. But unlike Cronkite, he’s not above showing a bit more of his personal life and personality to his viewers (they know that he is a sour candy addict, for instance).
And the mere act of curating the news is informed by personal opinion and editorial judgement — for what it’s worth, the Center for American Progress Action Fund rates Parnas as a progressive source. For the last 30 days, he’s currently ranked 5th in its dashboard tracking news sources across all platforms, including Twitter — right behind Elon Musk.
IT WAS THE CASE OF CASEY ANTHONY, a young mother who was accused and acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, that inspired Parnas to become a public defender. Then 12 years old, he watched all 32 days of the trial. “I really didn’t know what was going on, other than the fact that I loved what they [the lawyers] were doing in that courtroom,” he says. He graduated from George Washington University Law School in 2020 and began working as a lawyer.
This January, he launched a Substack, the Parnas Perspective; it now boasts 447,000 subscribers, making it the site’s number one-ranked newsletter in the news category. (As the TikTok ban crept up in January, Substack ran a “Tiktok Liberation Prize” campaign for those who could drive traffic from TikTok to their site; they awarded Parnas $25,000. He is also working with them as a creative advisor.) He’s starting to get attention and awards — he was named the “Defender of Gen Z” by Jim Acosta, and has been interviewed by a titan of legacy media herself, Katie Couric on her podcast “Next Question.” Parnas has enough subscribers across all platforms that this has become his full-time gig.
Parnas’s background is particularly unique. His father is Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian businessman and self-described hustler with Russian mob ties. After becoming a key Republican donor, funneling (some of it illegally) millions of dollars to Trump and Republican campaigns, Lev became a close associate of Rudy Giuliani. In April 2018, he and Giuliani had a private dinner with Trump and other associates and urged Trump to get rid of the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch; she was fired the following May.
Parnas was convicted on Oct. 22, 2021 of campaign finance, wire fraud, and false statements. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, and ordered to pay $1.8 million in restitution.
In 2016, father and son were both in the tank for Trump. As Aaron chronicled in his 2020 self-published book, Trump First, he is the one who convinced his father to consider the former reality star as a viable presidential candidate.
”I was never all-in into his policies. I think there were times where I was all into the idea of something different, right? The idea that he told it in plain and simple terms, because it really resonated with me,” he says. “I was never fully bought into his policy goals. But then again, I didn’t know what his policy goals really were until he took office, because he would say a bunch of things on the trail.” (For Lev, the choice was even clearer: “He was a New York hustler,” he said in the 2024 doc From Russia, With Lev. “And we could relate.”)
By 2020, both Parnas men had switched sides, backing President Joe Biden and, later, Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Before Trump, Aaron says, neither Parnas was politically engaged. “Growing up, we didn’t really talk politics in the house,” he says. “I didn’t really have your traditional political awakening that folks do when they’re like, 18, 19, years old, right?”
More than his father’s scandal, it was a health scare that helped shift his viewpoint. “I didn’t have health insurance, and I realized one party wants to make sure that I don’t have to pay a large amount of money to go to the doctor; another party might not care, and I might be stuck with a medical bill for the rest of my life.” A visit to a friend’s classroom working for the Teach For America program showed him the stark differences between his own childhood classrooms and those for less fortunate students. “And I was like, wow, one party wants to make sure that those kids have the same opportunities that I did,” he says.
Since 2022, the two Parnas men have found themselves on alternately diverging and intertwining paths; while the elder Parnas was being sentenced to prison, his son was becoming a TikTok star; while his son clerked for a federal judge, the father served part of his sentence at home, wrote a book, and starred in a documentary. Lev has spent the last few years trying to undo the damage he did — it was his testimony and extensive documentation of the Trump administration’s attempt to get Ukrainian officials to meddle in the election that helped secure the votes for Trump’s first impeachment on Dec. 18, 2019.
In a recent post on his personal account, Aaron talked about the impact of his father’s arrest on Oct. 10, 2019. “I love my dad, I had nothing to do with that, and I’m not my dad,” he said. Parnas described how he went from being his own person to his father’s son; from being a regular citizen to one where anything he typed on his phone became a liability. His family is not the same anymore, but shying away from his history, “turns trauma into a prison cell.”
“He’s always been very proud of me and made that very known,” Aaron tells me, but his father isn’t necessarily watching every TikTok. “He’s not the type of dad to call me every day in terms of, like, ‘Oh, I love this story you broke.’”
Parnas launched his TikTok in the beginning of 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and quickly built up 1 million followers. Six months in, he says, Russian trolls and bots mass-reported him and his account was banned. He had to start over from scratch, but by the middle of 2024, he was already back up to a million, putting him in prime position for last summer’s wild news cycle — Biden’s disastrous first debate, Trump’s assassination attempt, Harris’s tumultuous path to the Democratic nomination.
Since then, his following has quadrupled. His videos have reached over 180 million unique viewers in the past six months. “That shows that I’m breaking out, not just reaching Democrats, right?” he says. “I’m reaching folks across the spectrum.”
Parnas is not without criticism — he’s Jewish, and some on the left feel he’s not reported as strongly on the allegations of atrocities in Gaza as they would like. The criticism has been a low drum beat for awhile, but the recent bombings between Israel, Iran, and the U.S. have resurfaced this criticism amongst some of the most vocal viewers of the online left.
“I believe in a two-state solution, where both parties have the right to self-determination. Both parties can live in peace, hostages return,” Parnas says. “I want there to be peace and a ceasefire in the region.”
Though detractors have called him a Zionist, he does not see the word as a slur. “Zionism to me is the idea that Israel has a right to exist, and I firmly have and always will believe that,” he told Rolling Stone in an email after the personal attacks increased. “There is a difference between believing Israel has a right to exist and the removal of the Palestinian people from Gaza or the West Bank, something I will never advocate for.”
Since the Oct. 7 attack, he estimates he’s recorded 500 or more videos on the conflict, including the Israeli cabinet’s decision to vote on a plan to seize all of Gaza. He believes that non-Jewish TikTokers who don’t cover Gaza aren’t criticized the way he is. “For example, I reported on the Israeli cabinet’s decision to vote on a plan to seize all of Gaza. I made a video when Trump talks about making Gaza, ‘Trump Gaza,’” he says.
He recognizes the complexity of the subject and sometimes feels ill-at-ease reporting on what he doesn’t know. “There is so much misinformation coming out of the Middle East — on both sides — and I cannot fully justify covering the entire conflict, bombings in Gaza or a rocket launched into Israel, without having complete and utter accuracy,” he says. “And I feel like I personally don’t even have a source that I can go to, and I can get that 100 percent.”
As he put it in a later email, “I’m only one person and can only cover so many things, and I encourage folks to diversify where they get their news from.”
Indeed, media literacy is part of the point of his TikToks. “That’s why I got interested in politics in the first place,” he says. “What I’m doing is a way to teach folks civics without putting it in the classroom, because it’s on their phone.”
DESPITE HIS OLD-SCHOOL APPROACH, Parnas very much has the media consumption habits of a digital journalist. Each day he gets up at 7:30 a.m. and starts scouring for stories. He has several screens in his office — one with C-SPAN “running 24/7,” he says, another with an X feed of world leaders, others tracking local news. Sometimes his sources send him tips, and he cracks stories on his own with the help of PACER, the electronic database of federal court cases. His record for posts in a day is 24.
Sometimes, he even has to report breaking news about himself, as he did in May when Fox News picked up a post by @LibsofTikTok calling for his arrest by Attorney General Pam Bondi, claiming he leaked news of upcoming ICE raids in D.C. ”It is clickbait, and it is ridiculous,” he says. “Honestly, if something comes of it, if they decide to arrest me based on this, then it’s going to be a lot worse for them at the end of the day.”
He possesses an almost monomaniacal commitment to delivering breaking news, and he doesn’t let day-to-day activities get in the way. There he is recording in a car heading to a wedding, talking about Trump deporting children who are U.S. citizens, there he is, in his bed wearing a Snuggie and under-eye patches, talking about a federal judge ruling against Trump’s removal of Hampton Dellinger, then the head of the Office of Special Counsel. He’ll record in an airplane bathroom, talking about the disaster that was Newark Airport this spring. “It’s the most awkward place [to film],” he says, “because I sometimes walk outside and I see someone waiting, and I see their face, and I’m like, ‘Oh, you know what I just did. We’re not going to talk about it.’”
His friends have adjusted to his habitual recording. “I have seen Aaron film videos outside the Cheesecake Factory,” says Julianna, “I was actually just in D.C. for a week, and every time I saw Aaron run away to make a video, I filmed him running away,” she says, laughing.
His videos have become so ubiquitous that they are now memes. “Let’s normalize blocking Aaron Parnas to protect your peace,” joked Eric Goldie. “I’m about one more ‘Aaron Parnas breaking news story’ away from moving to an island and starting and OF page” wrote another creator, @H._squared. “This message is for Aaron Parnas and Aaron Parnas only,” Maggie the Millennial wrote. “Sir, please take a break. I’m very worried about you.”
Many of the stories he posts are sourced from wire stories or mainstream news like the New York Times — some of his critics wish he would make this a little more clear. Indeed, many of his own commenters don’t seem to understand that in many cases, he is not the reporter, but the transmitter of the information.
Parnas says some of this criticism is unwarranted and “often in bad faith,” he says. “I credit journalists in every single video where I base my video on someone else’s work,” he says. “When I don’t cite a journalist, it’s because I sourced the information myself.”
UNTIL RECENTLY, CALLING HIM A JOURNALIST might have been a stretch, but in recent months, he’s gone from aggregating the news to advancing the biggest stories of the day. Parnas has started interviewing politicians on his Substack: He talked to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ahead of Trump’s first address to Congress in his second term; Representative Tom Suozzi about the Republican Budget committee voting down their own reconciliation package; Cory Booker immediately after his record-breaking 25-hour filibuster (“You’ve been a source of light in my life,” Booker told him on air); and Senator Adam Schiff about the Trump-Qatar airplane fiasco. “More and more people get their news and information from social media and content creators,” Schiff tells Rolling Stone. “We can’t expect our message to be heard if we don’t reach out where people are listening.”
Parnas’ most recent coup was California governor Gavin Newsom, hot on the heels of nationwide protests pushing back against Trump’s ICE raids. “It’s a great opportunity to be able to meet people where they are and to have more substantive and long form conversations,” Newsom told Parnas about his choice to start doing “new media.” “I don’t even think it’s the future. I think it’s where we are now,” Newsom said.
With this kind of access, it’s easy to imagine Parnas becoming a major TV news talking head. “I think that Aaron’s trajectory is so unlimited,” Julianna says. She imagines everything from his own online political show or a prime-time anchor spot. “And he’s just getting started.” (While he wouldn’t rule out taking such an opportunity in the future, he appreciates the independence TikTok offers: “I can make whatever video I want.”)
And that means being able to break the fourth wall — in a Snuggie on a couch, jogging through D.C. streets, or simply expressing the same frustration he knows his viewers must be feeling with the incessant news cycle. On April 21, between videos about Pope Francis dying, Democrats going to El Salvador, and Harvard suing the Trump administration, he posted a video with his usual opening: “We have some major breaking news!” — then broke character — “Can we fucking not? I want to be able to sleep nine hours without being stressed out about whatever is happening in the world. No! No more breaking news!” he pauses, and raises his eyebrow. “But if there is, you know where to come find it.”
