Annand Bunty King Virk details his Twitter exile, citing anonymous suspensions and platform hostility that drove him to prioritize real-life connections over online echo chambers. He contrasts Twitter's toxicity with Facebook's genuine engagement, recounts a past physical altercation against an anti-Semite, and advocates for local community ownership rather than federal reliance. Ultimately, Virk argues that true influence stems from authentic relationships and loving neighbors, rejecting the cycle of harassment and political correctness that defined his previous twenty-seven years. [Automatically generated summary]
I know, and we were talking a bit about it, but yeah, it's definitely a city that's played extensively into my identity online and just throughout, you know?
So, I mean, then my dad came to Canada, and he got his degree in computer science.
He came here to become a systems analyst, and he went back, met my mom, brought her here.
And my mom actually abandoned all her dreams to pretty much raise me and my sister.
So, for the longest time, that didn't click with me.
And just, I would say, in the last year, year and a half, it really has dawned on me that my mother sacrificed her entire life to turn me into the human that I am now.
It actually was brought up based on all the stuff that I was watching on YouTube.
Just through the anti-feminist movement, things like that.
this whole, just through the anti-feminist movement, things like that, things like about
how, I think one of the things that really stood out to me was this fight back against
the traditional woman.
Which I think is okay.
I mean, I'm cool with women doing whatever they want to do, and they should.
They totally should.
But there's this beautiful thing about a woman that wants to be a mother, a woman that wants to take care of her kids, a woman that wants to take care of the home.
There's so much value in it, right?
And the amount of sacrifice that it requires.
So I began to really appreciate that about my mom, so there's that.
It's kind of funny, I mean, without going too deep into feminism specifically, it's kind of funny how this has flipped, right?
Like, taking care of the home and the family and all that is sort of looked down upon in a weird way by modern feminism.
My mom worked before she had kids, then she was a stay-at-home mom, took good care of us, cooked meals, made sure we got to school on time, all of those things, was home when we got home after school, and then went back to work after, when the kids grew up.
And I think now, back, that like, what a cherished, amazing thing that was.
I think being part of a full person is why I like your videos and I like when you were on Twitter and we're going to get to why you're not on Twitter anymore.
Why I like what you're doing because there's a good... I mean, it's very obvious now sitting in front of you.
And I feel like most people right now are walking around with a halfness, you know what I mean?
They're walking around in this constant state of hating everybody or not sure what they think, or they're now enemies with family and friends that two years ago they weren't.
And we don't have the issues that the states have.
We really don't.
We don't have, you know, if a mass shooting were to happen, we were not going to have people who are lined up with medical bills that they can't pay.
That's something that's not going to happen.
We don't have race issues to that degree.
We have a problem in terms of how we've treated native people in the past, but those are things that our government is willing to address.
Or is addressing in a manner that, you know, They're addressing it, they're trying to, and they're a lot more empathetic about it, right?
So I have something I'd like to call, you know, Montreal Canadian privilege.
It's just something that, it's like, I grew up in an environment where it wasn't easy for me growing up as a kid, a brown kid in the 90s, but it was, I would say, a lot easier for me than it would have been if I was, like, in South Chicago, South Central LA, or You know, Baltimore.
I have this, I'm happy because I'm privileged to be happy.
Anyway, so Sikhs are interesting because they were born out of war and they were pretty much almost the first line of defense against the Muslims when they were invading.
And I'm not saying this is not something that reflects on all Muslims.
A hundred percent.
It's not a thing.
It's so sad that we always have to say these things.
I know, right?
But one thing that I realized about my culture is that obviously, you know, it's still around, right?
Sikhs are still around, which means that at some point they won, right?
And what I've loved about the culture is that they've been very respectful of other cultures
in the sense that they are willing to adapt to whatever their host country is.
So Sikh Canadians are very Canadian.
British people are very British.
Another thing that I find to be really fascinating is that they don't have this animosity towards
Islam.
They don't.
It's very much a religion that from the ground up you're taught to pretty much be like, listen,
let bygones be bygones.
Treat things as they are at the very moment.
So if something is happening and you need to defend yourself, well then, it's fair game.
But if something happened back in the day and it's not happening now, we're not gonna hold against you.
I don't think about, oh my God, I should be upset at Muslims for what happened in 16th century India, you know?
For the longest time I thought I was maybe... I wanted to be so American, so North American, so accepted by people, that I was becoming someone completely different.
For me, one of the things I noticed was that When I met other brown people, I wanted to be friends with them, right?
Because I saw them as allies, you know?
And that's, I think, a very normal thing.
They were like, oh, they're brown, too.
I should be friends with them because they're brown, too.
And they're like, we're in among the sea of white people.
But I noticed that a lot of them would actually kind of like either want to be the best brown person.
They'd want to be the token.
And that pushed on to me.
me. I wanted to be the token as well. And I mean, when I was like eight, between that
period of time, I would get my ass kicked by this kid across the street all the time.
I never wanted to go outside because anytime he was outside, it was going to be a problem for me.
A lot of it is very hazy now because I don't spend too much time dwelling on my past in which I felt a little bit disadvantaged because it doesn't matter.
It's literally what we, the reason why we have channels.
The reason why we do what we do is because people just spend so much time dwelling on the past.
And I agree, the past is something that needs to be looked at and referenced regularly.
You need to look at the shit that we did, right?
But it's come to the point now where we're dwelling on the past where we're either super proud of things
that have nothing to do with whatever we just did right now.
Or we're just really pissed off about things that happened to us back when the people
that are alive today.
I mean, sorry, the people that are live today have nothing to do with it at all.
And yeah, you can go ahead and talk about how the system is set up in such a way and it kind of led to this point, but like, I mean, most of the time when you're talking to people, you're not talking to a crowd of a thousand people, you're talking to, I'm talking to Dave Rubin right now.
I'm not talking to anybody else.
I mean, I know there's a bunch of people watching right now, but like... We didn't even turn the cameras on, did we?
Yeah, it's okay.
We've just been talking.
We've just been talking.
That's it.
It's just you and me.
It's the individual level.
I know that if you look at policy, you can't look at the individual.
You'll have to look at everything, you know?
And that's where race realists come in, and that's where all these policies come in, right?
As human beings, as viewers, as content creators, we are not in charge of creating policies.
We have to be in charge of owning our lives and interacting with people in an authentic way, in a way that's going to be like, you know what, you have to care about people.
I'm not gonna interact with someone I don't care about.
I swear.
If there's someone, I look at someone, I'm like, I don't care about that fucking person, I'm out.
Yeah, so pretty much what ended up happening was that I...
I just kind of, I shed that.
I became me.
And I took to Twitter.
And Twitter video was an excellent, it was just an excellent way to be me online.
Something would happen and I would record a video.
I'm telling you dude, the amount of time my videos went for, that's pretty much the amount of time it took me to record that video.
I'd just turn it on, start saying something, probably laugh because I said something and I caught it and I laugh because it's hilarious what I just said.
Because I laugh at my own jokes because I'm a loser.
But yeah, that's pretty much it.
And then that's it.
And then people started catching on.
Next thing you know, I'm being followed by people and people want to listen to what I'm saying.
Because I've actually, from all the stuff that I've watched, I've never heard you really go directly into politics, but everything you're doing is around politics, sort of.
You know, I had a job at a marketing firm back in May, and I've always been interested in marketing, right?
And in order to be an effective marketer, you kind of need to know people.
And of course, you know, when I say I'm a marketer, people are like, oh, well, I don't trust what he's going to say, because he's going to say whatever is the best thing that I need to hear, right?
And it's true.
I completely understand the stigma behind marketers, but I'd like to think I'm a bit more ethical about it.
But yeah, people is my game.
People is totally my game.
And because, you know, everything that we do ends up involving people, That's how you end up venturing into politics, but it's never my direct avenue.
Because I'm not like Sargon of God, who spends time reading articles or reading books on social issues and stuff like that.
I'm a guy that likes to talk to people, and I want to know people.
I felt free because It was amazing because I was being this person that I wanted to be online, and I wasn't seeing repercussions in real life.
People were actually excited.
They were like, yo, man, we love your shit.
It's crazy.
People were coming up to me, my friends at parties would be like, dude, watch what you're doing now.
They appreciated it.
You know, there's obviously some people, there was one guy who I, who actually kind of, I really love this guy because he had a lot of, we'd play board games all the time.
I love board games.
And the strategy element is just something, I love strategy.
There's this one game that I really like called Twilight Imperium, and yeah, that has alien races and stuff, but pretty much you build the board every time.
And you pretty much pick your role at the very beginning of every round.
You can pick a warfare role, or a strategy role, or a politics role.
And when you pick a politics role, you draw it out of a deck that changes the game, essentially.
And you have to vote based on the influence that you have.
And so that's the kind of stuff I like because, I mean, one time I won a game by convincing a guy I was his friend the whole time.
I was like, yo, dude, I'm your friend.
And he was like, yeah, you're my friend, because I'm a nice guy.
And I was like, I'm not going to attack you.
And I never attacked him.
But the best part about it was that he never attacked me.
And I left that whole side completely defenseless.
And I pulled a whole offensive on the other side and I ended up winning the game because I took over someone's home system.
Like I said, I would say a majority of my character or my personality or my identity is built off of Hollywood movies.
So this whole stuff that's been happening in Hollywood, all the bad shit, the Me Too campaign, Harvey Weinstein and all that stuff, it's affected me a little bit.
I've just been like, fuck, all these people were cool people that I looked up to.
These actors.
No one's said anything about Brad Pitt yet, though.
You know, you make an interesting point, because I think part, of course, of course it goes without saying, for the people that have really done the bad things like Weinstein, it's like, of course you gotta go down.
Of course.
If you rape somebody, or all of that shit, it goes without saying.
But you're making an interesting point about something that I think is happening at a broader sense right now, which is that it seems like all of our institutions are crumbling right in front of us.
Like the whole Trump thing has the political machine crumbling.
The media is crumbling right in front of us, mostly by its own doing.
Hollywood now is starting to crumble.
And I think that's why people are turning to people like us.
So it's actually kind of cool for us, and I guess it's a little bit of pressure too, right?
Because there's a lot of people who I find that aren't good people.
And that's the sad part about it.
The crazy thing about what we do is we have this opportunity to connect with people.
You have this opportunity to connect with someone right now that's watching at this very moment and be like, oh my god, that speaks to me.
And there's people that are going to go ahead and incite hatred with their voices, and there's people that are going to try to go ahead and bring people together.
And I've encountered so many of the people that are trying to do the former.
It's insane.
People like Tariq Nasheed, people like Richard Spencer, these people are only around to fuck with people.
The funny thing is, the first time he called, he says Ruben's a white supremacist or something, and then all these people start sending me memes about wash my ass, and I had literally no idea.
Tariq was a rapper and he'd pick up artists and then he was like, you know what?
Pick up artist game.
It's not making that much money.
Oh, I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to race bait.
And that makes a lot of money because people are really upset.
Race is a big issue.
It's coming up over and over again.
As people's voices start to elevate, people who feel like they don't have a secure identity are going to voice their opinions about how they feel about their place in the world.
And of course, these people are going to kind of speak to that, you know?
And it doesn't matter if they're black, white or whatever.
The crazy thing is that I took on Tariq and he had me suspended the first time, right?
So he got me suspended off Twitter.
I had 26,000 followers.
But because I'm a marketer, I took that opportunity to kind of flex whatever social contacts I had.
And of course, they are down because it's a very mutually beneficial thing because they get to talk shit about Tariq.
And talking shit about Tariq is instant clout.
And the best part is that is that Tariq was still trying to fire at me, and every time he tried to fire at me, I spinned it.
And I boosted way past my original follower count within two weeks.
But that's what these guys do all the time, right?
I mean, that's why it's, I always think, it's like, it's hard to gauge exactly what the level of the country or the world is like right now, because you've got so many bad actors, the people you were talking about before, who just want to revel in hate and get more followers because they hate.
And then you've got some of the good guys, and I like to think we're kind of in that mix of the good guys.
Yeah, because you're constantly... because these guys who've been, like, spurring this level of hatred, you know, they...
They've kind of made this environment in which everyone kind of doubts people's motivations.
And so people are constantly doubting motivations.
People are like, don't trust Bunty King because he's modded this person in a chat or something like that.
It's like bullshit like that.
And it's annoying.
It's really annoying to have to deal with.
But I think that that's just noise.
And that was my problem.
It's very hard for me to ignore the noise.
Um, because I built my brand on being able to connect with people, right?
And, um, I love talking to my followers.
I found that, like, out of the 46,000 followers I had, I felt like the majority were people that I would love to live in a community with, you know?
And, uh, and so anytime anyone tried to engage me, I was down to engage them, especially if they saw they were following me, because sometimes I'd actually go to see if someone was following me and if they were giving me criticism, because I want criticism.
I want people to tell me if I'm doing something wrong so I can know if I can correct it based on, like, Yeah, let's do the shift there.
Man, I mean, see, it's so interesting, because I know a lot of people are watching this that probably aren't too into the Twitter world or whatever, and they're like, ah, why are they wasting time talking about this?
Or like, this seems like so insider-y, or, oh, poor guy lost his following on Twitter.
But there is something very culturally relevant, right?
I mean, it brings up all of these things about what private companies can do and that we opt in on all this stuff, about all the issues around free speech and how they selectively, because we know that there's plenty of people, like Tariq, who's constantly harassing people online.
I mean, let everybody harass everybody.
I don't really care, as long as they're not, you know, directly calling for violence.
Yeah, exactly.
But it does, that's why I don't want people to think this is too, I hope people don't think this is too insidery, because it is relevant to people like you being able to actually get your voice out.
What I really liked about your Twitter was that For all the people that I follow that my timeline's become a headache, and I think most people feel this, it's like, ugh, more of this, more of that, Trump this, Trump that.
You were just at least doing something different, you know what I mean?
Sitting in your bathroom, screaming about something, laughing about something, doing something.
You were one of the few people that I could watch and I'd be like, oh, I know something interesting's gonna happen here, I'm not gonna be pissed.
As now someone that's creating on YouTube, so you're in a similar situation as you were on Twitter, what do you think the answer is?
Because there's places like PragerU, and I really like Dennis, and I've done videos for PragerU, they're in a lawsuit right now with YouTube over restricting videos and things like that.
The libertarian side of me always says, don't get the government involved in this.
And yet I know we're all in this weird, precarious position.
I'm honestly trying to really fall back to doing local shit.
This is really interesting because a lot of people I find that we connect with are people that are involved in the The gathering of global power, alright?
We're in the pursuit of power.
I know you may not want to admit it, but we are- I'll come down this road with you.
Let's go.
Okay, we're in the pursuit of power as YouTubers.
We want influence over people.
We want to be able to go ahead and say something and have it heard.
We want people to listen to us because we feel like we can make some kind of impact in the world.
That's the nature of YouTube, I would say, and the nature of social media in general, people that really grow on social media.
What I was doing on Twitter was I was really attaining a level of- I mean, I was getting millions of impressions a day.
It was a great time.
I was interacting with more people than I ever did before ever in my life.
But these people were scattered throughout the world.
Some people in Denmark, some people in the UK, some people in California, some people in Texas.
It doesn't matter.
They were all over the place, right?
And I felt like I was really kind of avoiding Connecting with my direct reality, you know because I had already built my my network of people in real life Didn't feel like they were always gonna be around it took it for granted But it was really about kind of falling back and and and reconnecting
With my community.
I think that's really what's coming down to.
I'm like trying to... I still am going to be present on the global scale because I want to actually connect with people on YouTube.
I want to make some more videos and talk about things and provide my opinion.
But I think that the focus has really shifted more on really bringing my city up to the standards that I believe in.
Yeah, it's interesting, because I love that, on a personal level, I love it, because it's obvious that you're telling me the truth, and it has meaning to you.
But on the political level, I love it too, because that's what people need to be doing, is stop thinking that the federal government, whether you're in the United States or Canada or elsewhere, stop thinking that just bureaucrats somewhere else are supposed to rule your life.
You have to rule your life, and more importantly, you're gonna look at your neighbor on your left and your right, and you have to make sure that they're okay.
Because if you're surrounded by failures, You're a failure.
It's insane that the amount of communication that we have in this world, right?
And we don't want to apply it.
We don't want to apply the most elementary level of communication.
If we can't apply the most elementary level of communication, which is just like, hey, I'm standing in front of you.
How are you doing?
Your dog is barking, bro.
Can you please stop your dog from barking?
I don't know why it's barking.
I love your dog.
Maybe I could babysit your dog or something like that, or dog sit your dog, whatever.
You know, like, instead of talking about that, you know, how are we able to handle mass communication like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, anything?
Like, it makes no sense, Dave.
People are completely bonkers.
They don't want to take ownership of their lives.
So instead of taking ownership of their lives, they look to these ideologues, these ideologues that are telling them all the solutions, when the reality is that they're never going to be able to get these solutions because they are currently stuck in their present reality and they refuse, absolutely refuse, to connect with the people that are directly around them.
That's pretty much what I've started to do.
Connect with the people that are around me.
My friends.
My family.
My family.
My mom and my dad.
There was a period of time where I didn't talk to my mom for a year.
So the idea is that it's not about getting necessarily your shit together, but it's more about You can get your shit together, but it needs to start from within.
Like, you're not going to be a successful businessman.
You're not going to be successful anybody if you're not going to be able to be happy with yourself or be comfortable with yourself.
And in being comfortable with yourself, that means embracing everything that is about you, right?
And that extends to being comfortable with your direct surroundings.
So if you're in a situation, and I'm not saying that this is... By the way, once again, this is where my privileged point of view comes from.
I may not have these views if I was living somewhere else.
If I was living in a place that was really impoverished or a place where the threat of murder or anything like that was prevalent, I may not have these views, but... Do you think that's really privilege or just reality?
And even though you said before that your father was successful beforehand and all that, No one probably gave him anything, and I'm guessing his parents probably didn't have much before that.
So that's why this idea of privilege, it always flips sort of history on its head.
By comparison to some people, I'm doing way better.
I stand below the poverty line, but I can afford stuff.
I can go out to a bar and have a drink.
That's something that the poorest people can't do.
So I'm definitely lucky.
You know, I'm able to be a YouTuber while not making that much money and still continue to pursue this dream, you know, of being a YouTuber or being someone that's connected with the public because I have the privilege of living with my parents.
I can be like, yo, mom, dad, I don't want to go to school.
We had Neil Colticar, who's Indian from Australia, great comic.
Like, all of these people, they have some difference of diversity of skin color and all that, but I don't care about any of that shit.
What I like is that all these people from all over the place, we've all sort of found each other, and I think it's incredibly cool, like, that we've come together because of good ideas.
You know, you're talking about it's easy to do the bad idea.
What do you make of this kind of burgeoning community?
You have to inject yourself into established systems.
So, like, I mean, I've thought about, you know, finding a way to get into the UN.
I've thought about those kind of things.
I've thought about finding a way to get into local politics, you know, and I've gotten involved through media ventures.
I work with this company in Montreal called MotionCore, and what we do is essentially we try to, like, connect with creators in the area and we've connected with our local
politicians.
I'm in a campaign video for our newly elected mayor, which is crazy.
First female mayor in Montreal and I'm in a campaign video of hers on social media, which is sick.
I can only imagine the amount of people that are sending review requests their way, though.
I can only imagine.
It must be insane, the amount of workload they're under.
It's funny, because I feel like you're probably going to get, you probably had a bunch of other people that are like, yeah, fuck monetization, what the fuck is going on?
I'm like not, I try to understand, because I know people that work at YouTube, and I know how much they love their platform, and I know how much they want to make it a better place.
And honestly, dude, like, you know, and just being on Twitter, and now I'm not on Twitter, which I'm thankful for, actually, because I don't ever want to come back to Twitter.
Yeah, I wanna hit that a little bit, yeah.
It sucks because I liked interacting with people like you, I liked interacting with my friends on Twitter, but it was so negative, dude.
It was so negative.
There's people there with 40,000 followers that nobody's ever really gonna know in real life, but they're just pushing this crazy, hateful agenda, and it's just really annoying.
You know, it's funny, right before we sat down, or right before we went live, you sort of half-apologized to me for a tweet that you sent me, and I think it perfectly encapsulates what you're saying.
So I had Stefan Molyneux on, and we talked a little.
So, it's funny, though, because some people I saw in that little exchange, some people were trying to get you to fight with Stefan, some people wanted you to fight with me.
Right, and when you said, and I responded to your tweet, and I was like, yeah, I'll...
When I have Thomas on, this is, of course, this is one of the things that I'm going to talk to him about.
But it's that, so in a way, everything that you're talking about here for the last however many minutes has led you to now being off Twitter where you're back in the real world.
You don't want to get back in.
There's sort of a, there's like a beauty, a beauty and an irony or something.
I guess ultimately I'm going to continue doing social media.
I'm going to continue trying to connect with as many people as possible, but ultimately I see this coming to a point where I get to reconnect with my direct reality, because some of my best friends Their names are Brad and Jason, two amazing people that I've known for over 14 years of my life.
These people were seeing me at parties, and I'd be on Twitter dude, at a fucking party.
I'm looking at my phone, I'm like, responding to people who I'm probably never going to meet.
It'd be nice to meet some of these people, but like, I'm never going to meet them most likely, right?
And so, now that that's gone, it's allowed me to reconnect with people in real life.
The best thing I can say is that people who really align with my ideologies, people who align with my way of living, to just join, just jump back on Facebook.
Because I don't think that you should have a problem, because I don't have a problem in real life with my opinions.
Yes, I am definitely that person, but I'm also a kind of person that I want people to be honest and understand the level of influence they have.
So when I see people abusing that, when I see people putting out fake news, it pisses me off, dude.
It's not right.
They know what they're doing.
I know whenever I tweet something, by the way, I'd always use the right words because I knew what words were going to hit.
And of course I would kind of craft that within the message that I aligned with wholeheartedly so I wouldn't be called out for being disingenuous.
But I know there's people out there right now that have a lot of influence that really are very disingenuous about their message because they know that it's going to get them further in life.
They know that it's going to go ahead and allow them to get the most people pissed off.
And a lot of that has to do with these race-baiting articles that we see in Salon and stuff like that.
And the only thing I can really recommend to people when they see that kind of shit is just to ignore it.
Because most normal people Don't care about that shit.
It was not the right thing to do, 100% not the right thing to do, but he was being very disrespectful to a woman, and it was a woman that was being courted by one of my friends, and so I punched him in the mouth, and then I pushed him against the window, and I started headbutting him, and then a cop split it up, and the cop So I was like, you look like a nice guy, I'm gonna let you go, but get this over with and then escalated from there.
Walking around with Chris and Lacey, I was talking to them about stuff.
I'm not going to go into details, but it's funny because I was standing there and I told them, I said, listen, if anyone ever said anything to you or tried to do something to you, I'd beat the fuck out of them.
I used to be in detention all the time in elementary school because kids would always be trying to pick fights with me and I'd always try to fight back.
And yeah, but no, I haven't had the need to fight anyone in over a decade, so it's beautiful.
And I don't want to.
I always told people, I said, next time I fight someone, it'll be to kill them.