Audiobooks by Jared Yates Sexton

The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis

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.

Jared Yates Sexton (Author), Jared Yates Sexton (Narrator)

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American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes a journey through the history of the United States, from the nation's founding to the twenty-first century, which examines and debunks the American myths we've always told ourselves.  In recent years, Americans have faced a deluge of horrifying developments in politics and culture: stolen elections, fascist rallies, families torn apart and locked away. A common refrain erupts at each new atrocity: This isn't who we are. In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton upends those convenient fictions by laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination. From the very origins of this nation, Americans in power have abused and subjugated others; enabling that corruption are the many myths of American exceptionalism and steadfast values, which are fed to the public and repeated across generations. Working through each era of American growth and change, Sexton weaves together the origins and perpetuation of these narratives still in the public memory, and the acts we have chosen to forget.  Stirring, deeply researched, and disturbingly familiar, American Rule is a call to examine our own misconceptions of what it means, and has always meant, to be an American.

Jared Yates Sexton (Author), Macleod Andrews (Narrator)

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The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

On June 14, 2016, Jared Yates Sexton reported from a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to attend these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over a million times, his reporting was soon featured in the Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for the New York Times. Sexton gained over eighteen thousand followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassment, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 Presidential Election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton's book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy's political polarization-a result of our self-constructed, technologically-assisted echo chambers.

Jared Yates Sexton (Author), P.J. Ochlan (Narrator)

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