James Wesley Rawles

On December 1, 2015, Rawles released the novel Land of Promise, the first book in the Counter-Caliphate Chronicles novel series. This science fiction novel is a geopolitical thriller that is a considerable departure from his previous Patriots thriller novel series. Set in the late 2130s, Land of Promise fictionally describes the world under the economic and military domination of a Global Islamic Caliphate, brought about by a fictional new branch of Islam, called The Thirdists. The novel also describes the establishment of a Christian nation of refuge called The Ilemi Republic, in East Africa. This is the first book in a planned six-novel series. It is the first release from Liberty Paradigm Publishing, a publishing venture launched by Rawles in partnership with his literary agent Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group.

Rawles has seven books in print that are sold by mainstream booksellers: five novels and two nonfiction survival books. His second nonfiction book, titled Tools for Survival, was published in late 2014.

Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse is a contemporaneous sequel novel that parallels the events that occur in Patriots, Survivors, Founders, and Expatriates. It is the final novel in the series. This 416-page novel (the longest in the series) was released in October 2014.

Syndicated radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy interviewed Rawles and said that his book "posits a collapse of civilization." When Rawles was interviewed by radio host Laura Ingraham, she described the book as going "through point-by-point the basics of being prepared and heightening your chances of surviving some type of major crisis." Ingraham said that "there is a thin line between order and total anarchy in time of a crisis, when peoples' lives are on the line—and all the niceties and the rules go out the door."

Rawles is a proponent of Citizen Journalism. In April 2014, along with his son Robert, Rawles co-founded The Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA), a private free press advocacy group that distributes press credentials to any literate adult U.S. Citizen, free of charge.

Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse is a contemporaneous sequel novel that parallels the events that occur in Patriots, Survivors, and Founders including perspectives from Melanesia and Australasia as well as the USA. This 301-page novel was released on 1 October 2013. The book debuted at #21 in hardback fiction category on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

It received a favorable book review on the weblog of Orville R. Weyrich Jr. A summary of the book was published in the March–April 2010 issue of The Futurist magazine, under the headline: "Alarmingly Practical Advice For Doomsday."

Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse is a contemporaneous sequel that parallels the events that occur in Patriots and Survivors. It was released on 25 September 2012. The book peaked at #4 in Amazon's overall book sales ranks, on its release day. The book premiered on the New York Times Best Sellers list at #11, but dropped to #27 a week later.

Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse is a contemporaneous sequel novel that parallels the events that occur in Patriots, following a hyperinflationary socioeconomic collapse and the subsequent events known as "The Crunch". The novel follows several new characters (and some characters from Patriots) as they attempt to survive in the United States following The Crunch as they deal with criminal gangs, a provisional American government, and the general breakdown of society. The book was released on 4 October 2011. It rose to #2 in Amazon's overall book sales ranks, the same day. On 23 October 2011, it was listed at #3 in the New York Times Best Sellers list in the fiction hardback category. Less than a month after publication, the novel had gone through four printings and had 52,500 copies in print. A Spanish edition (titled Superviventes), was released in 2014.

In March 2011, Rawles formulated the American Redoubt movement. Rawles proposes five western states (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington) as a safe haven for conservative Christians and Jews. The concept was endorsed by former Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, who had recently relocated his entire extended family to western Montana. One of its adherents, John Jacob Schmidt, started a weekly podcast called Radio Free Redoubt to help further the movement.

Rawles is opposed to racism, for which he has received scorn from the far-right (he published a defense of his anti-racist views in a blog entry entitled "Race, Religion, and Reason" in 2010). He supports abolition of modern slavery in the world.

Rawles believes that survivalists see a high risk of a coming societal meltdown and the need to prepare for the repercussions. He has said that the popular media has developed an incorrect far-right "lunatic fringe" image in part because of the actions of a radical few. He called this a distortion of the true message of survivalism. Unlike the handful of fringe proponents, Rawles focuses instead on family preparedness and personal freedom. He explains that the typical survivalist does not actually live in a rural area, but is rather a city dweller worried about the collapse of society who views the rural lifestyle as idyllic. He cautions that rural self-sufficiency actually involves "a lot of hard work". In 2009, he said: "There's so many people who are concerned about the economy that there's a huge interest in preparedness, and it pretty much crosses all lines, social, economic, political and religious. There's a steep learning curve going on right now." In a December 2014 interview with The Economist magazine, Rawles described the survivalist movement as decentralized and full of people who value their privacy. He said: "You don't want to be known as the guy who has 3-4 years' supply of food in the basement. Because one day you could see it confiscated by the government or stolen by neighbours like hungry locusts."

In early April 2009, shortly after its release, it was ranked number 6 in Amazon.com's overall book sales rankings, but fell to number 33 a week later. By the end of the month it had fallen to number 98. The book's initial popularity caught librarians unprepared because it was considered a niche title and had not been reviewed by the major book review publications. According to Library Journal, the topic struck a chord with "a small but vociferous group of people concerned with survivalism" who share a sense of societal anxiety associated with the economic recession. The journal went on to say that Patriots was "reportedly originally conceived as a nonfiction guide. According to a number of Amazon.com reviewers, the novel will not win any literary prizes; its strength lies in its practical reassurances, focus on guns, and Christian ideology." Librarians then scrambled to purchase copies of the book to meet the unanticipated demand.

In an article titled "The Most Dangerous Novel in America", Rawles told The Daily Beast: "I'm not at liberty to discuss where I live. It's part of an agreement I made with my wife. I really can't go into the details. We live in a very remote area. I embrace technology. We don't live in a cellphone area, but I'm online constantly. We're just prepared to live off-grid, if the power grid goes down. Because of the nature of my blog and my novel, I don't just want anonymity, I need anonymity. I could wake up some morning in the aftermath of some crisis and look out in my barnyard and see five Winnebagos and some television news crews. I don't want fans of my books to descend on my property, so I have to be perspicacious." In 2009, Rawles told an Agence France-Presse reporter: "I'm surrounded by national forest. A river runs through the back end of the property, so there's no shortage of water and no shortage of fish or game to shoot. If Western civilization were to collapse tomorrow, I'd have to read about it on the Internet. I just wouldn't notice." His U.S. mail address is a post office box in Newcastle, Wyoming, but his main web site server is in Sweden.

Rawles has lived in San Jose, California; near Orofino, Idaho; near Smartsville and Fremont, California; and near New Washoe City, Nevada. An article published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2008 incorrectly asserted that Rawles lived in California, but later in that article, Rawles noted that the location of his ranch in the United States is kept secret, but that he lives somewhere west of the Rockies. The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asserts that the ranch is in northern Idaho. Others have claimed that the "undisclosed location" of the ranch is in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming or even in Central America. A CNN Europe article written before his first wife died noted that Rawles "... lives on a ranch in an undisclosed location with his wife (who he refers to in his blog affectionately as 'the Memsahib') and their children. Their life is almost entirely self-sufficient: They keep livestock, hunt elk and the children are schooled at home. Stored away in the ranch somewhere is a three-year supply of food."

He worked as a technical writer through most of the 1990s with a variety of electronics and software companies, including Oracle Corporation. In 2005, he began blogging full-time. He has since given up day-to-day blogging in order to devote more time to writing books.

His first novel was a work of speculative fiction set in a near future including hyperinflation and socioeconomic collapse. Initially titled: Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse, and later re-titled: Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse. The book was originally released in draft form as shareware under the title "Triple Ought" in the early 1990s. It was released in a printed edition by Huntington House. After Huntington House went out of business, the book was re-released by Xlibris, a "print on demand" publisher. Starting in April 2009, the novel was published in a paperback edition by Ulysses Press. It was updated to include a glossary and index.

From 1984 to 1993, he served as a United States Army Military Intelligence officer. He resigned his commission as a U.S. Army Captain immediately after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President of the United States.

Rawles worked as an Associate Editor and Regional Editor (Western U.S.) with Defense Electronics magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s Concurrently he was Managing Editor of The International Countermeasures Handbook.

James Wesley, Rawles (born 1960) is an American author, who writes the survivalist-genre Patriots novel series. Rawles is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer. He is the founder and Senior Editor of SurvivalBlog.com, which covers survival and preparedness topics, and has published collected material from this in two books. He also works as a survival retreat consultant. Rawles describes himself as a Constitutionalist Christian libertarian. As a minor affectation, he presents his name as "James Wesley, Rawles", using a comma to differentiate between the names that belong to him, and that which belongs to his family.

James Wesley, Rawles was born James Wesley Rawles in California in 1960 and attended local public schools. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from San Jose State University.