The Reawakening Trilogy were also released annually. His career grew to include television starting in 2017 when Cole was recruited for the CBS reality show Hunted. The premise of the show was contestants attempting to hide for a month from professional man hunters. Cole was chosen for the show due to his background in military intelligence operations; his role on the show was as one of the investigators tasked with tracking contestants. In 2018 The Armoured Saint, the first book of The Sacred Throne Trilogy was published by Tor. The series is a “grimdark” medieval fantasy, centering around a young girl leading a revolution in a theocratic state. Cole describes the series as being a difficult sell, with the first novel taking him three years to get it accepted by a publisher. 2018 also saw the publishing of Cole’s first non-fiction book, Legion Versus Phalanx, a military history book examining the military tactics of the Hellenistic phalanx and the Roman legion. In late 2018, Queen of Crows, the second Sacred Throne trilogy was released. Also in 2018, a survey on sexual harassment in children’s publishing, related to activism around the #MeToo movement, was conducted by author Anne Ursu. Cole was one of several male authors anonymously accused of sexism in the comments of an article that discussed the results. Cole offered a public apology on his own blog, describing his recognition of the negative impact of his behavior. He committed to rectifying his behavior, donated $500 to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, and stepped down from managing a writer's happy hour. In response to this, one of his accusers publicly accepted his apology and related that she accused him because of unwanted flirting from him at an industry dinner. In 2019 Cole returned to TV co-starring on the Discovery Channel series Contact, which explores evidence of UFO activity. While his role on the show involved credulity of the team’s discoveries, he maintains that he is a skeptic and the show did not change his opinion about the existence of extraterrestrials. A vocal critic of the Trump administration, Cole began publishing political commentary articles for various publishers. These include How the Far Right Perverts Ancient History – And Why it Matters, and America’s Militarized Police Can’t Fight Coronavirus One of these articles titled The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer published in the New Republic in 2019 discussed various myths