Part One: Romana Didulo: Queen of Canada

Robert sits down with Prop (Jason Petty) to discuss the QAnon Queen of Canada, Romana Didulo.

(3 Part Series)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
brought to you by no major streaming networks. That's not
a thing that we're doing. Ignore whatever it is, Sophie
says after me.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
That was so fucked up?

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Was up? That was so fucked up.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I can't even tell you, guys, so many meetings that
I've been in. I can't even tell you. I was
like up at five in the morning clipping together something
for I work so hard, and Robert's like, mind you.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
You work so hard.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
We're trash anyway, work hard for our network that has
nothing to do with a major streaming service anyway.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Try so hard and come so far.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Wow, Wow, I'm really glad props here for this anyways,
Just just wanted to give a little PSA at the
top that if you're an audio listener, not a single
thing has changed for you, my friends, you can still
listen to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. iHeartRadio,
app podcast blah blah blah blah blah. And there's a
PSA at the end if you're forgetting what I'm saying

(01:07):
up top. Also full video episodes of Behind the basswards
and now streaming on Netflix, Dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.
So hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss
an episode.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, and look, I know what you're all saying. Netflix
only had one demand, which was that we stopped making
actionable threats against it. Yeah so, and you know, I
feel like that's a fair compromise.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, so, hit remind me of Netflix you don't miss
an episode, and then for clips in older episode catalog,
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Respect, that's that's that's what's up.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yep, look, mama mon Netflix, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
I'll say, well, let's stop talking about streaming and start
talking about something important, which is our guest for this episode,
Jason aka Prop the best guy here. I'm so we're
back back baby, back in the New York mood. Not really.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
We got photos back from the live show we did
last year, and I was just looking at at it
and it's the three of us. I was like, damn,
I gotta frame this ship.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
We look like.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
It's like it's like our family photo album. I need it.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
I love you guys, listen.

Speaker 4 (02:18):
It is a blessing and honor to be here to
talk about some sort of piece of ship.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah. Yeah, man, you know what I'm saying. I'm talking about.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
I was just over here jamming some Barrington Levy calling
ice murderers.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
You know what I'm saying I have.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
I have shocking news to start this episode.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Oh that's that.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
The pastor of this episode is not a man.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
No, no, no, we're doing We got a lady bastard this,
We've got. Things are dark in the old United States
these days, so I figured we'd take a trip up
north to our our normal and mentally healthy neighbors where
nothing crazy ever happens. Obviously in Canada. And let's talk
about one of Canada's most notable bastards of the moment,

(03:05):
Queen Romana Didulo, the Queen of Canada, which does not
have a queen. Uh I did for a while.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Ka who.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, So she she is talking about. She's essentially a
Queanon influencer who's starting in like twenty twenty one, declared
herself the Queen of Canada and she's been declaring things
ever since, living in like an RV caravan with all
of her followers. It's good stuff.

Speaker 4 (03:34):
Oh my god, on behalf of everyone who's just nervous.
System is beat to crap. Man, Thank you, thank you
for giving me some fun.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
This absurd mystical creature, no gicide, no real body count.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
She's oh man, I need to do so much.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
She's you know, and Robert scripts it says she might
be an alien.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
Like I love it. She might be an alien, she
might be psychic. But she's definitely a cult leader, right,
thanks me. She's not a good one, which we don't
talk about enough. Oh god, dog listen man.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
I was here for the the Thomas Jefferson's I was
here for the Lost calls for the crack attack.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
I was here.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
Yeah, you know, fun's good. Yes, yeah, we have a
good Yeah. I feel like this is also, you know,
because Himler. If you're comparing if you're out there trying
to make your mark as a monster and you're comparing
yourself to someone like Himmler, you know, you're just kind
of wind up feeling inadequate. And I don't want any
of the cult leaders that listen to this podcast to

(04:42):
feel inadequate. You know, there's been a series of threads
going around on Reddit where people are pointing out that, like,
you know, how few people actually make over one hundred
thousand dollars to be like, hey, if you're making less
than that. You don't have to feel bad. And I
want to do the same thing to the cult leaders
out there. If you're a working class cult leader, you know,
really busting your to keep a dozen or so people,
you know, locked mentally in the chains of slavery to

(05:06):
your insane will, this is for you. You know, we cannout.
You can't all be all Ron Hubbard, can all have
a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
You know again, I appreciate you saying this. This is
like the the DEI affinity group of That's right, bastards.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
And trust I appreciate this.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
And you know what, it's just like, listen, man, all
of us don't start off you feel me, Like we
all don't start off with the privilege of being a
six foot white dude. You know what I'm saying with
the money endowment where you can just buy land, you
feel me. Jim Jones, you know what I mean, Like
some of us got to get it out the mud.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, you have to like get people okay with the
fact that, like, if all you can do is really
completely destroy the mental freedom and sovereignty of like ten people,
you know that's enough. You're valid as a could leader.
And that's what we're telling Romana. You know, I get
it all.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
So you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 (06:01):
If we talk about Canada, I mean they got stuff
like healthcare and like you know what I'm saying, so
they're kind of like they kind of really don't got
nothing to complain about, you know, So to get somebody
to fall into a cult in Canada, like I mean,
good for you.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
You feel like they have something to complain about.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
They've got played about largely the cult leader. The Coles
destroyed their lives.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
I was gonna say, I was gonna say, uh uh Drake, but.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
I was gonna say Tim Bets, but he's already.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah, car Kenny already took care of that.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
I'd also like to say that, like not that I
would ever, ever ever give a high five to any
sort of Western world leader, but Matt Carney just got
his bars off, like I'm gonna I'm gonna give our
Mark Corney.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
He was a good little Davos speech.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
Yeah, he got his bars OFFNA appreciate that. He was like,
can we just stop capping, y'all? Can we just stop pretending?

Speaker 1 (07:01):
And again that's part of why I support the Queen
of Canada, right, is that for too long Canada has
sat in the shadows as American cult leaders have gotten
all of the attention, you know, just because we're better
at cults than Canadians, you know, a lot better, like
way better. But that doesn't mean there aren't Canadian cult leaders.
And today we're going to talk about one right now.

(07:30):
As I noted, Americans are better at cults. And so
before we get to her Royal Highness, I want to
talk about a different cultic movement that people generally say
helped prepare the ground for Romana's cult. And this is
an American cultic movement, The I AM Activity. And it's
always spelled I AM in all caps and quotations in

(07:50):
an activity with a capital A. That's the name of
the movement. And it's like a Christian faith movement from
the United States. Kind of that turned it like a
self help cult got cropped up.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
You got to say the whole thing like a pim
named slick back, the I am the I.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Am exactly the im activity. Yes, you have to say,
can't abbreviate it. People will know what you're talking about.
So cropped up during the peak of the Great Depression
at the start of the thirties, which is, you know,
a good time to be starting a cult. A lot
of our New Age movements have some to some extent
their origins and the Great Depression, and the I AM

(08:30):
movement has its roots in the city of Mount Shasta,
which is the least surprising thing on earth. You've ever
been to Mount Shasta?

Speaker 3 (08:38):
The Californians in the chat Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, you know they're already in cults.

Speaker 4 (08:43):
You already know liked you, you feel, you feel the
cult vibration as soon as you leave the Bay Area.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Like you live in Mount Shasta, you've already been told
to cut ties with your friends and family and hand
all of your money to a carra.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Over They guy Rica, brother.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
It's a lovely town. But Mount Shasta is a big
volcano situated in northern California, not that far from the
border of Oregon. It's very pretty, it looks kind of
like a lady h and the town there has a
reputation for being a hub of the New Age movement
and various cultic groups like today, if you go there today,
there's a lot of wou shit in Mount Shasta. And

(09:24):
this has been the case for a long time. Shasta
kind of helped lot of birth to the New Age movement.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
A mountain looks like a lady, yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
It was a new one kind of Yeah, yeah, the
mountain yet it kind of has like the silhouette of
a lady, so the native said, And it does. If
you look at it during the sunset, it looks like
it you can see your face.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
Oh, I gotta know, she's a pretty mountain.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Sie.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Shasta would just like white women with dreadlocks.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
Well, yeah, there's there's them there too, but they didn't
start being there. So it has a reputation for being
a hub of the Age movement. There's also persistent rumors
that aliens live inside the mountain, right, yes, yes, And
I can confirm that there are mushroom aliens living inside
Mount Shasta via four independent interviews that I conducted with

(10:13):
guys I got stoned with at growhouses in the area.
So you know, that's that's as solid evidence as you're
going to get that there are in fact aliens living
in Mount Shasta.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Anyway, that's a triple source confirmation.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Exactly exactly. Any newspaper would print that. Yeah. Anyhow, the
root of the proud tradition of kookiness in Mount Shasta
starts with a local man named Guy Ballard, who, while
hiking on Mount Shasta, received a vision from Saint Germain. Now,
when I heard that, I was like, Oh, this guy's
probably Catholic. Some Saint visited him, right, that makes sense.

(10:46):
You know, Catholics are always talking about the Saints visiting them.
That's not what Saint Germain is. If you look up
Saint Germain online, you come across two different things. One
is a kind of elderflower liqueur that you've probably seen
in bars. It's got a pretty distinctive looking bottle, okay,
and it I think it's named after a long dead
confidence man who was not at all a saint, who

(11:08):
described himself as a count, and who made a bunch
of famous friends, including Voltaire, and told them stories about
being five hundred years old and all knowing.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Right.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Oh yeah, this was a guy a few hundred years
ago who just kind of he got famous for going
to parties and lying about himself, right, which was easy
to do back then. Yeah, you know you was gonna check.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
We're gonna check if you won't five hundred.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Like, yeah, exactly, as long as you're as long as
you're in a different city than you're from. No one's
figuring this shit out.

Speaker 4 (11:40):
There's there's a little bit of like I kind of
like like gaze back longingly over those days because I
just feel like, like if you think about like the
whole plot of like the born Identity, it's just with
facial recognition, you just don't have a movie like this
guy got all kind of like passports to say where
he's from. It like excuse me, sir, can you step

(12:02):
over here please? Like there's just you can't have a
fake ID, you know what I'm saying. So the idea
of saying, because the Internet exists, that I could be like, oh, yeah, no,
we're actually royalty. I'm from Ethiopia, Royalty. Like there's no
way for you to check. Like now it's like, sir,
you were born in Inglewood.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah yeah. And Guy Ballard is yeah one of these
he sees this Saint Jermaine fella, and I don't know
exactly they had to categorize Saint Jermaine. I think we
have to file him under the category of like con
artists whose cons have been lost to obscurity because he's
he's hanging out only around rich people, and he's lying

(12:43):
to them incessantly. But I don't know, like entirely what
the grift was, right, Like, what was he what was
he getting out of this? Was it just that he
got invited to parties and he got to stay at
rich people's fancy mansions. It may have been that, right, Yeah,
And he was He was a charming guy by all accounts,
and multi talented. He was good at music and stuff,

(13:03):
so he was fun. You didn't have TV back then,
so a lot of prominent people. If you're just interesting,
you could get invited to rich people parties and make
an okay life for yourself because there was nothing going
on and all of the other rich people are pretty boring.
He published a bunch of sheet music in his time,
and he wrote two books of magic. One was shaped
like a triangle and detailed a ritual that would provide

(13:24):
the practitioner with unnatural wealth and long life, just as
the Count was said to possess. And his books became
influential among the occult and as a result, when the
Theosophists came around in the late eighteen hundreds, Helena Blovotski
declared Saint Germain to have been the most powerful wizard
of his kind in several centuries, and that his astral
form had visited her and bestowed secret wisdom on her. Right,

(13:45):
this is amazing. There was kind of when we get
in the end of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds,
that big occult wave that kind of does in a
lot of ways leading to like the Nazis and stuff.
Saint Germain is just from a previous era are a
couple hundred years earlier. He's one of them those famous
guys who was like into magic and everyone just wrote
about him. So she says, oh, he visited me and

(14:05):
he taught me his secret powers, you know.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
And so he visited.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Right exactly forty years like forty years after he visits Olovotsky.
And so, okay, I bring all this up because Guy
Ballard didn't just invent Oh, Saint Germain, that's an interesting
figure from the past who said taught me something. He's
ripping off Blovatsky, right, got it, Like she was the
first one doing this. And so Guy is like, well,
I'm looking to make a name for myself. I want
people to see me as a as a cultic leader.

(14:33):
I guess I got to have Saint Germain back me
up too, right, okay, And so Guy Ballard takes this this,
you know, and he says, basically, Saint Germain told me
his secrets to long life and you know, mental powers,
and I'm going to teach him to you. That's the
that's the basis of the I Am Activity, right, which
is this mystic educational movement based on Saint Germain's supposed

(14:54):
teachings right up on the website the I Am Activity
always all captain in quoation marks I Am. Don't you
ever say it differently?

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Listen like a tribe call quest.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Got to say it exactly exactly yes, so write up
on the website New Religious Movements dot org. The core
teachings of the IAM Activity center around the presence of
the I Am or God presence within each individual, a
divine spark that connects everyone to the Creator. Through specific
practices such as decree, spoken invocations, and affirmations, followers aim
to realize their divine nature, achieves self purification, and ultimately

(15:28):
ascend the higher spiritual realms, emulating the ascended masters. The
Ballad's teachings also incorporated elements of American patriotism and nationalism.
Clearly the United States had a unique role in the
world's spiritual destiny.

Speaker 5 (15:41):
Bro.

Speaker 4 (15:41):
This is so there's so many like like uh, seasonings
of like Pentecostal Christian in that like you're declaring the
I am that I am, and you get to speak
speak the power of existence.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
Bro, Like let me tell you something, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
I could already see where that hot does got how
did Christian?

Speaker 1 (16:01):
And that's it's worth it. As you pointed out, the
I am and I am activity is a reference to
the Bibles and to God. I am that God said
to Moses. Yeah, what God said to Moses? Right, And
and that's what you know, it's possible. We don't know.
Romana is going to say a lot of stuff that
references aspects of the I AM activity. I don't know
if she's aware of the original cult or if it's

(16:23):
just because the I am activity kind of becomes part
of foundational American cultic lore, and as is always the
case with the stuff, pieces of it wind up picked
up by generations of later cultames and thrown in not
just cults, but thrown into different aspects of like New
Age thinking. So think pieces of Ballard's work kind of
wind up in self help books and stuff for decades

(16:44):
to come, which may just be the extent of like
where how she picks up on little elements of this
right now the I AM activities. You may have guessed
with the fact that most of you probably hadn't heard
of this this night before. It was not a huge hit.
It's just it's best it was not. It was like middling.
I'll say that it's great. Claim to fame was a

(17:04):
Supreme Court case US v. Ballard over whether or not
it was fraud for leaders of a supposedly religious movement
to collect donations based on religious claims they did not
themselves believe, and the case was launched after Ballard's death.
People sued and argued that like his wife and son
who'd helped with the cult, didn't really believe in anything,
and thus we're committing fraud when they took it more

(17:24):
than three million dollars worth of donations. The Supreme Court
ultimately decided the question itself is inappropriate for a court
to ask, right, we can't even rule on this because
us the idea that a court would have anything to
say about whether or not someone legitimately believes in a
religion they espouse is inappropriate basically like we shouldn't even
we shouldn't even be here, you know yah, which is

(17:45):
I'm so mixed about it because both, if they had
ruled yeah, that's fraud, maybe a lot would be better,
But also it really isn't a court's place to say,
I think that guy doesn't believe what he says he believes.
That's not really weird, like a religion, you know, crime, Like.

Speaker 4 (18:01):
That's interesting, and and like how could a court call
that like to be like it's, yeah, that was super interesting.
It's like I don't know about your faith, buddy. You
know what I'm saying. You said you believe you believe it, Like.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Because it's it's one of those things. I can imagine
a million problems we could have avoided if they ruled differently,
but also a million new problems that we would have
told we were Like, now the court gets to decide
if you really believe in whatever you.

Speaker 4 (18:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what's one of the problem Which one
of these cans of worms do we want to open?
You know what I'm saying, like, yeah, because because you
like you know, even fast forward to you know again,
American Pentecostalism, Like, how many of you would have been like, hey, bro,
you you really don't believe you could heal that person,

(18:47):
do you?

Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (18:48):
You mak it.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
But what you pulled out of them, that's chicken gizzard.
You don't think that's really.

Speaker 4 (18:53):
That That is not real, sir, Yes, And he's like,
it would be your project.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
I feel like there is a line where it's like, yeah,
if you're like pulling chicken gizzard out of people pretending
it's cancer, you're probably committing fraud. That's right. Cross it
a line. But if you're just asking do you really
believe that people can chant themselves in immortality doing this
or whatever? Like, yeah, I guess I can kind of
respect the Supreme Court being like, this isn't even our place,

(19:22):
Like this isn't even an appropriate thing for there to
be a court case of att It's really mixed. But
I can see the logic, you know. So the movement
limped along, the IAM movement. They won this case, and
they limp along until Ballard's wife dies in the early
nineteen seventies, at which point leadership passed to a board
of directors. The group is still kind of existent today,

(19:45):
the I am, but like they've got like a newsletter.
They publishers of shit. But it's not like a thing anymore,
not really. As I said, it's relevant to us because
pieces of it have been passed down in New age
and cultic and a cult explore ever since in the
United States and to a lesser extent in Canada. And
the IAM movement is relevant primarily to us today because

(20:08):
Ramona Didulo would later ape a lot of its core language,
knowingly or unknowingly. And so let's turn to her. Now, Okay,
the purported Queen of Canada was born in the Philippines,
and given her age, would have had to be born
probably sometime in the nineteen seventies. We get very little
detail from her early life that can be confirmed to
any degree, and she doesn't seem to have made a

(20:30):
ton of claims about her childhood and life before coming
to Canada. Most of the stories we do have concern
her grandmother, who is a sort of error figure within
the cult that she's created, and Ramana says that her grandmother,
a first grade teacher, raised her to speak five languages fluidly.
Researcher Christine Sarteeshi of Chatham University is almost certainly Didulo's

(20:51):
number one biographical expert, and she writes of the Queen's
further claims that same grandmother mounted a strategic defense and
offense and successful blocked the Chinese from invading their regional
stronghold during World War Two. This claim couldnot possibly be
true since during World War Two, Japan, not China occupied the.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
Philippines because they wouldn't there.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
She's gonna say a lot about fighting the Chinese. This
is a family business to her. But again, they they have,
they got other shit going on in World War Two.
They're not in the Philippines.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Yeah, I'm a bit like almost equal parts satin and
excited that this is a keeni, that this is like
a Filipino woe.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Oh yeah yeah, I was like, oh, she's from a Philippines.

Speaker 4 (21:34):
Okay, So that adds a layer of like awesome and
again not for lawers here, yeah, new for newcomers. As
y'all can see my face. My stepmother's Filipino. So like,
I'm part of the culture. So there are things that
I could participate in that I can only participate in
because one of my moms were Filipino.

Speaker 1 (21:55):
Yeah, and she is did you Loo. She doesn't inphas
size that part of her heritage very much. She'll talk
a little bit about her grandmother, but she's not she's
not massively like she's more Canadian, I think than anything else.
Because she leaves she's very young, right, and it doesn't
seem like she has a ton of contact with her
her family over there, although that's kind of unclear to me.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, does she go to Toronto?

Speaker 1 (22:20):
No? No, Vancouver?

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Oh kill her if she.

Speaker 4 (22:23):
Goes to Van Yeah, I was like, cause those are
two very pretty big, like Filipino populations.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Yeah, and I don't anyway, she may have been closer
to her family there. We get very little about her
life before she comes on the scene as a cultier,
but she doesn't talk much about anything to do with
her like background, really like because she's very she has
a vested interest in not having you think about her
before she was the queen, right like that that's kind
of why so I just there's not a lot to

(22:48):
say about that account, right, Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Her father
was a lawyer and an engineer, but he dies when
she's ten. Her mom dies a year later, and so
she's raised by her grandmother for a couple of years,
but not long after her parents die. When she's fifteen,
she moves to Vancouver and she's raised by other relatives there.
It's kind of unclear, you know, how much of this

(23:09):
is her grandparents, so they move with her. I actually
just don't have that information. And that's really about all
we've got as refers to her early life. We don't
have any sort of real documentation about her outside of this.
Sarteeshi and a journalist from Vice, Max Lammereaux, are kind
of the two people who have really delved into her
background a lot. So I am, I haven't. There's a

(23:32):
couple of other things I found just from like shit
she's written online, but most of what you're going to
find about her is from those two. And there's just
not a lot that's known yet about what was she
doing the first like forty years of her life. Right,
You know, who doesn't have a public life because they
live only to serve you and to bring you joy.
It is known. Yeah, the products and services that support

(23:54):
this podcast, that's right.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
Glorious.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, yeah, and we're back. So when Ramana next appears
on the public record, she's a Canadian citizen and an entrepreneur.
She seems to have run a couple of different companies,
and I know Mac Lamora of Vice is someone he's

(24:18):
reported heavily on her, and he seems to think these
businesses that she had were some kind of con but
the specifics of maybe how she was trying to con
people are unclear. That's at least how I interpret something
that he said on the qan on Anonymous podcast. Mac,
if I got your meaning wrong, I apologize. That seems
credible to me, although again we don't really know what
she was doing with these businesses. We have very little

(24:39):
on them. Yeah, so Teshi right side, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Well hold on side.

Speaker 6 (24:43):
Note like.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
QAnon feels like a fever dream right now.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
It's still there, but yeah, I have passed it too.

Speaker 4 (24:52):
Yeah, I was like, wait, that happened at work? Yeah,
because our nature of work, we know it's still kind
of there. But I was just like brod Info's wet
to the They storm the capitol.

Speaker 1 (25:03):
They stormed the capitol. They won, a lot of them
got into positions of power, and they seem almost to
like I think a lot of the folks who have
gotten into power who started out being q pilled and
east and chunk of them have had to even pull
back somewhat because once you're in office, you can't like
there's not a lot that you can carry further from

(25:24):
a lot of the qan on shit, Right.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
That's a real job. Once you get to it's like,
this is actually a real job.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
I got like stuffed. I'm in a griftin too, but
like I can't. I can't keep talking about how all
of my colleagues that I work with every day have
secretly been executed. Like that doesn't make much sense with
this guy.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
Yeah, I do love I do love the idea of
a conspiracy theorist, you know, as pilled as that. And
then you get to finally, like the deputy director of
the I don't know, interior for agriculture, and you're like, oh,
it's just spreadsheets. Yeah, everybody here is just doing spreadsheets.

(26:03):
And now I'm one of them, and now what do
I what do I do?

Speaker 1 (26:08):
It's the sad thing when you really come to like,
growing up, I was a conspiracy theorist, not like in
a literal believer way, but as like a fandom. I
enjoyed the conspiracy phantom. Right, it's fun.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
One of my OG's.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
Ok, this is a diversion, but it's very funny. One
of my OG's told me a joke recently, and like
he called me, my man Jonathan, he called me, he said,
he I got a joke for you. He goes, Okay,
this conspiracy theorist dies and he goes to have it
and he's sitting down and he's talking to Jesus, and
Jesus says, hey, you know what, ask me anything, and
the guy goes, all right, JFK, what happened? And then

(26:46):
Jesus goes, dude, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, third story,
single shooter, right out the window. He got him three shots,
all from him, and the conspiracy theorist goes, man, So
this thing goes higher than I even thought. Think Jesus

(27:07):
is in on the conspiracy also anyway, Yeah, yeah, I
was looking at Sophie.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
I mean I've been saying that for years, because who
else would have had the power to drop someone like JFK,
you know, of course, but I so like, I mean,
obviously Bernie Sanders, but of course, of course you get
to like you get to this point where you study
the world enough to realize that, like, there are conspiracies,
but they're all as you said, they're mostly guys with spreadsheets.

(27:32):
Even the conspiracies are like, they're not usually fun. They're
like some guys hiding a bunch of financial crimes on
a spreadsheet, or like hiding the fact that they're bribing
people to put in place a law that increases their
bottom line by five and maybe that also kills a
few hundred thousand people, but they're doing it because it
makes them like eight percent wealthier, right, Yeah, and.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
It's only usually like four of them, yeah, like and
nobody doesn't really know the whole story except for maybe
two of them, dudes. But the idea that like, yeah,
seventy countries have agreed that we're gonna lie about the
shape of the earth, like seventy like you know what
I'm saying, for sixty years.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they couldn't again, like they couldn't keep
Like we're seeing the actual conspiracy now with like fucking
Alex Pretti's murder right where yeah, we all see the
video of this man who is completely unarmed and was
never violent, just getting executed by an ice agent and
then the government's like, no, he nearly killed him. He
nearly killed that. And my friend is a conspiracy. But

(28:34):
it's not like inner, it's not fun. It's just like,
oh yeah, it's just a brute force of evil just lying.
And that's like what conspiracy. It's never seven different kinds
of alien have gotten together to like hide the fact
that the world leaders are drinking the blood of children
in order to get high.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, literally say the exact same thing with Renee Good.
She was gonna just gonna run this man over literally.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
No Epstein right where it's like, yeah, there was a conspiracy,
but you guys looked the other way at this dude's
shady financial dealings because he provided them with fifteen year
old girls, right, like that, that's pretty conspiracy. There's no aliens, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
Pretty simple.

Speaker 4 (29:16):
It's not blood sacrifices, it's young women. It's, yes, exactly
the basic debauchery that we all know.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, and that's that's not very fun, which is why
people like Romana Dulo have juice. Right, It's why all
these conspiracy theory figures, why there's an appeal to them,
is that, like, anything's better than realizing how fucked up
the world is in such a banal way and how
small your power is to actually do anything as an

(29:44):
individual so you might as well believe that, like this
guy who you met living in a fucking squat is
actually secretly in touch with the alien masters of the
universe and is the secret King of America or whatever.
And if you just follow him on an RV, you know,
that's way more fun.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
So much fun.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
Getting back to Romana here, right. Christine Starteghi has charted
her earliest online presence, which seems to be an October
two thousand and six article in a business publication that
describes her as the president and CEO of Global Solutions Canada.
The company description makes it seem like a rinky dink
budget version of Sales Force. You know, it's a company

(30:27):
you have that provides you with hr resources for your
startup and their specific specialty was recruiting engineers and geologists
for the oil and gas industry. And again, maybe she
tried to make a real business and it just failed.
I am assuming there was an angle here, There was
some way in which this was fraudulent because of who

(30:47):
she is, right.

Speaker 4 (30:49):
Yeah, me and my buddies try to come up with
this like a sentence to describe, like what some sort
of company like that, Oh, Global Solutions LLC.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
What do we do?

Speaker 1 (30:58):
What we do Global Solutions lzie sounds real.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
Yeah, Well, what we do is we try to integrate
and synergize between two different operating systems to make sure
that we can streamline the the processes for the We
just we synergies, like just just putting together a bunch
of words.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
I'm glad you brought up synergy because during our first
meetings with Netflix, they told us how important synergy was
to them, and I said, guys, I love sinning. I'm
sinning right now. I got so much synergy. I've got
endless energy to sin. Never met sin out of me? Yeah,
for lea reasons, never it happens. So Global Solutions, Geology,

(31:44):
salesforce business whatever. That really was her subsequent venture. She
has a series of real estate corporations that are described
by Starteghi as shell corporations. And I have to assume
that's definitely some sort of of course, right, Startegi concludes,
did you lo also has two additional open businesses in
London and Wales. Uh. No, substantial activity with these corporations

(32:07):
is known. Success in the business world seems to have
eluded her. Right, She's not successful, She's not making money.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah, so what does your real estate company do? Oh well,
we we.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
Make sure stuff mostly the.

Speaker 4 (32:20):
Integration of you know, our our HR systems and our
you know, you know.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
Send me fifteen hundred bucks and you'll find.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Out things and I'll help you out.

Speaker 6 (32:29):
Man.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
We could set you guys up, you know.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
Yeah, are you guys getting a gang of emails that
are clearly written by AI about how you can synergize
your companies.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
I get a lot of oh yeah, I get a
lot of them from PR people being like, here's an
article for your website that we think your readers would love.
You can post it, and it's just like talking about
how cool the CEO of this company that's going to
fail in five months is. I love PR emails.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Oh man, They're so great.

Speaker 4 (32:57):
And then I'll get a follow up page just making
sure you saw our last email. And I'm like, I
saw it go into my spam fold.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, I thought, so, I can't judge you. I have
in my secondary email forty nine thousand done ready emails.

Speaker 4 (33:16):
So oh yes, like, you know, for the for the
listeners and observers, like the the bit about Robert is
he's actually a very good businessman. And it's it's pretty
funny to see you.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
Click Sophie businessman.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Yeah, wait, let me finish, Let me finish.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
Is when I see like the and the switch is
so quick because Sophie is like cutthroat, this will be
here for this what we're finna do right?

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Like this, what I need?

Speaker 4 (33:45):
This? The bag where my money? Talk to me with
my money ready, right, that's Sophie. And then but you
don't realize because you know Robert's being goofy, and all
of a sudden he clicks in and he says, well, actually,
I think that really if we set up and you're
just like whoa like so I just want to like
put that out there, like Robert got a switch he got.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
Did I get my MBA from Harvard?

Speaker 3 (34:06):
No?

Speaker 1 (34:07):
No, no, let me into Harvard? I had like a
two point eight GPA. What do you think they let
me in?

Speaker 5 (34:14):
Did you?

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Did you see my face when you started this? And
it's almost like wait, but Provert's a fantastic business partner
because he listens to me.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Yeah, I'm a fantastic business partner because I let Sophie
run things while I write about the Queen of Canada,
much much like Bill Gates. So from other interviews conducted
with people who saw her, and from other interviews conducted
with people who saw the queen in her home prior
to announcing that she was the queen, we can say

(34:42):
that Didulo did not live well. People have described her
his living in squalor and maybe having been something of
a hoarder. She was I don't know if she was
like poor poor, but she's like not, She's like lower
middle class at best in terms of like income level.
She seems to be struggling financially. Right, we don't have

(35:02):
a lot of context here, but this is people who
saw her house were like, she was not living well.
She had a room, it was crowded and not very cleaner,
and eyes like she's like, this is someone who's doing
about as well as you'd expect someone who's orphaned at
eleven and then has to immigrate to her new country
to be doing right. Like, She's not someone who's living
in a rarefied air. She's struggling, and she does not

(35:24):
seem to have a particular position of respect or to
be very well known by her neighbors. Right, and part
because very few of them have come forward, is she's
gotten more famous to even say negative things about her,
which to me kind of suggests maybe she just maybe
in this previous areas of her life, she was, if
not like a shut in, then just not someone who

(35:44):
was very much a part of the social life in
her community. Right, Maybe someone who was very isolated given
her proclivities, we can say, probably someone who spent way
too much time on the internet, watching YouTube videos and
reading articles about conspiracy theories. Right.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I feel like she was in her own head for
most of.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Her life, just like the vibey idiot. Yeah right, that's
the vibe. I kind of get vices. Mac Lamoreau has
noted that in one live stream, she's claimed to have
been homeless at one point and to have slept on
the floor of a friend's nail salon. I don't see
any real reason to doubt this. It seems pretty she
lies about a lot, but that's that's I've known friends

(36:23):
who've been in the same situation. You would they had
to sleep on a few floors, you know, for her,
as for millions of other people in similar situations, the
twenty twenty COVID nineteen pandemic offered a lifeline. That year,
she took the lockdown and the attendant explosion in conspiracy
culture and fringe political organizing as an impetus to start
her own political party, the Canada First Party of Canada

(36:46):
and that of Canada, because what it could be a
Canada First Party of I'm going to start the Canada
First Party of America. I guess politics should be entirely
geared towards what's best for Canada. First. Off of them
are nukes. You know, they're better suited to them. And
you know what, you guys can have Maine.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
It reminds me of we went to the R and
C and they had all those signs everywhere that said
make America great once again.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
You're like, didn't we already do it?

Speaker 3 (37:16):
You just added once?

Speaker 6 (37:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
No, the Canada First Party of cant And she's seeing
the Party of Canada.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
The Canada First Party of Canada, the Los Angeles Angels
of Anaheim.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Glorious, She's seeing all these. Number one, she's stuck inside, yes,
but everyone's stuck inside, and she's seeing traffic explode. Probably
just because of the things that she knows and brings up.
She is familiar with a bunch of weird little particularly
a lot of alien focused conspiracy worlds. She talks a

(37:49):
lot about like the hidden secret bases that the Army's
supposed to run, which we talked about in our UFO episodes.
This starts out in like New Mexico because people are
trying to hide the results of some like nuclear tests,
but it's turned into today there's people believe like the
Getty and Los Angeles has like a deep underground military
base where they're like taking adrenachrome out of children. She's

(38:11):
she's big into all that. She believes in med beds,
which is this, these extraterrestrial aliens have these beds that
will heal any sickness, and they're trying to give them
to us, but some group of evil elites is keeping
them away from us. Right, she leaves all of that stuff.

Speaker 4 (38:25):
Was I on this was I on the show for
the for the for the alien conspiracy ones when.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
You don't remember who our guests.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
Was, Yeah, I remember us doing it.

Speaker 4 (38:33):
And then and how like the CIA or the Yeah,
the government was like because it was like.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
The d i A or the military intelligence even that
was fucking around more than the CIA with this.

Speaker 3 (38:46):
And they kept feeding secrets the Whomeboy.

Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah, yes, yeah, now you're you're tapped into the conspiracy.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
Brother, you might be on it, bro, you might be
on the something.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, so great.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
Yeah, there's a few Sometimes it's like you all, like
the reality is if he wasn't such like a flaming
piece of vomit, like Trump is hilarious so far.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
Oh yeah, he's funny, man.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
But if he wasn't so evil, you'd be the funny
so evil.

Speaker 4 (39:16):
So for the government to be like you wait, you
think Area fifty one is aliens?

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah, let me tell you.

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Some more like that. Fun he's even more going on.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
Yeah, bro, you don't even know to have homeie.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
So that's a chunk of the conspiracy culture that she
seems to be most inundated in. And during twenty twenty,
she's watching traffic to all of the different people that
she watched all these videos. It's all going up, and
she's seeing, you know, she's watching the news. She's seeing
the protests and stuff all over the in the US.
But she's also seen like the anti lockdown protests in general.
It's hard not if you have and I think most

(39:51):
people who have cult leader Jews have a kind of
sixth sense for timing for the lick yep, and I
think for her, it's like, this is the time to
try something. People are uniquely vulnerable and I can maybe
get it and maybe change my shitty life if I guess,
if I can rally a following around me. So she
starts the Canada First Party of Canada. Know Your Meme

(40:12):
describes the party platform as generally opposed to progressive, socialist
and liberal ideologies, as well as what it describes as
the U wins and globalist plans to turn Canada into
a third world country. The website for the party seems
to have been created sometime during the early summer, and
by August it's telegram page had about seventeen thousand members,
which probably didn't translate to more than a few hundred

(40:34):
Canadians who would call themselves members of the party. But
first off, for someone who's living alone in like a
in hoarding and like a tiny room, suddenly got seventeen
thousand people on your telegram page saying they believe it,
that's got to be addicting, right, That's like.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
That's got to feel amazing.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
That's like giving someone with a congenital predisposition towards addictive
behavior their first hit a heroin where they're like, oh.

Speaker 4 (40:57):
No oh, no oh, changed, Yeah, this is what I've
been waiting.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, yeah, I've been looking for a drug to destroy
my life. Thank god, my lord.

Speaker 3 (41:08):
You know it's also interesting too, like.

Speaker 4 (41:12):
And it's like, this is the part about like con
artists and hustlers that I still like, I still kind
of trip out on because I'm like, Okay, so when
I think about, like, there are some I can think
of three dudes that I grew up with that I'm like,
I have known for over twenty years, and I realize
I know nothing about you, Like there's a way that

(41:35):
they and and there there are a lot of them
are like like hustlers, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
but there was there's a way for them to like
really the knowledge of knowing how much to tell you
and how much not to tell you, and but you
but it feel like it feels like we're friends, you

(41:56):
know what I'm saying, And I do believe, like you
know what I'm saying, this person like thinks one of
the homies. I remember it was like I looked up
like this dude was in Cuba. I was like, what
are you like he's visiting Cuba, like he just went
to Like you know what I'm saying, I'm like, you
went to go visit Like I'm like, I have known
you for twenty years, you know. I mean like I've

(42:17):
been to your house and I realize I don't really
know you, you know, So I think that there's but
there's this sense of like you said, just like sentence
to know, like time to talk, time to shut up,
time to go, time to get out, Like I notice
this the moment.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, it's always it's it's always interesting when you run
into people who have that like skill for for leaving
some stuff on the table. I had an older friend
when I was in my twenties, like I was a
lot older, and we would we did like a biking
club and stuff together and would hang out. And I'd
known him for like two years, and I don't even
remember how it came out, but he was just like, yeah,
I did three tours in Vietnam. What Like what's like?

Speaker 6 (42:56):
What?

Speaker 1 (42:59):
Yeah, I didn't you never mentioned anything like three is
a lot. Most people didn't do that. Yeah that says something.

Speaker 4 (43:06):
What Yeah, but yeah, that's so even us knowing like
what we know about her and then how much we
don't know about her is like, yeah, you know, but
but I feel like the people that are able to
stay in the hustle are the ones that don't get
addicted to the attention.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
Like, well, when they get the attention, that's going to
be the downfall.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, I don't know, I think, because I think most
cote leaders are addicted to the attention. But you're right,
there's something, there's a degree, there's a degree of separation
you have to have from the bullshit in order to
be like el Ron Hubbard. I think always knew exactly
what the bullshit was, right, and that's why he had
the staying power and the success he did. It's not

(43:51):
that he wasn't deluded about certain things, but I think
he was generally pretty aware of what reality was and
was just conscious consciously and he loved the attention. He
loved being worshiped, but he it never I mean it
did near the end of his life. It eventually did
kind of overwhelm him, But for a very long time
he was able to keep enough of an understanding of
reality a distance to stay ahead of the authorities, right,

(44:14):
ya say, even about and I want to say, like
al Ron Hubbard was perfectly sane and rational. No no, no no,
but he kept enough, he had enough of an understanding
of what reality was that he didn't fall victim to
his own bullshit. He lived a long life and died free.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
You know.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
Yeah, that's the thing.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
If you can hold on to something that's like this,
I know is this is what I really am. You know,
I'm saying this is why I really am.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
This is work.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 (44:41):
So.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
On November twenty, twenty twenty, Ramana uploaded the first YouTube
video to the Canada First Party of Canada's YouTube account,
featuring a song that made it sound like every movie
trailer from a decade earlier. The video otherwise had minimum featured,
minimally competent editing and fairly clear audio, which sets her
apart from a lot of people trying to like make
fake vanity political parties. In this time, Sophie's gonna play

(45:03):
you a little bit of the Canada First Party for
Canada's ad here so you can this is her first,
her first documented grift, So we gotta see this.

Speaker 4 (45:12):
Yes, but before you play this, like, I'm I'm gonna
laugh every time you say that Canada First Party.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
Of Canada, Party of Canada. I'm a laugh every time.

Speaker 6 (45:20):
Okay, Hello Canada. I'm Romana Didulo. I'm the founder and
the leader of Canada. First, it's time for us to
clean up the swamp in Ottawa, to put an end
the corruption, criminality, incompetence and lives in the government.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
See, you know, she is not pretty all what I
think she would be. No, no, And that's the thing.
She's not very charismatic. She's not a great speagrece. It's
it's zero riz. There's again, there's effort, because that's a
competently it's not like unclear the audios, it's not like good,
but you're not. I've listened to a lot of these.

(46:10):
Usually the audios worse and stuff like this. Usually the
editing's worse. Like it was like she hit a minimum
bar of competence. Yeah, which is how I generally describe
her as a cult leader. She's not a good one.
She's a minimally competent cult leader. And what's interesting is
that she's managed to get a lot more attention than
you'd expect given her generally low level of competence, which
I find compelling.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
It's also a to me that like, this isn't like
she's using the exact same Like it's like this is
a bite, this is currently what we're saying, Like there's
already currently this. Do you copy my whole flow bar
for bar, Like it's already currently We're already doing the
drain this.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Swamp, Like yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just a ripoff of
Trump is populism mixed with you know, Trump is objectively charismatic.
You may not like it, most of us don't, but
he's to the people. He's able, a lot of people do,
a lot of people pick up what he's putting down.
He can give us, you know, you know he used
to be better when he was younger. But he can

(47:09):
give a speech. She's not good at that. Right, she
has no stage presence. It's one of the least energetic
examples of vo I've heard in the right wing populist
politics game. And this is kind of the big mystery
about her. Right, she doesn't have any money, she doesn't
have any power, and she's boring us. How why is
anyone talking about the quate of Canada?

Speaker 4 (47:26):
Right?

Speaker 1 (47:26):
Because she's she's had a lot more of an impact
than you'd guess, given all this, and I think the
answer I have to give is sheer persistence. She seems
to have committed to launching a career for herself out
of the right wing fever swamps in the early days
of the pandemic, and she's stuck to it tenaciously. I
can imagine that watching the first four years of Trump's presidence,
her first three years had given her a lot of

(47:47):
ideas as to content and made it clear that there
was no bottom floor of credibility as long as you
hated vaccines in the un right, That's all she needed
to say, and it didn't matter how much bullshit she
was otherwise. Right. That's what works with these This first
video only gets about twenty four thousand views in eighteen months,
and the Canada First Party of Canada sputters out and
there's not really anything memorable anecdote wise about it. They

(48:10):
don't have any fun moments, they don't have any big conventions.
It's a failed grift. It's mainly interesting because of what
comes next. She pivots immediately from the failure of this
political party to announcing herself as the Queen of Canada,
and from the outside, that seems like a desperation move right,
that probably shouldn't work. It's like if Trump, if like
the campaign hadn't worked, and then he just started telling

(48:32):
everyone he was secretly the king of America, you know,
like that that wouldn't seem like a well considered pivot, right, Yeah,
but it's going to work, right, And that's that's kind
of what's most interesting to me about her. On May thirtieth,
twenty twenty one, Digulo uploaded the first video on her
personal channel announcing that she was Commander in Chief of Canada.

(48:55):
That's before she's queen. She says that she's the commander
in chief. The language in the video deliberately apes QAnon.
She describes herself as as opposed by a deep state
cabal tied to a global pedophile conspiracy that she was
battling alongside white hats okay, which is a term that
comes out of like the hacking world. Right. You've got
like black hat hackers and white hat hackers, right, And

(49:15):
the black hats are people who are trying to fuck
up systems for their own benefit generally. The white hats
are like the people who are generally defending against malicious hacking, right, Like,
that's kind of the basic idea. I don't actually have
a great handling on why white hat got taken up
by the QAnon people, but it does. This is way
pre didulo. This is the early years of Trump that

(49:36):
they're starting to use the term white hats to talk
about like and these are when they use it. It
means the members of the government and the intelligence services
in the military who aren't part of the deep state cabal, right,
They're the good guys who are fighting this secret war.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
Now, I can't find her first video, but if you've
seen one of her pronouncements, you've seen most of them.
So here's an example from less than a year after
when she first makes her video. This is just to
give you an idea of what it looks like when
she addresses her subjects. This is filmed in an RV.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Wait what you said, This is filmed in an RV.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
It sure is?

Speaker 3 (50:15):
What the hell?

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Okay those are r V grade curtains man. Yeah, all right,
let's go.

Speaker 5 (50:24):
My fellow Canadians, I address you today as your Queen
and commander in chief. We are on the eve of
World War three. I asked that everyone come as one
people and one nation and to work with the United

(50:47):
States and all of our allies around the world. God
help us and God speed.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
Oh my lord?

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Yeah, what is she?

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Who are you?

Speaker 1 (51:03):
Yeah, she's she's interesting because again, no charisma, no juice. Seemingly,
I will say, she's putting some effort into dressing up.
You know, the white the white jacket thing is a
good call because it does kind of look vaguely regal,
you know, don't give her that she got flags again,
she puts in some effort, like it's not the zero

(51:24):
effort version like she's got. She makes sure everything's white
behind her. It looks vaguely, but it looks almost like
kind of like an Air Force one type video. It's
just her RV.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Yeah, but it's like production but the production value is
like West Wing nineteen ninety seven very much.

Speaker 4 (51:39):
It's very much a TV show. Yeah in the nineties,
Yeah about nineties.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
She's trying, but she doesn't have a lot of resources
to try with, right, so she's taking as much as
she can with what she has.

Speaker 4 (51:51):
I think I'm starting to realize how she even made
it to your radar and into this podcast, because it's like, yeah,
this is a very much of against all odds, because
I there is no reason we should know anything about
this person based on the two things that you just
showed me.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
No, she should never have hit our art. But here's
the thing. Part of why I'm doing this prop this
is she's in our top four or five most requested subjects.
That is, like anytime you go online to where people
talk about, like, hey, what who should we do next,
she's always prominent. I love. That's why doing her I.

Speaker 4 (52:26):
Think now I get like I'm telling you, man, like
the vision is becoming very clear to me, like where
you that you was like, Okay, she's definitely like a
C minus thing. But the but the tenacity of like
how you managed to poke through and get a number
one record, it's just that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Yeah with no bombs. Yeah, and I yeah, that's kind
of the big mystery of her. So her first and
second video she she puts out trying to claim that
she's now in charge of Canada get roughly like fourteen
thousand views in their first year each. So there's no
sign yet that this Queen Grift is going to take
her any further than the Canada First Party of Canada.

(53:05):
It's a little less successful, it looks like initially, but
trying your hat becoming a figure in the right wing
fever swamps. It's a little like playing the slots right
each time you pull that lever. Actually it's generally just
a button the levers, the levers or anymore les. Yeah, whatever.
Every time you say go right, you have a random
chance of winning. And in this case, when it comes

(53:27):
to being a right wing kind of conspiracy cult figure,
winning means someone bigger in the movement catches onto your
content and decides to either direct their followers your way
or to play in with your bits. This is a
big thing. This has been an aspect of UFO culture
of like like the psychic you know, the whole new

(53:48):
agent that believes that we have psychic powers where people
will be like I'll play along. Yeah, I saw those
aliens too, or that alien she's in psychic contact with.
I'm also in psychic contact with, so you can trust her, right,
And it's yeah, like.

Speaker 4 (54:02):
Are they just like a are are people like you know,
posting and sharing it because they think it's funny or
like you said, like that's what I was thinking. I
was like, I feel like people are doing this ironically, But.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Then I think that's a good chunk of it.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yeah, yeah, even within the right wing, because it's like
even the.

Speaker 4 (54:21):
Brain cooked folks still got some sense.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
To be like, well, this is just funny, this.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
Seems not Yeah, And I think I think most even
most people on the right who are aware of her, like, well,
this lady's a kok, right, and most of the kooky
people on the right are aware that this lady is
a kook. But in part, being made fun of and
being ridiculous enough that you get elevated by people talking
about what a bad con artist you are is part

(54:48):
of how you get success in this field, because it
just raises your general visibility, you know, like when people
are talking about you and laughing about how silly you are.
That also, that's another it's a free play of the slot, right,
because maybe somebody who can burnish your reputation somebody else
and will come across your shit that way and will

(55:08):
decide to play in right or to share your stuff.
So it's not necessarily bad for you to be initially
just seen as a figure of like mockery, you know,
which I think is kind of what happens to her.
But as mac Lamora writes for a Vice quote, the
Outlander self promotion went nowhere until a well known QAnon
figure confirmed her in early twenty twenty one. At the time,

(55:29):
the titular Q who drops clues for the community on
Aitkun had disappeared and did Julo stepped into the power
vacuum and if a matter of months, her popularity exploded.
And this is important. We're in early twenty twenty one.
Joe Biden has taken office. Trump is at least temporarily
seems like he might be out of the game, right
He was not wildly popular for the first couple of

(55:51):
months after January sixth, and Q's not doing drops anymore.
So there's still just as much as we're all aware of,
just as much interest in this stuff, just as many
people who are on board for these nonsense right wing
conspiracy theories, but the most prominent people have kind of
dropped out temporarily. And so part of why she gets

(56:11):
success is she just starts trying to make a name
for herself at a point in which there's nothing on TV.
You know, it's kind of like one of those shows
that wouldn't have been a hit if there'd been anything
geeral on, but because there's not, you know, yeah, like Okay.
You know, so this prominent QAnon figure who is the
first guy who really gives your credibility, seems to have

(56:33):
been a fellow who went by the user name Whiplash
three four seven. He runs a telegram channel with about
three hundred thousand followers, which makes him a fairly large
fixture in the QAnon community, and like many influential q heads,
he claims to have close personal ties to Elon Musk,
Donald Trump, and JFK. Junior, who is deceased but they
believe is secretly alive.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
Oh yeah, forgot, he's alive.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
My bad.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
I gotta keep it.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah yeah. And you know what never dies? Prop Oh? Man,
gooneys the girl they had that that's actually the one
of the Goonies must.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Have died, right, Goonies never say die.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
They never say die.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Figure figure out if one of the Goonies has died,
and if they're all alive, hunt one of them down,
and then Jesus off to ads. Jesus Christ, we're back.
Sophie is telling me that we are not allowed to
tell people to hunt down the cast of the of

(57:29):
the classic film Goonies. They're wonderful people, They're wonderful people
probably don't hunt them down unless you have like a
really good shot at it.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
You're gonna get kicked out of Oregon for that tick
because that was shot in the.

Speaker 3 (57:41):
Organ very much organ.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
I think it mostly annoys people from Oregon though, because
that house, you know, that whole neighborhood probably property values
You're swollen as a result.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
Dude.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
Imagine, Yeah, like every morning I kind of live next
to a kind of like a cult classic location.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
I won't say exactly.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Say which it is, say which it is. Let's move
on from this. Yeah, you got.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Too many listeners.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Yeah. H So, in the space of a year, from
like early twenty twenty one to early twenty twenty two,
Didulo goes from someone who couldn't crack fifteen thousand views
on a YouTube video to someone who, in May of
twenty twenty one head close to twenty thousand followers on
her personal telegram channel amazing, and at least hundreds of
people claim to embrace her as their rightful sovereign and leaders.

(58:28):
She's eventually going to get close to like it's going
to be like eighty thousand or something like that on
her telegram channel. So again, you know the guy who
kind of vouches for her has like three hundred thousand
followers on telegram, so she's never up to his level.
But that's enough. When you've got like eighty thousand people
following your telegram, you can pull out a couple a
dozen folks who are going to be willing to change

(58:50):
their lives to follow you in the real world. Oh no,
that right, Yeah, that's enough. You know, it's not enough
to be a big deal, but it's enough to change
your your shitty life into something more fun. So during
this first year, she's not out in public yet, no
one's seen her. She's not traveling immediately, right, she's mostly

(59:10):
for the first kind of few months that she's the
Queen of Canada, she's just making videos and she's expanding
the law about herself. She's doing a lot of live streams,
she's talking a lot in her telegram, and you know
she's thought this through to some extent. She knows that
royalty doesn't just conjure itself up out of thin air.
It's appointed by other royalty. Right, you can't just say
I'm the queen. Some other king or something has to

(59:32):
say I'm the queen. Kind of how it works. Generally,
I mean, initially, there's always some guy who's like, I'm
the king. Here's what a king is. Right, by this point,
we've got a fairly robust system of royalty in the world.
Someone knows about. Think we kind of know now yeah, yeah,
now here's how researcher Christine Sarteghi summarizes Digulo's description of

(59:57):
her own rise to power is recounted over a series
of live streams and YouTube videos. Digito had been living
with a roommate in Victoria, British Columbia, working a regular
nine to five job. The two were living in a basement.
At night and after working her day job, Romana was
secretly interacting with a man she would later reveal as
his Highness David J. Carlson, married to her Highness Sarah MG. Carlson,

(01:00:18):
who is acting in the role of Commander in Chief
of the United States Air Force Academy's Civilian Command of
Military Operations, which what who what? That's not Commander in
Chief of the Air Force Academy Civilian Command.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Of what you're saying words.

Speaker 4 (01:00:42):
Again, Like the commander is making sure that there's a
connection between the two.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Yeah, She'll just call David Carlson, the commander in chief
of the United States and king. There's a lot that's
wrong about this. It's what you'd expect. She's she understands
America as well as you'd expect from a woman from
the Philippines who's lived in Canada most of her life,
which is not at all. First off, the commander in
chief is a role that the president has president where
they're in charge of the military, because we're supposed to

(01:01:08):
have a civilian who's in charge of the military. Right,
it doesn't make you king, It shouldn't, right. And it's
also there's not a commander in chief just of the
United States, because that's also that's not what the job is.
The commander in chief is like oversight of the military,
commanding in chief of the country.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
So funny, it's so funny, dude, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
There's a lot that's wrong about this.

Speaker 4 (01:01:31):
That's why I'm like, that's why I'm like, y'all have
to be laughing at her, because that is it's funny.

Speaker 1 (01:01:39):
She does this too with Canada, where she will kind
of sometimes, especially earlier on, she would sort of she
would refer to herself as the commander in chief and
the Queen as if they were the same job and
they're not. They never have been. It's just kind of,
I think, a misunderstanding, or she just likes the way
the terms sound.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Also Canadians.

Speaker 4 (01:01:57):
Canadians, from my experience, are actually pretty well versed in
like American history and politics, so.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
Like Romana not Romana. Yeah, for a while, I think
the overwhelming suspicion was that David Carlson was not a
real dude. But after she mentioned him, he pops up
being a very real guy. And Arizona, who does in
fact claim to be the king of the Kingdom of
America every time?

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Yes, Los Angeles angel every time?

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
Yes, Okay, I don't know marking behind the scenes, right, Like,
was he pretending to be the king to her and
she found him on like his weird king website and
they started talking and he appointed her I don't know,
or did she start claiming this about him and then
he came like it's a little unclear to me what

(01:02:54):
came first, like with the chicken or the egg is
in this situation, But she claims David appoint did her
Queen of Canada in twenty seventeen. Now, this can't be true, right,
there's no evidence of her. She wasn't a figure back then, right,
she wasn't saying shit. It was the evidence that right.
We have no evidence she thought of this until twenty
twenty one, But the story needs to date back to

(01:03:16):
twenty seventeen to make room for another crucial piece of
Romana's hastily contrived and poorly conceived backstory. According to this tale,
King David Carlson became aware of Romana and made her
the Queen of Canada after she saved Canada from an
underground invasion by the Chinese Communist military.

Speaker 4 (01:03:33):
Oh, single handle, that is wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Now you have a reaction. I think a lot of
Canadians are going to have a similar reaction because and
it's sad. You know, in America we have the Korean
War is our forgotten war, right, Americas just don't know
a lot about the Korean War.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
And I think Canada, we can all agree. Canada's forgotten
war is that time China invaded through a series of
underground under turned back by a woman in her fifties. Oh,
my lord, from underground, from underground, that is from underground.
I love. Everything's got to take place underground. She's from
that chunk of the UFO come where everything's happening underground everything.

(01:04:19):
If you're like China invaded Canada, Canadians are gonna be like,
I've lived in Canada and I didn't see anything. But
if you're like, no, no, no, they came up underground.
They were in the tunnels, like, well, maybe I haven't
been to the top.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
One was up in the UK.

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
It was underground. Its pretty cold up there. I don't
think you could borrow dude.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
I don't think a cold place for tunnels.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
Why would they do that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
I'm imagining like in a sort of situation here, which
is what they're imagining right as part of what that
movie was inspired by. As the story goes, there were
Chinese soldiers that were like being stationed in tunnels that
ran from Canada through the US down to Mexico. And
the Chinese army was go to invade, and they were

(01:05:01):
going to invade like Canada in the US and I
guess Mexico simultaneously. And as they were preparing and getting
their army in place, they were using the tunnels. Because
if you've got these tunnels before they're filled with soldiers,
that's a lot of a real estate outlay to buy
these tunnels, so you're gonna use them for something, and
the Chinese army use them to harvest adrenochrome from children.

Speaker 4 (01:05:20):
You know, So a multi national tunnel, like you say
it through through three countries.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Three three countries, a tunnel system presently underneath like all
of the major habitation areas of those cities, right, I
would assume.

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
This is incredibleose countries. It's absolutely incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
Yeah, yeah, Now again she's cribbing from some old and
well established conspiracy theories, which all have underground bases and
cities and stuff about the you know, children being abducted
to prevent organs and arcotics for the elite. This is
none of this is new. She's just wrapping old stuff
in her conspiracy theory. Christine Starteghi continues. Didulo claims that
the Chinese Communist military is a front for the New

(01:05:57):
World Order, Satanists and individuals who want to engage in eugenics.
Did you. Loo asserts that she single handedly removed the
Chinese Communist military from Canada and additionally the remainder of
the world. It's got to be news to China. Didulo
maintains that if the Chinese communist military attacked the United
States as was planned, that it would have sparked a
World war. She contends that her subterranean military achievements thus

(01:06:19):
prevented World War three. For that, she was awarded her
title ast Queen. The entire world, she explains, should be
thankful for her monumental efforts. And you know what, prop
let's end this episode right now by just just saying
thank you Romana for stopping the Chinese communists from destroying Canada.
And I guess also, America.

Speaker 4 (01:06:38):
I'm curious as to why your commander in chief in Arizona,
Like why he ain't do nothing about it before he even.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
Got to Canada, Like why was he not? And why
would you? Like, I feel like.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
He was the King of America, King of America.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
I feel like I would have an issue.

Speaker 1 (01:06:55):
Maybe he's down in Arizona. They haven't made it there yet.

Speaker 4 (01:06:58):
Way down south. You could have gave me a heads
up that they was coming, yeah, saying.

Speaker 1 (01:07:02):
I feel like that they were kind of invade, you
know what I'm saying. Yeah. One thing I love about
this is that it is very clearly the kind of
grift that like someone who doesn't know much about Canada
or the United States really would make there's this almost
like childlike vantage point where like, obviously, if there's a

(01:07:23):
queen in Canada, she must have been appointed by the
King of America, right obviously does that just makes sense
because of course, which is you know, I think kind
of offensive to most Canadian most even most crazy Canadians,
But it makes a lot of sense when you think
about like Romana's backstory that she's she does have this
kind of outsider look where she's like, Okay, I gotta
find someone who who could make me Queen of Canada,

(01:07:43):
King of America about the King of America.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Right, that's so great, This is wonderful.

Speaker 4 (01:07:49):
I'm still curious, which we'll probably get into the next episode,
is like okay, but where's the back where's the money at?
Where's the bag at? Like what are we are? When
do you when does she get to the money? Like
what is the Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:08:01):
What is the thing? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
It was the I mean the grift is she's going
to raise money to support her quest to save Canada.
Like that that's what it's going to be. You get
followers and you take their money. Right and again, when
I first read about her exploits tunnel fighting the Chinese army.
I had the same question you're all asking, how did
she do that? And unfortunately she never gives us to tails.

(01:08:23):
She just says that she was unable to eat or
sleep or think while fighting off China's invasion, and when
she finally achieved victory, she wept and was allowed to
eat and sleep again. I think, based on my knowledge
general knowledge of these kinds of movements, that she she
thinks she's claiming this was a psychic battle. She wasn't
fighting them in a hand to hand combat. She was
sitting in her house and became aware psychically that Chinese

(01:08:45):
psychers were in tunnels underneath Canada, and she fought off
China psychic warriors. So using psychic powers right basically? Like
so that's a little unclear to me. Prop I think so.
But I don't think she fought them physically.

Speaker 3 (01:09:02):
That's what I'm saying. Why would they physical?

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
Why am I asking about logic? But that means that see,
but see we learn it here we learn and biomissions.
See that means that, like your psychic fighting abilities has
a range. It's more like radio rather than satellite. So
you got to be a little closer to Canada. So
that's the best way you might be in psychic war.

(01:09:25):
You got to actually physically be on the Western hemisphere
under our radio sig.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
That's why again, Arizona was just too far the King
of America's psychic.

Speaker 6 (01:09:38):
Try.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
It's just a signal was to triumph.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
Maybe the caves were made out of dolomite, which we
all know block psychic res. You know, no way to know,
so uh. The Queen claims that after she finished defeating
the Chinese, her roommate. It sounds like she's saying her
roommate walked in on her. She doesn't exactly say this,
but I'm guessing she was astral projecting. And then afterwards
her roommate Caesar and is like, hey, what happened, And

(01:10:02):
she's like, I am the Queen and commander in chief
of Canada. I defeated the Chinese communists and if you
tell anyone, I'm going to have to kill you. And
that's not a joke, right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
Queen having a roommate is really funny, It's very funny.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
It's really funny.

Speaker 3 (01:10:21):
Yeah, I'll just call uber e bro, Like, if you
want to.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
Do anything, Yeah, I'm the queen. I'm gonna need your
half of the utilities bill.

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:31):
Well, and here's the thing. What's funny to me is
this is part of her story to her followers about
like how she came to power, is like, and then
I told my roommate, and my roommates started calling me
your majesty from then on. Of course, she she's like
he immediately recognized that I was the queen. I think
this guy might have been both joking and also like, well,
she's just threatened to kill me, so I probably don't

(01:10:51):
want to push her too far. This is clearly an
unwell person that I lived with. I mus kind of
say your majesty and get on Craigslist to look for another.

Speaker 4 (01:10:59):
Absolutely, Okay, your majesty, will is your turn do the bathroom?
So I don't know if you got any of your
royal subjects to come do this. It is your turn.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
Yeah, you still got to clean the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:11:14):
I was also interested in your your your acknowledgment of
the tunnels being made of dolomite, and well.

Speaker 1 (01:11:21):
I assume it it blocks psychic powers. Maybe not her
psychic powers, but maybe the King of America.

Speaker 4 (01:11:26):
I'm just saying my only reference to dolomite was a
pimp from the Gripes.

Speaker 5 (01:11:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Oh, it was also a pimp. Maybe the tunnels in
Canada were made from a pimp from the sa Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:37):
Cool, Wow, dolomite was a real thing.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
Okay, Uh, well, everybody killing me. That's this episode of
Behind the Bastards Until next time. You know what you
should do.

Speaker 2 (01:11:51):
Listen to hood politics you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:54):
Could, Yeah, sure, listen to hood politics. Listen to hood politics,
and declare yourself or queen of whatever country you happen
to be in. You know, all you have to do
is defeat the Chinese military underground using your sage with
your brain.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
Yep, I'm gonna work really hard on that. Behind the
Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes that

(01:12:29):
Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every
Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me of Netflix. You don't
miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards, We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,