Sheila Gunn Reid, a 2015 citizen activist, exposed Michelle Rempel’s anti-Jewish tweets, forcing her Liberal candidacy withdrawal, yet faced media smear campaigns as partisan. Rebel News surged in 2016 by championing conservative free speech during Brexit and Trump’s rise, filling Canada’s void of pro-conservative outlets. She rejects vote-splitting claims, blaming Andrew Scheer’s liberal hire for Conservative base alienation, urging Alberta conservatives to focus on municipal politics instead. Criticizing mainstream media’s framing of church burnings (65 incidents) and Indigenous colonization narratives as black-and-white oppressor-victim stories, Reid defends Rebel News’ hands-on support for affected churches while mocking classist elitism. Ultimately, she argues conservative media must resist leftward pressures to authentically represent overlooked rural voices. [Automatically generated summary]
Sheila Gunread is the host of The Gun Show and chief reporter for Rebel News.
She's covered countless national stories and is a best-selling author, writing books like Stop Notley and The Destroyers.
Thank you so much for joining me, Sheila Gunread.
How are you?
Hi, what a pleasure and joy to be on the show.
I've never been on your show before.
This is fun.
I wanted to sort of save it for further down the road so we can have landmark episodes.
You know, I've got plans for David Menzies, Ezra Levant, and I don't know who else, maybe producer Justin, we can have on one day.
So who knows?
So I always want to make it a special moment.
The first thing I wanted to ask you, Sheila, I was trying to think of what things would a Rebel fan fast for rewinding back to before I worked from Rebel News, questions that I would want to ask you.
My first question to you is, how did you get hired by Rebel News?
How did you start reporting for this company?
First off, I appreciate your kind words, but I know you had a last-minute cancellation.
You can't tell the audience that.
Oh, you know, we're nothing if not honest with our audience.
You know, how I started with Rebel News is, I guess it's the story of the company itself.
We sort of fill a void that we think the mainstream media isn't filling.
So back in 2015, it was before Justin Trudeau was elected, I was sort of a citizen activist.
You know, I had worked on a few election campaigns just as a volunteer or whatever.
So I was active in political circles, but in the lead up to the election of Justin Trudeau, I felt like the mainstream media wasn't doing the research on Justin Trudeau's candidates that they were doing on the conservatives.
Because, you know, the mainstream media, they really do all the opposition research on behalf of the liberals anyways, but they weren't turning that sort of attention to the liberals themselves.
So I thought, you know what, I'm a mom.
I'm not particular, or I wasn't at the time, particularly tech savvy, but I could sure search somebody's Twitter feed.
And I started doing that.
I started just picking off liberal candidates.
And, you know, in writings where I knew lunacy is rife.
So, you know, you would go and search the liberal candidates in some of the BC writings where you know they're radical green wackadoos and you know that supporting anti-pipeline protests when the liberals tell us on paper they support oil and gas and pipelines and stuff like that.
But they were running these candidates that didn't.
And it ultimately ended up, my research actually ended up getting a liberal candidate in Alberta nuked.
It was Michelle Rempel's liberal opposition in No's Hill.
Funny story, she had actually tweeted some pretty anti-Jewish stuff about our boss, Ezra Levant, like telling him to go back to Israel.
And it was like, I'm pretty, pretty sure he was born here, by the way.
And so were his parents.
So, you know, I just dug that up and I was just retweeting things and dumping it onto the like onto my Twitter feed.
This got picked up nationally.
She ended up having to be removed as a candidate.
And the Globe and Mail, I think, or McLean's, doesn't really matter.
It's all the same.
But the mainstream media were running these stories about me as a large C researcher, as in I worked for the party.
And that wasn't the case.
I was just a citizen activist doing their job, they being the mainstream media.
And even in reporting on the things that I had been doing, they were still getting the story wrong because they didn't even bother to reach out to me to say, you know, are you doing this because you work for the party?
Reached National Audiences00:03:23
Are you doing this just for funsies?
Which I was.
So, you know, I think our boss sort of saw that, what I was doing and a couple other people were doing.
And he reached out to me when he started Rebel News.
And at the time, my littlest one wasn't in school full-time.
So that wasn't the deal my family signed up for.
So I said, you know, I can't do it right now.
But when September rolled around and she did start school full-time, my excuse and delays to go back to having a normal job and not being a stay-at-home mom, that sort of ran out.
And then Ezra contacted me again and I didn't have a reason to say no.
And it's really, it's been a love affair since with the company.
And then Justin Trudeau gave you what you wanted, which was his, what would it be now?
Almost seven years of pure love and joy.
At least it's equal to Hila.
Remember that it's 2015 line was such a mainstream media hit.
It's 2015, you guys.
Yeah.
Now, fast forward another year to 2016, which is, of course, when Trump caused people to break their brains and spill it all over the sidewalk.
It was a crazy time here as just a viewer.
I want to get inside your head of how it was to work here.
You had all these crazy personalities, of course.
You had the Tommy Robinsons, the McInnes's, the Southerns, all these people, the Milos, all these people coming through.
Everybody's blowing up in terms of following, getting banned from everywhere.
What was it like to, you know, the company for it to explode so massively, so quickly, and everybody, including yourself, all of a sudden have this huge fan base internationally from UK to Australia to Canada to the US?
You know, it was weird.
I think we were in the right time at exactly the right place.
I like to think here at Rebel News, we're early adopters of good ideas.
And we just sat through an hour-long staff meeting this morning where we have these big plans and big dreams.
And, you know, like we get this idea and we just do it and we'll figure out the details afterwards.
And that seems to be working for us so far.
And that's what 2016 was kind of like.
We, you know, like we, it was the Brexit was happening and Trump was getting elected.
And it was just a strange time to be in conservative politics and in conservative news.
And in Canada, we were really the only ones at the time.
Now we have, you know, True North and Postmillennial popped up.
But I still think we do something completely unique and different because we couple our news and journalism with activism.
So we do something where we come to tell the story, but instead of just telling the story, which for me can feel kind of like we're exploiting the story, I'm proud that we do something different in that if we are able to offer help in a solution, we do that.
But we, again, going back to we were in the right time at the right place doing the right thing, fighting the right battles.
If you look at the United States, they're very saturated with conservative news outlets, big and small, right?
The largest cable news channel is a conservative one.
It's Fox News.
But here in Canada, it was just us.
Unique Canadian Journalism00:03:15
We were in a wasteland.
And because of that, because we had this unique Canadian perspective, but also we were so free speechy and we cared to fight the fights for free speech and tell the stories that the mainstream media were either scared to tell or didn't want the opposing narrative out there because we were willing to do those things.
We just sort of went huge.
It just blew up overnight.
We went from, you know, maybe a few tens of thousands of people who were interested in what we were having to say to, you know, approaching a million.
Did your life change at all in that time span?
Like I said, all these people, all these characters, yourself included, all of a sudden you've got 50,000 individual followers, a million people watching.
I remember there was a time where in my life, where every single rebel news video that came out, and I'm clearly wasn't alone in this, we were just like, what were they going to do next?
What was the next legitimately edgy thing that was going to happen?
Because, like you said, there was nobody else doing this stuff, especially not in Canada.
Did your life change?
Did you start getting more recognized on the streets?
What changed in your life?
Because there had to have been this huge influx of attention towards you, wasn't there?
There wasn't.
There wasn't.
I don't know.
I think I'm kind of in a unique position because of where I live and my lifestyle and things like that.
While I'm the forward face of my family, my husband's kind of private.
Every day, somebody at his work puts together the fact that we have the same last name and that we're married.
Like they're still discovering who he's married to.
And, you know, it's six and a little bit years later.
In Alberta, yeah, I do get recognized.
More often than not, it's at the grocery store, the farm supply store, naturally.
It's, I guess my life changed, but not really because I'm still, you know, a farmer.
I'm still a farmer's wife.
My husband is still in the oil patch.
I try to keep work and life separate.
But I guess maybe for some of the other talent who were doing these big international stories, and I've done some of them, for me, I always tried to use my platform, and I think I still do this to advocate for the normals of the world.
You know, in 2016, for example, Rachel Notley brought in this crazy bill called Bill 6, and it basically put bankers' hours on Alberta family farms.
And for me, I saw the mainstream media coverage of this as like, oh, yeah, you know, these poor exploited farm workers, the NDP are going to help them.
And I'm like, no, the poor exploited farm workers are literally my kids.
Back off.
And, you know, I felt like for some of the stories that I covered, because of where I am and how I live and the people who live in my family and the job that my husband has and the job that my dad had, I felt like I have been uniquely equipped to tell Alberta stories in a way that you're not going to get from people who are in a cubicle in Calgary or Toronto or Vancouver sometimes who are reporting on Alberta news.
Why We Should Vote Differently00:15:26
And so for me, that's sort of where my focus has been.
So those people, like farmers, rayhands, they'll notice me.
But like if I'm traveling in Toronto or whatever, nobody knows who I am.
And also I think it has a lot to do with how I look and how I dress.
I look like everybody else's soccer mom.
So, I mean, there's some benefit to being ordinary.
Chevy Astrovan getting a big plug with you, I think.
I want to parlay that to a Canadian story that's been high on your radar.
You've reported a lot of it along with our Alberta and BC reporters.
It's the burned churches.
And the reason I bring this up is because it gets so little coverage.
65 relatively unspoken of church vandalisms or burnings across the country.
What does the lack of coverage here, and this is me as a non-religious person saying this, what does the lack of coverage say about our media in this country?
Well, it says that they think the actual victims here are deserving of what's happening to them.
And it also speaks a lot to how I guess the secularism in the mainstream media, they really don't understand who uses these churches.
For example, Drea covered a Coptic church that was burned in the lower mainland.
And if anybody knows anything about Copts, they are some of the most persecuted people in Egypt.
Their churches are routinely burned during Holy Week.
So when you flee to Canada, you think that you're going to be safe from your churches being burned.
And yet they are because we have this spate of arsonist terrorism directed at Christian churches.
You know, when you have the prime minister saying things like, I don't agree with it, but I understand why it's happening.
And the mainstream media completely reporting that uncritically, like, no, you should have just stopped everything you said before, but was the right thing to say.
You know, you're putting blame on the innocent people who use these churches.
Adam Sos, right now, I think literally as we're filming this, he's out at a church on Siksica land.
So that's, no, sorry, not Siksica, Tsutsina, wrong reserve, just outside of Calgary.
He's helping put a roof back on the church.
So while the mainstream media is sort of cheering on or doing their best to understand the motives of the arsonists, much the way, you know, like we need to find out the root causes of terrorism.
That's another famous thing Justin Trudeau said.
We're actually doing something to help these communities that are so often indigenous communities.
And I think that's where the real disconnect is.
The mainstream media sees religion as this colonial thing that is oppressing Indigenous people when these are Indigenous people of faith and their churches are being burned down.
And that's, I think, the difference between what we do and what the mainstream media does, where we're actually going to talk to the people who use the churches instead of going to talk to the paid person who rings the alarm bell of colonialism every time they need somebody to do that on the CBC or on global news.
Yeah, I think it does Native people extreme disservice in the way this stuff is reported on and the way their whole history is presented in conjunction with, you know, subtler colonization history.
It almost cheapens the society that was created through colonization and through working with Native tribes.
You can even go as far as to talk about residential schools if you want.
There's never any two sides given to that story.
It's always sort of told through this, you know, it's almost silly to say, but it's literally through this communist purview where everything is just we've come here to destroy this land, to take everything from it, when that couldn't be further from the case.
And it also presents a side of innocence on the side of people who are here already.
And that's not the case.
There's two sides to both stories.
And I don't think it's presented properly.
I don't think there's a differentiation between different colonists and different tribes who act in completely different ways, different subtler groups, different Native groups who may have been at war with one another or who may have worked with settlers.
So it's all this literal white socialist communist whitewashing of it, where everything's just black and white and it's oppressors and the oppressed.
And that's the theme I think we see in pretty much every story that's told from that point of view.
Just my opinion there.
The next thing I want to talk to you about is something we get a lot of questions in myself personally because we do cover the alternate parties.
I'll call them just because they poll or get a lot less votes at Rebel News.
We cover them.
The Mavericks, forgive me, the Wild Rose.
I'm not sure how much coverage they're getting.
The PPC, of course, and even the Green Party, if they want to talk to us, we'll talk to them, even if they are a literal globalist party.
What's your opinion on this?
You have a lot of influence in your province.
Do people come to you with this idea of why are you splitting the vote by covering this?
Or why are you splitting the vote by criticizing Aaron O'Toole?
What's your response to that sort of point of view?
Well, the first thing I would say is: look, I don't work for your preferred politician of choice.
I work for the people.
And I'm not cheering for any particular politician.
I'm cheering for the people.
In this case, the people of Alberta.
So for people who say, well, if you're critical of Aaron O'Toole, you must support the PPC.
Or if you are critical of federalism, then you must support the Mavericks.
And why can't I say, actually, I'm in support of good ideas.
And for me, somebody who has, you know, built a life out of mostly nothing, and I think the best way for me to do that is through conservative principles.
That's where, that's where I am with regard to my politics and that sort of stuff.
But yeah, we get a lot of people who say, well, if you support the PPC, you're splitting the vote.
When you drive people to the PPC, you're splitting the vote.
It's really interesting to watch the, and this is one of the things that I brought up during the leaders' debate last time.
It was my question to everybody that, you know, Andrew Scheer oversaw the splitting and eruption of the party into the two sort of factions of PPC and the conservatives.
And my question to the leader, prospective leadership candidates at the time was: what are you going to do to fix that?
Because when you talk to PPS, they haven't changed.
They still hold those fundamental, fundamental, conservative principles that they held when they were the conservative base.
These people were part of the conservative base, reliable donors, door knockers, activists, but they've been driven out of the party.
And for me, I said to them, What are you going to do to bring them back?
Because we know that Andrew Scheer hired a literal liberal mercenary to malign these people in the mainstream media, paint them as extremists, paint them as white supremacists, when just a few short months earlier, they were within the party getting phone calls saying, Give us money, reliable conservative donor.
And that was fine back then, but because they left the party, they were treated like garbage.
And I still see it.
So if there is a conservative vote split, that is squarely on the Conservative Party itself because they've had a lot of time to fix this problem.
But instead of being, for lack of a better term, ecumenical with them, to reach out across the table to say, you know what, I'm not Andrew Scheer.
Things are going to be different.
You see conservative partisans still treating the PP Sears and the Mavericks and anybody else like a pile of garbage.
And it shouldn't be that way because you can't berate these people, lie about them, paint them as extremists, and then hold them accountable for your loss because they didn't vote for you.
And that's what I see happening.
Yeah, my opinion on that is for people to vote for what they actually believe in, not to vote somebody else, vote against somebody else, which I know is hard for people to conceptualize when they're so displeased with a Joe Biden or a Justin Trudeau or whomever it may be in your part of the world or region.
But I think it's best to vote based on your conscience and what you believe in.
And then hopefully those ideas take a foothold and they grow and they grow and they grow.
And that's just my opinion.
Vote in.
Sorry, I'll just, I just want to, I just want to, I just want to add to that because I think I have a unique perspective with that because I'm in Alberta.
So for us, it's far easier to vote for your conscience because basically the election is over by the time the 905 votes are counted.
So we can go completely blue, conservative, like we did last time.
And it didn't matter.
We were just this big blue chunk of the country out here being treated like a colony of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.
And so when you realize that you, you know, like it doesn't matter, everything's decided for you before the 905 is counted, then vote for who you feel like.
Vote for the people who earned your vote.
Because at least, you know what, if you're going to be governed by your colonial overlords, at least come by it honestly.
You know, go down swinging.
There's still time for you to vote Block Quebec Quash, Sheila.
I'm very sympathetic to them these days.
Oh, my father will be proud of you.
What I want to ask you is: what do we do with our government moving forward through the whole lockdown, what era, I'll call it?
We've seen, you know, politicians ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ignore freedom of speech, ignore freedom of movement.
Judges, as we've seen in some cases without being particular, just say, no, we don't want to hear that.
Much like what's happened in the election, for example, in the U.S., we don't even want to see anything.
We don't want to hear anything.
It all gets thrown out.
Is there a way or a change that we can make moving forward that gets rid of what appears to be bias at the highest level, political bias?
Is there anything we can do to make the country system better?
Do you have any ideas or thoughts on that?
Do you know for me, this starts a lot closer to home if we're worried about charter rights?
I think, if anything, that conservatives should learn over the past two years, but maybe four years, if we look at the culture war, it's that we need, we have the greatest stability, especially as, again, I look at this through an Alberta lens because we're controlled by our colonial overlords in Laurentia.
If we really want to make change, I think it starts a lot closer to home.
If we are worried about our children being brainwashed to be future liberal NDP voters, whatever, then why aren't we involved in the school board?
Why aren't we making sure that conservatives are on the school board, people who believe in parental autonomy?
I think these battles start a lot sooner.
And I realize that, you know, it's going to be a long time to undo what's currently happening, but we have to start somewhere.
And the quickest way to make change is closer to home.
For example, all the mask mandates in Alberta right now, because the provincial government removed everything July 1st.
We've been living free here.
But now the municipalities are bringing them back in.
Edmonton is considering Edmonton has done it.
Calgary is considering it.
The municipality that I live in, they are bringing it back.
It's such an emergency.
They're bringing it in on September 10th, you see.
And so, you know, those are politicians that you can easily oust.
And they're the ones that you have the closest contact with.
I think for me, the best way to change what we've all lived through is that we cannot have walked off the field of municipal politics.
And we know that municipal politics is sort of this breeding ground of people who just have aspirations of greater power.
You start off on city council and then you end up as an MLA or MPP, and then eventually you end up in federal politics.
That's it's the farm team route, right?
So, you know, you have to fix the farm team before they get to be an MP and have vast control over your life.
For me, I think that's the one wake-up call that conservatives should have: we walked off the field of municipal politics a long time ago, and we've seen the tyranny of municipal politics over the last bit of the pandemic.
So we have to get involved and we have to make change.
And I know here in Alberta, October 2nd, no, yes, October 2nd, I think, is our municipal elections.
And so I think it's time to hold some of the locker downers on municipal councils responsible for the things they've done to people and the civil liberties they've harmed over the last 18 months, two years.
A lot of that advice can be used for the Edmonton Oilers as well, Sheila.
Get your minor leagues and your front office in line.
Last question I want to ask you before we run out of time is about your haters, haters, hate us.
We can call it that.
You hate as a person reads.
You know, I'm relatively new here.
My hatred is still just blind nothingness.
It's the what I get is just you're fascist or something like that.
It's never content-based.
Is there anything that keeps popping up from your haters that amuses you?
That maybe they have a point?
Anything that's consistent across the type of criticisms that you get?
Or is it just all funny?
Well, it is all funny, but I think a lot of the criticism I get is very classist.
You know, what does somebody like me have to say about anything, right?
Like somebody like me who has a stay-at-home mom, farmer, wife of a righand, where at least he's in the oil patch, you know, someone who drives a pickup, you know, has dirty fingernails.
A lot of it is classist.
Like, what would I have to say about what people who are poor need to no longer be poor?
Or what would I have to say about, you know, how it is for women's rights because I'm not some fancy person with a degree in feminist literature?
I think that's a lot of it, but I think that's the real problem with how the rest of the country also looks at Alberta.
Conservative Politicians Pulling Back?00:02:51
It's like, look at those hillbillies with their money.
How dare you defeat people and give them energy, Sheila going to the point of view.
Yeah, why do those people have any political power?
Two generations ago, they were dirt poor.
And so, you know, you get a lot of that classist looking down their nose.
For me, I get a lot of that.
But I also enjoy how I irritate my haters.
I very rarely block them, but I do mute them because I think it's important for them to see what I'm saying and scream into the ether while I pretend like they're dead to me.
That I enjoy, and I hope they know that.
This is where we show the footage, stock footage, of your daughter throwing rocks as if she's your slave or something.
We know she hates that.
Really quick before we go, Sheila, are you ever going to run for public office?
I know everyone always wants to know that.
Never, never.
I know that there's some pressure even internally for me to do something like that.
But yeah, well, from you, from David, from higher up the supply chain.
But I think it's really important work that we do here at Rebel News to work from without the like from without the system, outside the system, to hold our not just liberal politicians, but our conservative politicians to account.
Doug Ford's a great example of this.
So all the forces are pulling our conservative politicians to the left.