David Freiheit

David Freiheit (born May 23, 1979), is a Canadian lawyer, former political candidate for the People's Party of Canada and YouTuber under the pseudonym Viva Frei.

Biography

Freiheit grew up in Montreal, Quebec, as the youngest of five siblings born in a Jewish family. He enjoyed creating videos. He studied Creative Arts at Dawson College and received his Bachelor of Arts at McGill University. He then received his civil law degree from Université Laval where he was the editor-in-chief of the university's law journal. He worked professionally for the prominent commercial litigation firm Borden Ladner Gervais for six years, but left to be a freelance litigator after his first child to have a more favourable work-life balance,

For the first few years of his YouTube career, Freiheit was a practising commercial litigator, and he struggled to find time to create his videos. In January 2018, he discontinued his litigation practice and turned full-time to YouTube.

On July 22, 2021, Freiheit announced the launch of his campaign to run for Parliament as a member of the People's Party of Canada.

YouTube career

Early content and awards (2014–2019)

Freiheit started his YouTube career in early 2014 by posting videos of him lip syncing to various pop songs while running obstacle courses dressed in a full suit. These videos were not receiving many views, so Freiheit decided to try another style; in late 2014, Freiheit started posting nature-related stunts. He gained popularity when he posted a video of a squirrel picking up his GoPro action camera and carrying it up a tree. Freiheit then started posting videos of stunts involving the use of a drone.

In 2016, Freiheit won a GoPro Award for his use of their cameras in his videos. He won a Shorty Social Good Award for Best Overall YouTube Presence in 2017.

In January 2019, Freiheit was invited by GoPro to be a featured panellist at the Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Style change (2019–present) From 2014 to 2019, Freiheit had accumulated around 60,000 subscribers. In April 2019, he decided that since law-related content was by far his channel's most popular genre, he would change the style of his channel and only post vlogs analysing different current issues from a legal standpoint. He started a second channel, "Viva Family", as a place to maintain his former content style.

Before running for the PPC, Freiheit had classified the political stance he takes on his channel as non-partisan, claiming that the internet, through the use of the terms right-wing or left-wing, only succeeds in "pigeonholing, categorizing, dichotomizing, just reducing a complex individual to either right or left in all of their... beliefs". In an interview, he described his channel's content as including a "pretty decent balance of left and right".

In September 2022, Freiheit signed an exclusive video deal with the video platform Rumble. He frequently works in person at the Rumble Miami studio, and was attributed by the company as a key legal contributor to their 2022 proposal for an 'open-source content moderation policy and process'.

Political career

Freiheit ran in the 2021 Canadian federal election to become a Member of Parliament for the People's Party of Canada in the riding of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount. In July 2021, Freiheit created a third channel, "Viva PPC", as a place to feature his political content. He lost his electoral bid, coming in sixth place in the riding with 3.3% of votes.

Electoral record