Counterspell is here.
www.counterspellgroup.com

After three years of writing, the book launches Friday, May 1.

I was going to open this with something stirring. Something about the times we are living in, and the work the book is meant to do, and the kind of reader I had in mind through every page. I drafted that paragraph four times. It kept reading like a press release.

So instead, plainly:

Counterspell launches Friday, May 1, 2026. Ebook is available for pre-order on Amazon now (https://a.co/d/05DG1xql). Paperback and hardcover ship May 1. Below you'll find the introduction in audio (in my voice, recorded last week) and the first three lessons of the afterword in a produced PDF. If you read nothing else of the book, read those.

This post exists to give you four things — the audio excerpt, the PDF excerpt, the pre-order link, and a short personal note about what this book is for. In that order.

Listen — the introduction, in my voice

This is the full author's note that opens the book. About six and a half minutes. It is the shortest distance between a stranger and the argument the book makes.

🎧 [ Audio excerpt — 6:45 ]

If you are reading this on a device where the player doesn't render, the audio is also available at counterspellgroup.com.

Read — the first three lessons of the afterword
(live on the redesigned www.counterspellgroup.com)

The book closes with twelve plain lessons — no philosophy, no jargon, no footnotes — addressed to a reader with a job, a family, and only so many hours in the week. The PDF below contains the introduction and the first three of those lessons.

The lessons are the version of the book you can carry in your pocket. The full argument runs to twenty-eight chapters. But if you forget everything else and remember the lessons, the book has done its work.

📄 Download the PDF excerpt →

The first three:

1. Call things by their proper name. 2. Niceness is not a virtue. 3. Ignorance is not an excuse, and neither is going along.

The other nine are in the book.

Pre-order

Ebook — $9.99, available now Paperback — $19.99, ships May 1 Hardcover — $29.99, ships May 1

➡️ Pre-order on Amazon

If you would rather wait to hold the print edition in your hands, that is the right call for some readers and I would not talk you out of it. But the ebook ships immediately, and if you are someone for whom this book is going to land, you will want a few weeks with it before the conversations it starts begin happening around you.

A note on what this book is for, and what it isn't

There are a lot of books that explain what is wrong. There are fewer books that name the system producing what is wrong. There are even fewer books that connect that system, accurately, to its actual ancient roots — not the comfortable roots, not the roots that flatter the reader, but the roots a careful tracing of the texts and the lineage actually shows.

Counterspell attempts to do that last thing. The argument runs from the mysteries of ancient Egypt through Plato's Academy, through Hegel and Marx, through the Frankfurt School, and into your child's classroom and your state legislature. The argument is that what calls itself the modern progressive Left is not a political movement, not an economic philosophy, not a cultural trend — but a religious system, operating through a mechanism as old as civilization itself.

If that sounds like the kind of claim that requires extraordinary evidence, you are right, and the book attempts to provide it. I read the primary texts. I cite the sources. I name the figures. I extend the lineage all the way through to the people writing the curriculum your children will be taught next year.

The book is written for the widest possible audience. I am a Christian. My faith informs everything I write. The argument I make does not require you to share my faith — only your willingness to follow an argument where it goes. There will be something in this book that will offend just about every reader, of every stripe. If you are a progressive, the early chapters will challenge everything you hold dear. If you are a mainstream conservative, the later chapters will challenge your comfortable assumptions about institutions you trust. If you are a libertarian, the theological underpinnings will grate. If you are a Christian, the frank treatment of certain esoteric practices will disturb.

I ask only this: persist. You will be rewarded with knowledge if you can endure the occasional discomfort.

What you can do this week, if you want to help

I have not asked much from this Substack in three years. Today I am asking a little.

One. Pre-order the ebook. The pre-order numbers in the first week shape the algorithm that determines whether the book is shown to anyone who is not already on this list. A pre-order from a paid subscriber here is worth more than ten pre-orders the week after launch.

Two. If the audio excerpt or the lessons resonate, share this post with one person you think it would land for. Not five people. One person. The right person. That is how books that matter actually move.

Three. If you are part of a group — a church, a study circle, a homeschool co-op, a political organization, a podcast audience — and you want a copy in front of more people than yourself, reply to this email. We are still working out bulk-order terms as the book moves from Amazon-only into wider distribution, and I will tell you what I know.

That's it. No paywall on this post. No upsell. Just the book, the excerpts, and the request.

A personal note, last

This book cost me real things. The work it argues for has cost me more. I wrote it anyway because I have a daughter, and because the world she will inherit is being unmade by people who know exactly what they are doing, and because there is no one else who is going to write the book I needed to read. So I wrote it.

Whether it lands for you or not, thank you for being here. Three years ago this Substack had nine subscribers and most of them were related to me. That you are reading this is, in a small but real way, part of what made the book possible.

The path through is not theoretical. It is not won by lone wolves with strong opinions. It is won, if it is won at all, by reconstituted communities of serious, faithful people who have reordered their loves and their habits around something higher than the regime.

I hope this book serves that work.

— Mike

Counterspell is dedicated to my daughter — that we may heed the call to "do enough."