If you do a routine name search on the internet for “James Wesley Stivers,” probably the first entry that will pop-up will be for a sex offender of that name from Blountsville, Alabama. Similar entries will appear on that search page and repeated ever after, page after page.
Prior to 2010, if you would have typed in that name, entries for my writings for the Grail Church website would have appeared instead, not the name of an obscure felon from the early 2000s.
What changed? I ran for political office as a Republican.
Inspired by Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy in 2008, I wanted his libertarian slant on economic policy and individual freedom to get traction in North Idaho politics. I participated in his election campaign, got elected to a party position and ran for State Senate in 2010.
You would think that North Idaho would be friendly to such a political philosophy, and you would be right. But as with any other movement, people will fight over leadership.
I did not ingratiate myself. My involvement with the GOP went all the way back to Rev. Don Lyon’s campaign in 1978 against Congressman John B. Anderson in Rockford, Illinois. It set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, as Anderson, the 3rd-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, saw the “handwriting on the wall,” and decided on one final swan song as a third party presidential candidate, which just happened to siphon enough votes from Jimmy Carter to give Reagan the win.
I worked hard for decades as a good foot soldier in the Christian conservative movement, learned how to leverage myself, and achieved results for which others took the credit, especially in Idaho. My position and influence in the party was earned.
At the 2008 Idaho State Convention, I engineered the “Sound Money” plank to the State GOP platform through my son’s sub-committee. Others took the credit, but his resolution came out of committee first and was the one presented to the floor of the convention in the language as he introduced it.
But there were rivals in other subcommittees who wanted the credit.
One person was Tom Dillin from Bonner County. He held himself out as a “Ron Paul supporter” and had allied himself with Bill Denman who had been long recognized as an advocate for the gold standard.
Dillin was also proudly “ex-CIA” going all the way back to special operations in Vietnam. I think he took offense at about everything I said or did. The caveat here is that there is no such thing as “ex-CIA.” Operatives learn from the CIA’s “book” of dirty tricks and often use them to their personal advantage later in life, even after so-called “retirement.”
After a central committee meeting in 2009, he, Don Harkins (the editor of The Idaho Observer) and I met for a bite to eat. A friendly conversation turned ugly when Dillin found out that I was going to run for State Senate on Ellen Brown’s platform for a state bank. It was then that Dillin threatened to “destroy” me if I should run on that advocacy. Don, who was well-known as my supporter and friend, scoffed and scolded Dillin. But he was convinced that it was a socialist idea and promised to “take me down” and run me out of the party. No threats were implied; he stated them bluntly.
A short time later, Don was dead from a sudden on-set of an exotic disease, and then mysterious hacking began to occur on my websites. That was when “James Wesley Stivers” became smeared as a convicted sex-offender on the internet search engines and “the Grail Church” was portrayed as a cannibalistic cult from Romania. Even though I have never been to Alabama – or Romania, for that matter, the conflation of identities is the easier deduction for the simple-minded.
The extent of my criminal record is for trespassing to block entrance of an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas (1990), a year before the sensationalized “Summer of Mercy” when the “Operation Rescue” (see Appendix A, p. 117) circus came to town.
I was a victim of the “webot” phenomenon a decade before the current censorship of Deep State opponents on social media. Webots can be found from many sources, not just the CIA. But the CIA is certainly one of them, as recent “Twitter files” revelations have proved.
I will save for another time – if ever – a chronicle of my political history and my various first-hand experiences with intelligence officers – some of them good, and some of them not so good. But for now, it is enough to say, that if you type in my name on the internet, rest assured, “I am not that guy.”
Wearing my Christian name with pride,