June 27, 2024 - 6:45pm

→ Peter Thiel makes intellectual case for Christianity

Peter Thiel evidently has many strings to his bow. The PayPal and Palantir co-founder recently made the intellectual case for Christianity at a religious event in San Francisco, arguing that belief can protect one from status games and other distractions.

“The First Commandment is: you should worship God. The Tenth Commandment is: you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbour,” he said. “In some ways, the First Commandment is to look up, and the Tenth Commandment is you do not look around. And if you’re too much focused horizontally on all the people around you, that’s sort of the bad version you get caught up in.”

Thiel lauded the “progressive” nature of the religion, wherein “there’s some kind of a progressive, gradual character to the revelation itself that happens through history”. Does a debate with Richard Dawkins beckon? 

→ Éric Zemmour joins anti-immigration song craze

The European hard-Right is supposedly on the march, and they seem to be doing it to musical accompaniment. After the popularisation in Germany of Ausländer raus, an anti-immigration song — chanted over the beat of Gigi D’Agostino’s club fixture L’Amour toujours — whose title translates as “Foreigners Out”, a French equivalent is catching on.

Je Partira Pas (“I won’t leave”), a French pop song about migrants which includes the lyrics “We have given you enough […] Good riddance/And don’t come back”, as well as “When Bardella comes,/You will return home”, has gained popularity among members of Gen Z, to the point that it was this week removed from Tiktok in France. Even Right-wing former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour yesterday shared a video of himself dancing to the tune.

Zoomers appear to be leading the charge of Right-wing parties across the continent, and Britain isn’t immune to the trend. Who did it better: Zemmour or Farage?

→ CCHQ depicts Angela Rayner as Super Mario

It goes without saying that the Conservative Party isn’t having a great election campaign. And while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has hired some technologically astute Zoomers to handle the party’s social media, CCHQ’s online strategy is full self-sabotage. Today, the Tory Party account photoshopped a moustache and beret onto a clip of Angela Rayner talking about Labour’s new deal for workers.

In the video, Labour’s Deputy Leader talks about ending fire and rehire and zero-hour contracts as the Tories insinuate that her Gallic policies will lead to French-style protests and chaos. But it hasn’t quite landed. As politics academic Rob Ford put it: “Angela Rayner dressed as Super Mario promising to ban a thing people don’t like? Why is there a French flag emoji? Who is this aimed at?” Who is Keir Starmer’s inside man at CCHQ?