Juno News - Sheila Gunn Reid on Defamation vs. Name-Calling

00:00:00.000 Hi, everyone. Lindsay Shepard here, investigative journalism fellow with True North. And today,

00:00:10.520 my guest is Sheila Gunn-Reed. Sheila is a rebel media commentator. And last week,

00:00:17.280 a little over a week ago, she sent out a tweet that went completely viral. Right now, it has

00:00:22.680 over 27,000 likes, over eight and a half thousand retweets. And I'm going to read out what her tweet

00:00:30.840 says. Dave called me a neo-Nazi on Twitter. That tweet cost Dave $1,200 in damages to me. Plus his

00:00:39.840 pinned apology tweet. Plus his own legal fees. He wanted our agreement to be confidential. It is

00:00:45.900 not. Don't be a Dave. Here we have the apology that David Barrett, his Twitter handle is at DBNYYC.

00:00:55.220 His apology is there. What happened here? In what context did Dave call you a neo-Nazi? And what

00:01:02.940 happened here? It wasn't even anything related to even social commentary. I had had the folks from

00:01:13.240 Save Calgary on my show. So Save Calgary is like a taxpayer accountability group in municipal politics

00:01:21.940 in Calgary. And we were talking about, you know, quit wasting municipal tax dollars, Mayor Nenshi. And

00:01:28.060 they were talking about their appearance on my show. And he chimed in saying, I can't believe or

00:01:33.940 something to the effect of, you know, how can you go on a neo-Nazi's show? And it's pretty clear.

00:01:40.700 I'm not a neo-Nazi. I'm the opposite of a neo-Nazi. I'm a philo-Semite. I'm a Zionist. I've led two 0.56

00:01:48.380 missions to Israel. I work for Jewish owned and operated company. I am highly critical of movements 1.00

00:01:58.660 like BDS. I'm critical of the NDP for adopting things like BDS measures as part of their party

00:02:05.460 platform. Part of my beat is like anti-Semitism on campus. I just literally, before I got on Skype

00:02:14.100 with you, finished an interview with a Jewish activist in Winnipeg. I'm not a neo-Nazi. And

00:02:22.180 I've even actually done a video from just outside of Auschwitz. I went there on my own accord. I was in 0.82

00:02:28.220 Poland actually attending the UN Climate Change Conference last year. And my videographer and I

00:02:33.520 thought, you know, we're like an hour's train ride from Auschwitz. We may never have this opportunity

00:02:38.520 again in our lifetime. Let's go. And we did that. And after, I did a video because I was so struck

00:02:45.120 with, you know, the evil is still sort of thick in the air in Auschwitz. It just lingers there.

00:02:52.280 And the sorrow and the grief that's still sort of in the atmosphere there. And I was struck with

00:02:59.380 how flippantly we, especially in the Western world, and we, I mean, as society as a whole,

00:03:05.040 not you and I, abuse the word Nazi to mean strictly just something that, you know, the political left

00:03:13.360 disagrees with. They use it really interchangeably with conservative or right wing. And I think that

00:03:20.920 normalizes neo-Nazis, it actually helps Nazis because it sort of makes them mainstream. It

00:03:26.560 means conservative now in the parlance of the left. And that only helps them. That, you know,

00:03:32.100 when we, we, again, as society throw around that word in, in political debate, when it really should

00:03:41.280 be reserved for Nazis, the worst of the worst, one of the most evil things to ever walk the face of 0.90

00:03:50.520 the earth. And when Dave called me that, I thought, you know what, it's time to put a marker down. It's 0.50

00:03:56.460 not an opinion that I'm a neo-Nazi. To describe me as a neo-Nazi is a very specific thing. If someone

00:04:03.180 wants to call me a bigot, it's not true, but that's an opinion. If they want to call me mean or

00:04:08.580 hateful, again, it's not true, but that's a personal opinion. When you're calling me a neo-Nazi,

00:04:13.520 that's pretty well defined. And I'm definitely not that. There's no evidence that I'm that.

00:04:19.760 I go out of my way to be specifically the opposite of that. And I thought, you know what, we have

00:04:26.800 the means. By means, I mean access to lawyers who can do these sorts of things for us at Rebel News.

00:04:33.780 And I thought, you know what, maybe we need to put a marker down and teach the Daves of the world

00:04:39.560 that you just can't go around calling people you disagree with the most evil thing on the face of

00:04:45.200 the earth. Yeah. So something I was wondering is, is this Dave guy notable in any way or he's just

00:04:52.340 like some average guy? He's an academic at the University of Calgary. I forget what he does.

00:05:00.300 I think he works in aquatics. I didn't even know that they had such a thing at the University of

00:05:05.800 Calgary, but that's him. He's also, you know, on his community board or something like that.

00:05:12.480 You know, he's not particularly high profile, but I think maybe this could be a lesson for those

00:05:18.960 high profile people who throw it around. Because when they do slander and libel somebody like that,

00:05:28.580 the damages are far greater than when it's done by somebody like Dave.

00:05:32.980 Right. And I think your point about the word neo-Nazi being a very specific marker is important

00:05:39.480 because you're right. Like bigoted could just be an opinion, but neo-Nazi really means something.

00:05:44.560 We need it to mean something. We can't take away from that word. So a lot of the detractors in the

00:05:50.420 comments, though, they were saying things like, oh, but don't you believe in free speech, Sheila?

00:05:54.900 So, you know, you're you're stifling this guy's speech. So these people apparently think that if

00:06:00.540 you believe in free speech, you should be open to being defamed. So what do you think about that?

00:06:06.860 Yeah. I mean, there's a difference between free speech and libel and the law is pretty clear.

00:06:11.220 I would compare this to me calling somebody a pedophile on the Internet, apropos of nothing,

00:06:18.540 just because I disagree with them. That's also one of the worst things on the face of the earth.

00:06:24.880 You can't do that. That's a very specific. I mean, it's a very specific thing to call somebody a

00:06:31.140 pedophile. And if you're doing that without proof, just because you disagree with them politically,

00:06:36.820 that is defamation. That is libel and you can't do it. And you shouldn't do it. I mean,

00:06:43.020 but that's where we're at. Like that we've people are conflating free speech with accusing somebody of

00:06:51.600 being something that they're not. And like you and I have both pointed out very specific things that

00:06:57.800 involve actions and affiliations. Yeah. So something I get called all the time is

00:07:03.020 white nationalist. And I have had to take action against the National Observer. I just sent them

00:07:08.920 an email saying, you guys, you can't call me a notorious white supremacist. You got to take that

00:07:13.800 out. And they did. But I have pointed out on my Twitter before that, hey, guys, you can't just call

00:07:21.220 me a white nationalist. And then this professor named Jeffrey Sachs out at Acadia University, he

00:07:26.540 he was trying to make the argument that it's okay to say that. And so I actually did say it with

00:07:32.260 Jeffrey, how would you like being called a pedophile? And then a whole bunch of people started calling

00:07:36.780 him pedophile. Right. And to make a point about defamation and how this is not true, there's no

00:07:41.560 proof. And then he was, you know, complaining about being piled on and all that.

00:07:47.600 Every time, right? Every time they'll spend two days calling you a mean name. And then when you sort

00:07:52.500 of punch back, they're like, oh, she's baiting me into being angry or something like that. I mean,

00:07:57.040 it's really ridiculous that the victim switch turns so fast. Yeah. And does this happen to you

00:08:02.660 often being name called and libeled online? Name called for sure. And people like to libel

00:08:11.000 anonymously. I mean, I've had a lot of people responding to my tweet about Dave by saying, well,

00:08:18.320 I do think you're a Nazi, but it's always somebody who is anonymous, or in the United States, so I 0.93

00:08:25.660 can't get to them. But that being said, I think even the fact that people are doing this anonymously

00:08:32.740 means that I've given them pause to not use their real names, because nobody cares if an anonymous

00:08:39.360 defamer calls them a Nazi, or at least maybe I don't. But if you put your name to it, we're going to

00:08:45.980 have a problem. And, you know, calling me names, that's fine. Welcome to being a conservative

00:08:52.060 woman on the internet. I've got pretty thick skin. This isn't about being called names. They can call

00:08:59.880 me the C word, the B word, whatever, who cares? It's about defamation. And that's a very different

00:09:07.440 thing. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for telling your story, Sheila, and making these very important

00:09:13.600 points. And we'll see you again in the future. Great. Thanks, Lindsay.

Juno News - December 09, 2019

Sheila Gunn Reid on Defamation vs. Name-Calling

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