Last week, Ben Shapiro--editor emeritus of the conservative media organization the Daily Wire, prolific right-wing firebrand, and someone who seems to wear a blazer and button-up every day of his life--played a round of Minecraft on his YouTube channel. Often, the sandbox game is about the quiet joys of pastoral life, where players construct homesteads, rear livestock, and grow crops in a world made up entirely of perfectly equilateral cubes. It's also the best-selling game ever, which is why Minecraft videos tend to pop up on the channels of blue-haired Twitch celebrities, not a 39-year old political commentator who initially entered the upper tier of pundit-influencers as an anti-anti-Trump Republican who toured America's college campuses in order to argue with 19-year-olds about Marxism. Yet here he was, in 2023, doing his best to defeat the Ender Dragon for all five and a half million of his subscribers. "I'm still hitting the wrong buttons here, I'm not used to the controls," Shapiro said as he limply gestured his pickaxe toward a stone laden with glowing rubies.