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The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis from Left Bank Books to support authors and independent bookstores! Yates will personalize and sign copies for sale from Left Bank Books. If you are unable to make it in person, leave a personalization note in your order.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule, The Man They Wanted Me to Be, and The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore. His political writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, and Salon.com. Sexton is also the host of The Muckrake Podcast and the author of three collections of fiction.

Sarah Kendzior is the New York Times bestselling author of Hiding in Plain Sight and The View from Flyover Country. She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she researched propaganda and state crimes in authoritarian regimes. She is the co-host of the acclaimed podcast Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and was named by Foreign Policy as one of the "100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events." Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including NBC News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The Chicago Tribune, TeenVogue, The Globe and Mail, and The New York Times. She lives in St. Louis.

From the author of American Rule and the host of The Muckrake Podcast, an ambitious account of how white supremacist lies, religious mythologies, and poisonous conspiracy theories built the modern world and threaten to plunge us into an authoritarian nightmare.
To fully understand these strange and dangerous times, Jared Yates Sexton takes a hard look at our nation's history: namely, the abuses committed by those in power and the comforting stories that shaped the way the West has viewed itself up to the present. As reactionaries and authoritarians cling to myths about "Western civilization," The Midnight Kingdom exposes how political power, religious indoctrination, and economic dominance have been repeatedly weaponized to oppress and exploit, sounding an alarm for what lies ahead as the current order frays.
Beginning with the Roman Empire and racing through centuries of colonization, war, genocide, and the recurring clashes of progress and regression, Sexton finds our modern world at a crossroads. In an echo of past crises, we have arrived at a time of historic inequality and a fading trust in our institutions. Meanwhile, authoritarianism is gaining momentum and the progress of the twentieth century is being rolled back at dizzying speed. This catastrophic moment holds terrible potential for a return to a totalitarian past or, potentially, a better, realer, more human future. The difference depends on a true reckoning with our history and the larger forces at play or hiding behind this disastrous fantasy of Western superiority.
Bracing and compulsively readable, The Midnight Kingdom takes a critical look at the forces that have shaped human civilization for centuries--and invites us to seek a radically different future.

Praise for The Midnight Kingdom
"An episodic jeremiad in the best tradition of that word, The Midnight Kingdom is warning and lament, a people's history of apocalypse in the mind and actions of Western empire from the Great Fire of Rome to the Trumpocene. In print and by podcast, Jared Yates Sexton has been steadily expanding his deep inquiry into the ideas that informed his own fundamentalist roots and now shape today's Christian nationalist attack on the democratic dream. This book is Sexton's most ambitious yet, powered by cool anger but girded with the hope that even at this late hour gives his work its beautiful strength." --Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family and The Undertow

"Jared Yates Sexton is indispensable to understanding our tumultuous political era. He does not shy away from America's dark history, but instead delves into the shadows in order to find the light. The Midnight Kingdom is yet another vital entry in his ongoing chronicle of a West in disarray and decline." --Sarah Kendzior, author of They Knew: How A Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent

"Jared Yates Sexton is a modern day Cassandra who uses his considerable intellect, historical knowledge, and effective writing skills to illuminate, shake, warn, and wake up the majority to the looming threats attacking our fledgling democracy. In his latest book The Midnight Kingdom Sexton connects the dots, names and names, and reveals how corrupt gatekeepers of religious, political, and economic institutions have continued to abuse wealth, white supremacy, and revisionist narratives to maintain systems of inequity and oppression. With this book, however, the majority will have the knowledge and righteous fury to finally rise up and fight back." --Wajahat Ali, author of Go Back To Where You Came From