The Shaman of the Radical Right
How an obscure British eccentric named Jonathan Bowden became a legendary figure on the online right.
In February this year, I published a biography of a portly, penniless university dropout who lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of a dreary English industrial town. The biography was almost immediately reviewed in The Spectator, one of England’s most significant magazines. In fact, its editor, the former Cabinet Minister Michael Gove, had known this eccentric man personally. Because my biography wasn’t a hagiography, I soon became the object of online trolling.
“Shame on all those who contributed to this character assassination of a decent kind man,” wrote an anonymous reviewer. “The book is nothing but a hit piece. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est. Do not speak ill of the dead. They are not here to … reply.” You see, in telling the truth about him, I had blasphemed against someone who, for a growing portion of young British conservatives, is a kind of messiah. This messiah’s name is Jonathan Bowden.
In the spring of 2009, at an unpublicized gathering hosted by The Occidental Quarterly in Atlanta, this unassuming, disheveled Englishman with a faintly nasal rural twang took to the stage. According to multiple attendees, what followed was one of the most electrifying speeches ever delivered at a nationalist event—perhaps the most compelling such speech ever heard. The speaker, it turned out, had not prepared any notes. Known for his “trancelike” oratory, he claimed to enter a dissociative state before speaking—almost as if he were channelling something beyond himself. The words, he once said, arrived from elsewhere.
Since his untimely death in March 2012 at the age of 49, a strange and fervent reverence has taken hold, particularly among Generation Z, as well as amid a growing number of older, sometimes prominent, onlookers who would never admit their interest in public. Among disenchanted youth navigating a postmodern landscape they dismissively label “Clown World,” Bowden has become something akin to a prophet—a fringe intellectual whose image has now been repackaged into digital tributes, quote graphics, and impassioned YouTube and
Twitter montages.
This groundswell of fascination is what finally compelled me to write his biography, Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden. The book almost didn’t happen. Although several people encouraged me to take it on in 2019, I discovered that an old friend of Bowden’s had supposedly been working on a biography since shortly after Bowden’s death. But by 2021, nothing had materialized. He was still preventing others from moving forward while being unable—or unwilling—to finish the job himself.
Then, in late 2024, at a meeting hosted by a somewhat “purple-pilled” London magazine, I found myself talking to a female philosopher who suddenly pulled out a book of Bowden’s speeches from her handbag and beamed at me. It was a moment of realization. This man’s influence had outstripped even my expectations. His executor and I reached out one last time to the would-be biographer—no reply. So I picked up the pen.
But that raised a larger question: Why had Bowden’s legacy surged? What drew people—especially the young and rebellious—to him? What combination of factors led a seemingly mainstream academic to carry around the words of a man she’d likely never publicly endorse? He spent his life meandering around various radical right groups and delivered most of his recorded speeches while holding the title of “cultural officer” within the “far right” and entirely politically “beyond the pale” British National Party. He had publicly asserted that “there’s nothing wrong with Fascism!” He is, it seems, a Weberian Charismatic; one who, like a shaman, makes a cold world seem warm again for community, in this case for the disenchanted conservative British youth and, increasingly, their American equivalents.
Part of what makes him inspiring to these disaffected young people is Bowden’s astonishing range and spontaneous intellect. In his speeches, he was able to connect disparate thinkers and symbols—from Julius Evola to the dystopian comic character Judge Dredd—without notes, and with theatrical conviction. His presentations felt to many like a form of performance art. He didn’t merely inform; he mesmerized. That spontaneity, recorded in grainy videos in dingy venues above pubs, has now become part of nationalist lore. It gives his speeches an added aura of authenticity—a man alone, raging against the encroaching banality of managed decline.
There’s also the matter of personal courage. Bowden never adopted a pseudonym, despite knowing full well the reputational risks of voicing unpalatable opinions. He embraced a Nietzschean vision: one must not submit to the cult of victimhood or inherited weakness. Instead, one must seize power, spiritually and biologically, and refuse the role of the aggrieved.
Yet Bowden was not merely a political ideologue—he was also a failed artist, a failed novelist, and a prolific painter whose abstract works evoked comparisons to nightmarish Kandinsky paintings. His literary fiction, often impenetrable, was described by friends as “almost unreadable,” yet somehow incandescent. That willingness to create without concern for reception—that bold aesthetic risk-taking—further added to his mystique.
in 2011, Bowden was institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia after police found him wandering around Reading, half-naked and wielding a samurai sword, convinced that foreign agents were trying to kill him.
This wasn’t a man chasing acclaim. He lived, quite literally, on the margins: a lone bachelor in a dilapidated caravan on the outskirts of Reading, using the public library for internet access, armed with an ancient mobile phone. He was physically unremarkable—short, overweight, and socially adrift. And he was mentally ill; for a period in 2011, Bowden was institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia after police found him wandering around Reading, half-naked and wielding a samurai sword, convinced that foreign agents were trying to kill him.
And yet, these very vulnerabilities, this lack of polish, lent him relatability, in a way. His critics saw a crank—and he was, indeed, a pathological liar, who convinced friends he was a millionaire with five children and a heavily tattooed wife named Karen. Even so, his followers saw a sage.
Social psychologists have found that people with certain imperfections—those who appear slightly helpless, who occasionally blunder—are often viewed as more likable and trustworthy. Charismatic leaders often possess a kind of childlike enthusiasm or perceived innocence. In Bowden’s case, this manifested in both his emotional volatility and his single-minded commitment to speaking truth as he saw it.
His untimely death, of course, solidified his legend. Sociological studies on charisma show that when a movement loses a leader unexpectedly and young—especially one who had not yet “sold out” or declined—followers tend to elevate that individual into something more than human. They are not just mourned; they are mythologized. The prophet becomes part of the people.
And so today, Bowden has become a meme, a digital echo—his fiery declarations remixed and spread far beyond the “far right” margins where he once spoke. For many young people disillusioned by a world of algorithmic conformity and spiritual inertia, he is less a political theorist and more a shamanic figure—a bard of dissidence, raw and unfiltered.
He once described himself as a “Bohemian,” and perhaps that’s exactly what he was: An artistic soul drawn to extremism, superficially unbothered by middle-class norms, who saw in radical politics not just a means to power, but an arena for spiritual warfare. In a sense, Jonathan Bowden became what all artists long to be: unforgettable, misunderstood, and indispensable to those who need them most.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/society-culture/the-shaman-of-the-radical-right