The Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series: Episode 1

To detail the extent and nature of the threat we're facing, I'm rolling out a new video series

Hey everyone. First off, hope you’re well. The vibes out there in the world? They ain’t great. We’re inching up on a really tense election and things have been particularly noxious. It’s part of a larger building crisis that I still believe we’ll find our way through, but, as always, it isn’t going to be easy.

To that end, I want to introduce The Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series.

As you may know, my book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis is due to be released this coming January by Dutton/Penguin-Random House. Book releases are hard for a plethora of reasons, but in this case, like American Rule: How A Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, the timing can be maddening. For the past couple of years I’ve worked on The Midnight Kingdom in order to understand the deeper politics at play and better grasp just exactly what we’re dealing with. Now, I’m in that strange spot with the book done, ready-to-go, and a lot of what I discovered is playing out on our television and computer screens.

You have probably picked up on the fact that I am exasperated by the coverage of our moment. Lacking doesn’t even begin to cover it. Though the authoritarian threat is treated, at best, like an inexplicable phenomenon, and at worst like a passing phase, the history here is very obvious.

There are explanations.

And there are solutions.

So what I’m doing is this: while waiting on The Midnight Kingdom to drop, I am preparing a limited series of lectures in an attempt to get everyone up to speed. These are presentations determined to fill in gaps of knowledge while spotlighting exactly the complex nature of what we’re experiencing. It is a strange thing we’re dealing with, this existential threat, but it is knowable and it is avoidable.

Below you’ll find the first episode of The Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series. It’s called The Great Chain of Being and it traces the marriage of Christianity to the Roman Empire to the birth of capitalism, Liberalism, and Conservatism. Along the way, we’ll discuss exactly what world the Right and the GOP want to create, while shedding light on the nature of the ideological war we find ourselves caught between.

If you have not already, please preorder The Midnight Kingdom. Communicating this information is a risk I’m willing to take, but I truly think getting this book out into the world and hopefully into the hands of people who need to read it might make a semblance of a difference. Preorders help. A lot.

And I hope you enjoy this premiere episode. I’ll be filming the second installment here soon. In the meantime, like, subscribe, and share with your friends and families and any interested parties. Thank you, as always, for the support. In these hard times, it’s absolutely miraculous.