YouTube. That is all we have left. The last free space. The only platform where progressive, liberal voices still breathe. Where truth, the raw, unfiltered, uncomfortable truth, still finds an audience.
Because let us face it. The mainstream media is gone. Bought. Sold. House-trained. Journalists are now stenographers. News anchors are glorified propagandists. Every channel is a megaphone for the establishment.
And yet, we, the liberals, the so-called defenders of free speech, are doing the most idiotic, short-sighted, self-destructive thing possible.
We are demanding censorship (even if we do not say it outright). We are asking for regulation (which already exists, but has not been weaponised—yet). We are offering up the last free space we have on a silver platter, all because our delicate sensibilities were offended by a tasteless joke.
A joke. On a subscription-only YouTube show. By a man whose entire personality is built on being tasteless.
Seriously?
You think it stops at BeerBiceps? You think the government will step in, wag a finger at Ranveer Allahbadia, and then politely retreat?
Have you learnt nothing?
Do you not remember NDTV? Do you not remember how quickly “monitoring fake news” turned into jailing journalists? Do you not see the pattern?
They have been waiting for an excuse to regulate YouTube. And we just handed it to them. A Department Of Online Media. D.O.O.M.
And when YouTube falls, make no mistake. We will be the ones who suffer.
Not the right-wing hate factories. Not the propaganda peddlers. Not the godi media rejects who already parrot the party line.
It will be Ravish Kumar and Aakash Banerjee who will be shut down.
It will be Dhruv Rathee and Abhisar Sharma who will be hounded.
It will be Karan Thapar and Ajit Anjum who will be targeted.
And the small, independent YouTubers? The ones exposing corruption, questioning power, reporting on what mainstream media refuses to touch? Jailed. Silenced. Wiped out.
All because we, the liberals, decided that a lame joke was the hill to die on.
Congratulations, morons.
You just handed the government its next excuse to clamp down on the last bastion of free speech in India.
When the lights go out, when the voices go silent, and when we are left wondering how it happened, we will have no one to blame.
Except ourselves.
And that, my friends, would have been funny, in an ironic sort of way. If only the joke didn’t land so badly. On us.
