James Wesley Rawles

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.[4]

From 1984 to 1993, he served as a United States Army Military Intelligence officer.[5] He resigned his commission as a U.S. Army Captain immediately after Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President of the United States.[5]

Rawles worked as an associate editor and regional editor (Western U.S.) with Defense Electronics magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s[6] Concurrently he was managing editor of The International Countermeasures Handbook.[7]

He worked as a technical writer through most of the 1990s with a variety of electronics and software companies, including Oracle Corporation.[5][8] In 2005, he began blogging full-time.[1]

Rawles is now a freelance writer, blogger, and survival retreat consultant.[9][10] He is the author of the survivalist novel Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse,[11] and the senior editor of SurvivalBlog.com, a blog on survival and preparedness topics.[12]

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.[13]

His novels tend to be heavy on acronyms and technical jargon,[14] while his non-fiction books concentrate on practical skills and tools. In the Acknowledgments note to his book Tools For Survival, Rawles credits David Brin, Algis Budrys, Tom Clancy, Bruce D. Clayton, Colonel Jeff Cooper, Frederick Forsyth, Pat Frank, Gordon Dickson, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Ing, Elmer Keith, Herbert W. McBride, Ludwig von Mises, Dr. Gary North, Arthur W. Pink, John Piper, Jerry Pournelle, Ayn Rand, Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard, George R. Stewart and Mel Tappan as influential to his writing.[15] In his blog, Rawles also cites Robert A. Heinlein as an influence, and often quotes him.[16]

Cover of Patriots

How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It

Cover of How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It

His How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times is a non-fiction book drawn primarily from his posts on SurvivalBlog.com. The book was described as "The preppers' Bible", by a Reuters journalist.[20] His blog addresses preparing for the multitude of possible threats toward society. Rawles describes how to prepare against a post-disaster society that suffers looting, armed violence and food shortages. He recommends establishing rural safe havens at least 300 miles from the nearest major city, financial planning for a future barter-based economy, water retrieval and purification, food production and storage, security and self-defense techniques and strategies.[21][22]

The book received a mixed review from the New York Journal of Books:

For a neutral assessment of the huge efforts put in by the author, the book has its own strengths and weaknesses; however, the former outweigh the latter by a huge margin. One of its crystal clear strengths is the author's obsession with precision and a clinical eye for relevant details.[23]

It received a favorable book review on the weblog of Orville R. Weyrich Jr.[24] 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."[21]

Syndicated radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy interviewed Rawles and said that his book "posits a collapse of civilization."[25] 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."[26]

How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It has 14 chapters and three appendices, 336 pages, ISBN 978-0-452-29583-4. September 2009. First Printing (September 2009): 20,000 copies. Second Printing (October 2009): 6,000 copies. Third Printing (October 2009): 25,000 copies. An unabridged audiobook edition is also available (ISBN 978-1441830593), produced by Brilliance Audiobooks. It was narrated by Dick Hill. As of March 2011, there were 132,000 copies of the book in print, and it had gone through 11 printings.[27] As of April 2012, there were 12 foreign publishing contracts in place to produce editions in 11 languages,[28] and the book was still in Amazon.com's Top 250 titles, overall.[29] The German edition, Überleben in der Krise was translated by Angelika Unterreiner and published in 2011 by Kopp Verlag.[30][31] The French edition, Fin du Monde: Comment survivre? was translated by Antony Angrand. It was released in September 2012.[32][33] The Spanish edition: Cómo Sobrevivir al Fin del Mundo tal Como lo Conocemos was translated by Juan Carlos Ruiz Franco in Spain and Javier Medrano in the United States. It was released in April 2012.[34][35] A Romanian translation (Ghid De Supravietuir) from Editura Paralela 45 in Bucharest was released in November 2013. It was translated by Ioan Es. Pop, a well-known Romanian poet, political figure, translator, and academic.[36][37]

Rawles is an proponent of family preparedness, especially regarding food storage[42] and advocates relocating to lightly populated rural "retreat" areas. His preparedness philosophy emphasizes the fragility of modern society, the value of silver and other tangibles for barter, recognition of moral absolutes, being well-armed, maintaining a "deep larder," relocation to rural retreats, and Christian charity.[43] In an interview in The New York Times, Rawles identified himself as a "guns and groceries" survivalist.[44]

Rawles interprets the 2nd Amendment as supporting citizens' individual rights to bear and keep arms. He believes they should be able to take arms to public events.[45]

Rawles is opposed to racism,[46][47] (he published a defense of his anti-racist views in a blog entry entitled "Race, Religion, and Reason" in 2010).[48] He supports abolition of modern slavery in the world.[49]

Rawles is opposed to military interventionism.[50]

The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Rawles as a Christian separatist and promoter of conspiracy theories associated with the anti-government Patriot movement.[51]

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.[52] The concept was endorsed by former Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, who had recently relocated his entire extended family to western Montana.[53] One of its adherents, John Jacob Schmidt, started a weekly podcast called Radio Free Redoubt to help further the movement.[54]

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),[55] a private free press advocacy group that distributes press credentials to any literate adult U.S. Citizen, free of charge.[56][57]

Rawles has lived in San Jose, California; near Orofino, Idaho; near Smartsville and Fremont, California; and near New Washoe City, Nevada. Rawles notes that the location of his ranch in the United States is kept secret, but that he lives somewhere west of the Rockies.[58] The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asserts that the ranch is in northern Idaho.[59] Others have claimed that the "undisclosed location" of the ranch is in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming or even in Central America.[2][60] 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."[61]

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."[2] 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."[62] His U.S. mail address is a post office box in Newcastle, Wyoming, but his main web site server is in Sweden.[60]

• Rawles on Retreats and Relocation, Print on demand from CafePress, No ISBN (January 2007)
• SurvivalBlog: The Best of the Blog, Volume 1, Print on demand from CafePress, No ISBN (February 2007)
• Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, Ulysses Press, Berkeley, California, ISBN 978-1-56975-599-0 (April 2009), ISBN 978-1-56384-155-2 (November 1998), ISBN 978-1-4257-3407-7 (December 2006)
• How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York, ISBN 978-0-452-29583-4, (September 2009)
• Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse, Atria Books, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4391-7280-3, (October 2011)
• Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse, Atria Books, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4391-7282-7, (September 2012)
• Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse, E.P. Dutton, ISBN 978-0525953906, (October 2013)
• Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse, E.P. Dutton, ISBN 978-0525953913, (October 2014)
• Tools For Survival, Plume, New York, ISBN 978-0-452-29812-5, (December 2014)
• Land of Promise, Liberty Paradigm Publishing, Moyie Springs, Idaho, ISBN 978-1475605600, (December 2015)
• The Ultimate Prepper’s Survival Guide, Thunder Bay Press, ISBN 978-1645173779, (October 2020)

• Survivalism
• Kurt Saxon
• Ragnar Benson

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• James Wesley Rawles on Survival Firearms: The End of the World as We Know It at Y2KChaos