Romana Didulo, a Filipino-born orphan who founded the Canada First Party in 2020, pivoted to declaring herself Queen of Canada after a power vacuum left by QAnon figure Whiplash347. Her rise relied on absurd claims of defeating Chinese invaders with psychic powers and utilizing "med beds," echoing the fraudulent I Am Activity cult. Despite lacking charisma or resources, her tenacity in crafting these fantastical narratives attracted nearly 80,000 Telegram followers, illustrating how vulnerable audiences embrace delusion over reality when traditional authority figures fail to provide meaning. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Valid Cult Leader Status00:07:23
Cool zone media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the 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.
That was so fucked up.
I can't even tell you, guys, how 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, you work so hard, we're trash.
Um anyway, work hard for our network.
That has nothing to do with the major streaming service.
Anyways, tried so hard and come so far wow wow, i'm really glad prop's here for this.
Anyways, just just wanted to give a little psa at the top that uh, 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 podcast.
I heard Radio Apple podcast blah, and there's a psa at the end.
If you're forgetting what i'm saying, up top also, full video episodes of Behind The Bastards and now streaming on Netflix, dropping every tuesday and thursday.
So hit, remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode.
Yeah, and look, I know what you're all saying.
Netflix only had one demand, which was that we stop making actionable threats against.
Yeah so, and you know I feel like that's a fair compromise.
Yeah, so hit, remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode.
And then, for clips in older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our youtube channel.
Um yeah respect that's, that's.
That's what's up.
Yep look mom, i'm on Netflix.
There you go saying 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 Family.
I'm so excited we went back.
We're back back baby, back in the New York mood, not really.
We got photos back from the live show we did last year and I was just looking at it and it's the three of us.
I was like damn, I gotta frame this shit.
We look, you know, i'm like it's like, it's like it's like a family photo photo album.
I need it.
I love you guys listen.
It is a blessing and honor to be here to talk about some sort of piece of and yeah yeah man, you know what i'm saying.
All i'm talking about.
I was just over here jamming some Barrington levy calling ice Murderers.
You know saying I have I have shocking news to start this episode.
Oh, the bastard of this episode is not a man.
No no no, we're doing.
We got a lady bastard this time, prop.
We've got uh, things are dark in the old United States these days, so I figured we'd take a trip up north to our uh, our normal and and mentally healthy neighbors where, where nothing crazy ever happens, obviously in Canada.
Uh and uh, let's talk about one of Canada's most notable bastards of the moment, queen Romana Didyalo.
Uh, the queen of Canada which does not have a queen.
Uh, I think Kanye did for a while.
AKA.
Who?
Yeah.
So she talked about.
She's essentially a QAnon influencer who started in like 2021 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.
On behalf of everyone whose just nervous system is beat to crap, man, thank you.
Thank you for giving me something this absurd.
She's a mystical creature.
No genocide.
No real body count.
She's a man.
I needed this so much.
She's, you know.
And Robert Scripps said, it says, she might be an alien.
She might be an alien.
I'm excited.
I love it.
She might be an alien.
She might be psychic, but she's definitely a cult leader, right?
Thankfully, she's not a good one, which we don't talk about enough.
Oh, God, dog.
Listen, man, I was here for the Thomas Jeffersons.
I was here for the lost cause, for the crack attack.
I was here.
Yeah, let's get some fun.
Let's do something good.
Yeah.
I knew Himmler.
Yeah.
I feel like this is also, you know, because Himmler, 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 going to wind up feeling inadequate.
And I don't want any of the cult leaders that listen to this podcast to feel inadequate.
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 $100,000.
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 ass to keep a dozen or so people, you know, locked mentally in the chains of slavery to your insane will.
This is for you.
You know, we can't all, you can't all be L. Ron Hubbard.
You can't all have a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, you know?
Again, I appreciate you saying this.
This is like the DEI affinity group of bastards and cult leaders.
I appreciate this, man.
You know what I'm saying?
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?
Everybody ain't Jim Jones.
You know what I mean?
Like, some of us got to get it out the mud.
Yeah, you have to get people okay with the fact that like if all you can do is is really completely destroy the mental freedom and sovereignty of like 10 people, you know, that's enough.
That's it.
You're valid as a cult leader.
And that's what we're telling Ramana, you know?
I get it.
And also, you know what I'm saying?
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 Justin B.
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.
I do feel like they have something to complain about.
They've got stuff complained about.
Largely the cult leader, the Colts.
He's destroyed their lives.
I was going to say, I was going to say Drake, but I was going to say Tim Bitts, but he's not going to be a lot of Canadians.
I was going to say, but Kenny took care of that.
Yeah, Coro Kenny already took care of that.
I 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 going to give our Mark Corny.
Good little Davo speech.
Yeah, he got his bars off.
I'm going to appreciate that.
He was like, can we just stop capping, y'all?
Can we just stop pretending like.
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 what, right?
The I Am Activity Scam00:02:24
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Saint Germain Online Mystery00:14:58
Now, 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 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 into like a self-help cult.
And it cropped up.
You got to say the whole thing like a pimp named Slickback.
The I Am tribe.
The I Am octave.
Exactly.
The I Am activity.
Yes.
You have to say it a whole lot.
You can't abbreviate it.
People won't know what you're talking about.
So it cropped up during the peak of the Great Depression at the start of the 30s, 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 in the Great Depression.
And the I Am movement has its roots in the city of Mount Shasta, which is the least surprising thing on earth if you've ever been to Mount Shasta.
Any Californians in the chat?
Yeah.
They're already in cults.
You already know, like you feel you feel the cult vibration as soon as you leave the Bay Area.
You're like, smells 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 carrot.
Don't get gas over there, boy.
Oh, you can't.
Do not get away from it.
That'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.
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 woo shit in Mount Shasta.
And this has been the case for a long time.
Mount Shasta kind of helped give birth to the New Age movement.
Wait, the mountain looks like a lady?
Yeah, that was a new one.
Kind of, yeah.
Yeah.
The mountain.
Like it kind of has like the silhouette of a lady.
So, so the native said.
And it does.
If you look at it during the sunset, it looks like it.
You can see her face.
Oh.
I kind of know.
I always think she's a pretty mountain.
I tied Shasta with just like white women with dreadlocks.
Well, yeah, there's them there too, but they didn't start being there.
So it has a reputation for being a hub of the New 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 guys I got stoned with at grow houses 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 inside Mount Shasta.
Yeah, I mean, that's a triple source confirmation.
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.
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'll 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 I think it's named after a long-dead confidence man who was not at all a saint, who described himself as a count and who made a bunch of famous friends, including Voltaire, and told them stories about being 500 years old and all-knowing, right?
Oh, I love this guy.
Yeah, this was a guy a few hundred years ago who just kind of got famous for going to parties and lying about himself, right?
Which was easy to do back then.
Yeah.
You know, who's going to check?
Who's going to check if you wasn't 500?
Like, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, 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.
There's a little bit of like, I kind of 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's like, excuse me, sir.
Can you step 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.
We're royalty.
Like, there's no way for you to check.
Like, now it's like, sir, you were born in Inglewood.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Guy Ballard is, yeah, one of these.
He sees this Saint Germain fella.
And I don't know exactly how to categorize Saint Germain.
I think we have to file him under the category of like con artists whose cons have been lost to obscurity because he's hanging out only around rich people and he's lying 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?
And he was, he was a charming guy by all accounts and multi-talented.
He was good at music and stuff.
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 the practitioner with unnatural wealth and long life, just as the count was said to possess.
Okay.
And his books became influential among the occult.
And as a result, when the Theosophists came around in the late 1800s, Helena Blavatsky 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?
This is amazing.
So just kind of when we get in the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, that big occult wave that kind of does in a lot of ways lead into like the Nazis and stuff.
Yeah.
Saint Germain is just from a previous era, a couple hundred years earlier.
He's one of the most famous guys who was like into magic and everyone just wrote about him.
So she says, oh, he visited me and he taught me his secret powers, you know?
And so he visited this.
Exactly.
Like 40 years after he visits Blavatsky.
And so 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 Blavatsky, 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 cultic leader.
I guess I got to have Saint Germain back me up too, right?
And so Guy Ballard takes this, you know, and he says basically Saint Germain told me his secrets to long life and mental powers.
And I'm going to teach him to you.
That's the basis of the I am activity, right?
Which is this mystic educational movement based on Saint Germain's supposed teachings.
Put a write-up on the website.
The I am activity, always all caps and in quotation marks with I am.
Don't you ever say it differently.
Listen, like a tribe called Quest.
You got to say it all.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yes.
So a write-up on the website, newreligiousmovements.org.
The core teachings of the I am 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 decrees, spoken invocations, and affirmations, followers aim to realize their divine nature, achieve self-purification, and ultimately ascend to higher spiritual realms, emulating the ascended masters.
The Ballard's teachings also incorporated elements of American patriotism and nationalism, claiming the United States had a unique role in the world's spiritual destiny.
Bro, this is so, there's so many like 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, bro.
Like, let me tell you something.
Right.
Like I could, I already, I already see where this got, how this became Christian.
You know what I'm saying?
And that's, it's worth noting, as you pointed out, the I am and I am activity is a reference to the Bible.
It's something to God.
Yes, most I am that God said to Moses.
Yeah, what God said to Moses, right?
And that's what 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 just because the I am activity kind of becomes part of foundational American cultic lore.
And as is always the case with this stuff, pieces of it wind up picked up by generations of later cult leaders and thrown and not just cults, but thrown into different aspects of like New Age thinking.
For sure.
So pieces of Ballard's work kind of wind up in self-help books and stuff for decades to come, which may just be the extent of like where, how she picks up on little elements of this, right?
Now, the IM activities, you may have guessed from the fact that most of you probably hadn't heard of this before.
It was not a huge hit.
It was like middling.
I'll say that.
Its great claim to fame was a Supreme Court case, U.S. 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 were committing fraud when they took in more than $3 million 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?
Yeah.
Which is, 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.
Yeah, that's not really weird.
It comes like a religion, you know, a crime.
That's interesting.
And like, how could a court call that?
Like, to be like...
It's tough.
It's tough.
That was super.
That's interesting.
It's like, I don't know about your faith, buddy.
You know what I'm saying?
You said you believe, but I don't think you believe it.
Because it's one of those things I can imagine a million problems we could have avoided if they'd ruled differently, but also a million new problems that we would have had if we were like, no, the court gets to decide if you really believe in whatever you say you believe in.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
It's like, that's the problem.
Which one of these cans of worms do we want to open?
You know what I'm saying?
Like, yeah, because even like, you know, even fast forward to, you know, again, American Pentecostalism, like, how many of it would have been like, hey, bro, you really don't believe you could heal that person, do you?
Yeah.
You out here making money.
You look at what you pulled out of them.
That's chicken gizzard.
You don't think that's really the case?
That is not real, sir.
Yes.
Like, I would be Gabby.
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 probably crossing a line.
But if you're just asking, do you really believe that people can chant themselves into 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.
Like, this isn't even an appropriate thing for there to be a court case about.
It's really mixed, but I can see the logic, you know?
So the movement limped along, the I Am movement.
They won this case and they limp along until Ballard's wife dies in the early 1970s, at which point leadership passed to a board of directors.
The group is still kind of existent today, the IM, but like they've got like a newsletter they publish or some 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 occult lore ever since in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada.
And the I Am movement is relevant primarily to us today because Ramona Dadilo 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 been born probably sometime in the 1970s.
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 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 figure within the cult that she's created.
And Romana says that her grandmother, a first-grade teacher, raised her to speak five languages fluidly.
Researcher Christine Sarteshi of Chatham University is almost certainly Dadilo's number one biographical expert.
And she writes of the queen's further claims.
That same grandmother mounted a strategic defense and offense and successfully blocked the Chinese from invading their regional stronghold during World War II.
This claim could not possibly be true since during World War II, Japan, not China, occupied the Philippines.
Because they weren't there.
She's going to say a lot about fighting the Chinese.
This is a family business to her.
But again, they got other shit going on in World War II.
They're not in the Philippines.
Yeah, I'm a bit like almost equal parts saddened and excited that this is a peanut, that this is like a Filipino woman.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I was like, oh, she's from the Philippines.
Okay.
So that adds a layer of like awesome.
And again, for newcomers 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.
Yeah.
And she is Didilo, she doesn't emphasize 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 when she's very young, right?
And it doesn't seem like she has a ton of contact with her family over there, although that's kind of unclear to me.
Does she go to Toronto?
No, no, Vancouver.
Okay.
So her, if she goes to Vancouver, I was like, because those are two very pretty big, like Filipino populations.
Conspiracy Theorist Real Job00:15:53
Yeah.
And I know she may have been closer to her family there.
We get very little about her life before she comes on the scene as a cult leader, 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's that's kind of why.
So I just, there's not a lot to say on that account, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, her father was a lawyer and an engineer, but he dies when she's 10.
Her mom dies a year later.
Uh, and so she's raised by her grandmother for a couple of years, but not long after her parents die, when she's 15, she moves to Vancouver and she's raised by other relatives there.
It's kind of unclear, you know, how much of this is her grandparents.
Do 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.
Sarteshi and a journalist from Vice, Max Lamaraux, are kind of the two people who have really delved into her background a lot.
So I am, I haven't, there's a 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 40 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 this podcast.
That's right.
Glorious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
When Romana 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 Lamerau of Vice is someone he's 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 QAnon 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 on them.
Yeah.
Sarteshi writes.
Side note, dude.
Yeah.
Wait, hold on.
Side note.
Like QAnon feels like a fever dream right now.
It's still there.
Like, yeah, I mean, we move past it too.
Yeah, I was like, wait, that happened because of our nature of work.
Yeah, because our nature of work.
We know it's still kind of there.
But I was just like, bro, them fools went to the storm the Capitol.
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, a decent 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 a lot of the QAnon shit, right?
That's a real job.
Once you get to it, it's like, this is actually a real job.
I got like stuffed.
I'm in a grifting 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.
I share a desk with this guy.
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.
And now I'm one of them.
And I know, what do I do?
It's the sad thing of 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 fandom, right?
It's it's fun.
Um, one of my OGs, this is a diversion, but it's very funny.
One of my OGs told me a joke recently, and like he called me, my man Jonathan.
He called me, he said, Hey, I got a joke for you.
He goes, Okay, this conspiracy theorist dies and he goes to heaven.
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 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.
You get it?
Because he thinks Jesus is in on the conspiracy also.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah, I was looking at Sophie.
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.
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 8% wealthier, right?
Yeah.
And 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, 70 countries have agreed that we're going to lie about the shape of the earth.
Like 70.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
For 60 years.
Yeah.
They couldn't, again, like, they couldn't keep, like, we're seeing the actual conspiracy now with like fucking Alex Predi's murder, right?
Where 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 him.
And like, conspiracy, but it's not like inner, it's not fun.
It's just like, oh, yeah, it's just 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.
Yeah.
You can quite literally say the exact same thing with Renee Goode.
She was going to, she was going to run this man over.
Literally fucking Epstein, right?
Where it's like, yeah, it was a conspiracy.
A bunch of guys looked the other way at this dude's shady financial dealings because he provided them with 15-year-old girls, right?
Like that's a conspiracy.
There's no aliens.
Yeah, it's pretty simple.
It's not blood sacrifices.
It's young women.
It's just exactly.
Basic debauchery that we all know.
And that's not very fun, which is why people like Romana Didulo 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 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 in an RV, you know, that's way more fun.
So much more fun.
Getting back to Romana here, right?
Christine Sartesi has charted her earliest online presence, which seems to be an October 2006 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 Salesforce.
You know, it's a company 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 she is, right?
Yeah, me and my buddies try to come up with a sentence to describe like what some sort of company like that.
Oh, Global Solutions LLC.
Well, what do we do?
Global Solutions LLC.
That sounds real.
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 processes for the we just we centered like just putting together a bunch of words.
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.
You know what I'm saying?
This never happened.
I got sin out of me.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
For legal reasons, left and right.
It happens.
So, maybe in your mind.
Fucking global solutions geology sales force business, whatever that really was.
Her subsequent ventures, she has a series of real estate corporations that are described by Sarteshi as shell corporations.
And I have to assume that's definitely some sort of copy.
Of course.
Yeah.
Sarteshi concludes, DeGilo also has two additional open businesses in London and Wales.
No substantial activity with these corporations is known.
Success in the business world seems to have eluded her, right?
She's not successful.
She's not making money.
Yeah, so what does your real estate company do?
Oh, well, we make stuff mostly.
The integration of our HR systems and our, you know, send me $1,500 and you'll find out.
And I'll help you out, man.
We can set you guys up, you know?
Yeah.
Are you guys getting a gang of emails that are clearly written by AI about how you can synergize your companies?
I get a lot of them.
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.
Oh, man.
They're so great.
And then I'll get a follow-up.
Hey, just making sure you saw our last email.
And I'm like, I saw it.
Go into my spam folder.
Yeah.
I saw it.
So, I can't judge you.
I have in my secondary email 49,000 unread emails.
So my other one has more.
Like, you know, for the listeners and observers, like the bit about Robert is he's actually a very good businessman.
And it's, it's pretty funny to see you click.
Sophie's a good businessman.
Yeah, wait.
Let me finish.
Let me finish.
Is when I see like the, and the switch is so quick because Sophie is like cutthroat.
This is what we here for.
This is what we finna do.
Right.
Like, this is what I need.
This is the bag.
Where my money?
Talk to me when 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 put that out there.
Like, Robert got a switch.
He got a professional switch.
Did I get my MBA from Harvard?
No.
They wouldn't let me into Harvard.
Sophie's Cutthroat Business Partner00:05:49
No, they would not.
I had like a 2.8 GPA.
What do you think they let me in?
Did you see my face when you started this?
And it's almost like, wait a second.
But Robert's a fantastic business partner because he listens to me.
Yeah, I'm a fantastic business partner because I let Sophie run things while I write about the Queen of Canada.
Much like Bill Gates.
So from other interviews conducted with people who saw her in other interviews conducted with people who saw the queen in her home prior to announcing that she was the queen, we can say that De Dulo did not live well.
People have described her as 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 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 clean or nice.
Like she's, she's, she's like, this is someone who's doing about as well as you'd expect, someone who's orphaned at 11 and then has to immigrate to a new country to be doing, right?
Like she's not someone who's living in a rarefied air.
She's struggling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And she does not seem to have a particular position of respect or to be very well known by her neighbors, right?
In part because very few of them have come forward if 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 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?
Yeah, I feel like she was in her own head for most of her life.
I just the vibe I kind of get.
Yeah, right?
That's the vibe I kind of get.
Vice's Mac Lamreaux 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 much she lies about a lot, but that's that's I've known friends who've been in the same situation.
I tell you what, you know what I'm saying?
They had to sleep on a few floors, you know?
For her, as for millions of other people in similar situations, the 2020 COVID-19 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.
And I love that word.
Because what else?
It could be a Canada First Party of America.
I'm going to start the Canada First Party of America.
U.S. politics should be entirely geared towards what's best for Canada.
First off, give them our nukes.
You know, they're better suited to them.
And you know what?
You guys can have Maine.
It reminds me we went to the RNC and they had those signs everywhere that said, make America great once again.
And you're like, didn't we already do it?
You just added once.
Yeah.
No, the Canada First Party of Canada.
And she's Canada First.
She's seeing the Party of Canada.
The Canada First Party of Canada.
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Glorious.
She's seeing all these people.
Number one, she's stuck inside.
Yes.
But everyone's stuck inside.
And she's seeing traffic explode probably because 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 lot about like the hidden secret bases that the army is 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 in Los Angeles has like a deep underground military base where they're like taking adrenochrome out of children.
She's big into all that.
She believes in med beds, which is this, these extraterrestrial aliens have these beds that'll 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 believes in all of that stuff.
Yes.
Was I on this?
Was I on the show for the for the for the alien conspiracy ones when the job?
I don't remember who our guest was.
Yeah, I remember us doing it and then and how like the CIA or the yeah, the government was like because it was mostly like the DIA or the military intelligence even that was fucking around more than the CIA with this.
And they kept feeding secrets to homeboy.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
No, you're you're tapped into the conspiracy, brother.
You might be on it, bro.
You might be on to something.
That was so great.
Yeah.
There's a few.
Sometimes it's like, you know, like, like the reality is, if he wasn't such like a flaming piece of vomit, like, Trump is hilarious.
So funny.
Oh, yeah.
He's funny, man.
If he wasn't so evil, he'd be the same.
So for the government to be like, wait, you think Area 51 is aliens?
Yeah, sure.
Man, come here.
Let me tell you some more.
That's funny.
There's even more going on.
Yeah.
Bro, you don't even know the half, homie.
So that's the chunk of the conspiracy culture that she seems to be most inundated in.
And during 2020, 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 in the U.S., but she's also seeing like the anti-lockdown protests.
In general, it's hard not if you have, and I think most people who have cult leader juice 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.
Area 51 Alien Beliefs00:02:54
People are uniquely vulnerable, and I can maybe get and maybe change my shitty life if I can, if I can rally a following around me.
So she starts the Canada First Party of Canada.
Know Your Meme describes the party platform as generally opposed to progressive socialist and liberal ideologies, as well as what it describes as the UN's 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, its Telegram page had about 17,000 members, which probably didn't translate to more than a few hundred Canadians who would call themselves members of the party.
But first off, for someone who's living alone in like a hoarding and like a tiny room, suddenly you got 17,000 people on your Telegram page saying they believe it.
That's got to be addicting, right?
That's like that's got to feel amazing.
That's like giving someone with a congenital predisposition towards addictive behavior their first hit of heroin where they're like, oh no.
Oh, it's over.
Oh no, my whole life just changed.
Yeah.
This is what I've been waiting for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been looking for a drug to destroy my life.
Thank God.
Oh, my Lord.
You know, it's also interesting too.
Like, 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 20 years and I realize I know nothing about you.
Like there's a way that they, and they're, there, a lot of them are 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 know what I'm saying?
And I, and I do believe, like, you know what I'm saying?
This person like thinks highly of me.
One of the homies I remember was like, I looked up, like, this dude was in Cuba.
I was like, what do you like?
He's visiting Cuba.
Like, he just went to, like, you know what I'm saying?
I'm like, you just went to go visit.
Like, I'm like, I, I have known you for 20 years.
You know what I mean?
Like, I've 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, this like sense, sense to know, like, time to talk, time to shut up, time to go, time to get out.
Like, I know this, this is the moment.
Yeah.
It's always, it's, it's always interesting when you run into people who have that like skill for leaving some stuff on the table.
I had an older friend when I was in my 20s, 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.
Mockery to Desperation Move00:14:00
What?
Like, what?
Like, what?
Yeah.
I didn't, you never mentioned anything.
Like, three's a lot.
Most people didn't do that.
So that says something.
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.
Like, love the attention, that's going to be the downfall.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think, because I think most cult 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 L. 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 that he wasn't deluded about certain things, but I think he was generally pretty aware of what reality was and was just conscious.
And he loved the attention.
He loved being worshipped, but 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 to stay ahead of the authorities, right?
It's not even about, I don't want to say like El Ron Hubbard was perfectly sane and rational.
No, no, no.
No, of course.
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, you know?
Yeah, that's the thing.
If you can hold on to something that's like, this I know is this is who I really am.
Like this is who I really am.
This is work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So on November 20th, 2020, Romana 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 minimal, 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 going to play 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 got to see this.
Yes, but before you play this, like I'm telling, I'm going to laugh every time you say the Canada First Party of Canada.
Party of Canada.
I'm going to laugh every time.
Okay.
Hello, Canada.
I'm Romana Didolo.
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 to corruption, criminality, incompetence, and lies in the government.
See, you know, she is not all what I thought she would be.
No, no, and that's the thing.
She's not very charismatic.
She's not a great speaker.
It's zero riz.
Again, there's effort because that's a competently, it's not like unclear.
The audio is, it's not like good, but you're not.
I've listened to a lot of these.
Usually the audio is worse and stuff like this.
Usually the editing's worse.
Like it was, it's like she hit a minimum bar of competence, 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.
It's also bizarre 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 you copy my whole flow bar for bar.
Like it's already currently, we're already doing the drain the swamp.
Like yeah, exactly.
It's just a ripoff of Trumpist populism.
Mixed with, you know, Trump is objectively charismatic.
You may not like him.
Most of us don't.
But he's very to the people.
He's he's able.
A lot of people do.
A lot of people pick up what he's putting down.
He can give us, he knows, you know, he used to be better when he was younger, but he can 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 as hell.
Why is anyone talking about the Queen of Canada, right?
Because 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 stuck to it tenaciously.
Can imagine that watching the first four years of Trump's presidency, her first three years, had given her a lot of 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 what how much bullshit she was, otherwise, right?
That's what works with these people.
This first video only gets about 24,000 views in 18 months.
And the Canada First Party of Canada sputters out.
And there's not really anything memorable anecdote-wise about it.
They 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 everyone he was secretly the king of America, you know, like that wouldn't seem like a well-considered pivot, right?
Yeah.
But it's going to work, right?
And that's kind of what's most interesting to me about her.
On May 30th, 2021, DeGilo uploaded the first video on her personal channel announcing that she was commander-in-chief of Canada.
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 opposed by a deep state cabal tied to a global pedophile conspiracy that she was battling alongside white hats, 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 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-DeGilo.
This is the early years of Trump that 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 and the military who aren't part of the deep state cabal, right?
They're the good guys who are fighting this secret war, you know?
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 May 30th 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.
Wait, what?
You said this is filmed in an RV?
It sure is.
What the hell?
You just threw that in at the end.
Okay.
Those are RV grade curtains, man.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's go.
My fellow Canadians, I address you today as your queen and commander-in-chief.
We are on the eve of World War III.
I ask that everyone come as one people and one nation and to work with the United States and all of our allies around the world.
God help us and God speed.
Oh, my lord.
Yeah.
What is she?
Who are you?
Yeah, 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?
Yeah.
Don't give her that.
She got flags.
Again, she puts in some effort.
Like, it's not the zero effort version.
Like, she's got, she makes sure everything's white behind her.
It looks vaguely, it looks almost like kind of like an Air Force One type video.
So it's just her RV.
Yeah, but it's like production, but the production value is like West Wing 1997.
Very much.
It's very much a TV show.
Yeah, in the 90s, about 90s.
She's trying, but she doesn't have a lot of resources to try with.
Right.
She's doing as much as she can with what she has.
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 a 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.
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.
That's why I'm doing her.
I 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 manage to poke through and get a number one record is just that's crazy.
Yeah.
With no bars.
Yeah.
And I, I, yeah, that, 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 14,000 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.
It's a little less successful, it looks like initially.
But trying your hat at becoming a figure in the right-wing fever swamps is a little like playing the slots, right?
Each time you pull that lever, actually, it's generally just a button.
The levers don't really levers anymore.
I'm not sure.
Levers are the machines.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Every time you say go, right?
You have a random chance of winning.
And in this case, when it comes 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 bit.
This is a big thing.
This has been an aspect of UFO culture of like the psychic, you know, the whole new age movie that believes that we have psychic powers.
Well, people will be like, I'll play along.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, because at first I was like, are they just like, 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 then I think that's a good chunk of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Even within the right wing, because it's like, even the, even the, the, the, the brain-cooked folks still got some sense to be like, well, this is just funny.
This seems nonsense.
Yeah.
And I think, I think most, even most people on the right who are aware of her are like, well, this lady's a kook, right?
Even most of the kooky people on the right are aware that this lady's a kook.
Um, 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 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 slots, right?
Because maybe somebody who can burnish your reputation, somebody else will come across your shit that way and will 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 Lamarau writes for Vice, quote, the outlandish self-promotion went nowhere until a well-known QAnon figure confirmed her in early 2021.
At the time, the titular Q, who drops clues for the community on Aitcoin, had disappeared.
And Dejilo stepped into the power vacuum.
In a matter of months, her popularity exploded.
And this is important.
We're in early 2021.
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 months after January 6th.
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 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 better on.
Because there's not, you know, like, okay, you know?
So this prominent QAnon figure who is the first guy who really gives her credibility seems to have been a fellow who went by the username Whiplash347.
He runs a Telegram channel with about 300,000 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 Jr., who is deceased.
Wait, but they believe is secretly alive.
Oh, yeah, I forgot he's alive.
My bad.
QAnon Whiplash347 Credibility00:05:13
I got to keep it.
And you know what never dies, prop?
Oh, man, goonies?
Well, that's true.
Actually, one of the goonies must have died, right?
Goonies never say die.
They never say die.
Figure out if one of the goonies has died.
And if they're all alive, hunt one of them down.
Oh, then we're off to ads.
Jesus Christ.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You hear related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, woo, woo, woo.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Sophie's telling me that we are not allowed to tell people to hunt down the cast of 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.
You're going to get kicked out of Oregon for that tick because that was shot in the Oregon.
It's very much Oregon.
I think it mostly annoys people from Oregon, though, because that house, you know, that whole neighborhood probably property values are swollen as a result.
Dude, imagine.
Yeah, like every morning.
Well, I kind of live next to a kind of like a cult classic location.
Underground King Pretense00:13:46
I won't say exactly what it is.
Don't say which it is.
Yeah, I won't say it.
See which it is.
Let's move on from this.
Yeah, you got too many, too many listeners.
I mean, yeah.
So in the space of a year, from like early 2021 to early 2022, Didilo goes from someone who couldn't crack 15,000 views on a YouTube video to someone who in May of 2021 had close to 20,000 followers on her personal Telegram channel.
Amazing.
And at least hundreds of people claim to embrace her as their rightful sovereign and leader.
She's eventually going to get close to like, it's going to be like 80,000 or something like that on her Telegram channel.
So again, you know, the guy who kind of vouches for her has like 300,000 followers on Telegram.
So she's never up to his level.
But that's enough.
When you've got like 80,000 people following your Telegram, you can pull out a couple of dozen folks who are going to be willing to change their lives to follow you in the real world.
Oh, no, that's real.
Like that, 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.
Oh, yeah.
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 for the first kind of few months that she's the queen of Canada, she's just making videos and she's expanding the lore 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.
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 say I'm the queen, right?
Some sort of lineage, kind of how it works, generally.
Yeah, I mean, initially, there's always some guy who's like, I'm the king, here's what a king is, right?
Yeah, by this point, we've got a fairly robust system of royalty in the world somewhere.
We kind of know all our royals, think we kind of know them now.
Yeah, yeah, now, here's how researcher Christine Sarteshi summarizes Digilo's description of her own rise to power as recounted over a series of live streams and YouTube videos.
Digilo 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 M.G. Carlson, who is acting in the role of Commander-in-Chief of the United States Air Force Academy's Civilian Command of Military Operations.
Which not Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force Academy Civilian Command of What?
What?
You're saying words.
Yeah.
Again, like the Commander-Chai-siddy, making sure that there's a connection between the two.
Yeah.
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 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 where they're in charge of the military because we're supposed to have a civilian who's in charge of the military, right?
Yeah.
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.
You're not funny.
Commanding in chief of the country.
That's so funny.
It's so funny, dude.
There's a lot that's wrong about this.
That's why I'm like, that's why I'm like, y'all have to be laughing at her because that is funny.
She does this too with Canada, where she will kind of sometimes, especially earlier on, she would sort of refer to herself as the commander-in-chief and the queen as if they were the same job.
And they're not.
No.
They never have been.
It's just kind of, I think, a misunderstanding, or she just likes the way the terms sound.
Also, Canadians, Canadians, from my experience, are actually pretty well versed in like American history and politics.
So like for her to even say that.
Not 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 in Arizona who does, in fact, claim to be the king of the kingdom of America.
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
She started this time every time.
Yes.
Los Angeles Angels of Hannah.
Angels of Anaheim.
Every time.
Yes.
Okay.
I don't know.
Robert does not get away from David marping 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 came first, like what the chicken or the egg is in this situation.
But she claims David appointed her Queen of Canada in 2017.
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 wasn't the play.
There's no evidence that.
Right.
We have no evidence she thought of this until 2021.
But the story needs to date back to 2017 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.
Oh.
Single-handed.
Oh, man.
That is wonderful.
Now, Prop, 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?
Americans just don't know a lot about the Korean war.
I just don't know.
And I think Canada, we can all agree, Canada's forgotten war is that time China invaded through a series of underground tunnels.
And got turned back by a woman in her 50s.
Oh, my lord.
From underground?
From underground.
That is.
From underground.
I love it.
Everything's got to take place underground.
She's from that chunk of the UFO community where everything's happening underground.
Yeah, everything's happening.
Yeah, there's a whole world under there.
If you're like, China invaded Canada, Canadians are going to be like, I live 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.
Well, maybe I haven't been to the tunnels.
You might have missed that one.
Was it up in the UK?
Because the dude was underground.
It's pretty cold up there.
I don't think you could borrow through.
I don't think it's.
It's a cold place for tunnels.
Why would they do that?
I'm imagining like an us sort of situation here, which is what they're imagining, right?
That's 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 U.S. down to Mexico.
And the Chinese army was going to invade.
And they were going to invade like Canada and the U.S. 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 going to use them for something.
And the Chinese army used them to harvest adrenochrome from children.
So a multinational tunnel.
Like you say through three countries?
Three countries.
A tunnel system.
Presumably underneath like all of the major habitation areas of those cities, right?
I would assume.
This is incredible.
For those countries.
This is absolutely incredible.
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 narcotics for the elite.
This is none of this is new.
She's just wrapping old stuff in her conspiracy theory.
Christine Sarteshi continues.
Didilo claims that the Chinese communist military is a front for the new world order, Satanists and individuals who want to engage in eugenics.
Didilo 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.
Digilo 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 prevented World War III.
For that, she was awarded her title as 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 saying thank you, Romana, for stopping the Chinese communists from destroying Canada and I guess also America.
I'm curious as to why your commander-in-chief in Arizona, like, why he ain't do nothing about it before he even got to Canada.
Like, why was he not, and why would you, like, I feel like...
He's the king of America now.
He's king of America.
I feel like I would have an issue.
Maybe he's down in Arizona.
They haven't made it there yet.
Way down south.
You could have gave me a heads up that they was coming.
You know what I'm saying?
I feel like they were going to 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 queen in Canada, she must have been appointed by the king of America, right?
Obviously, because that just makes sense, 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 got to find someone who could make me queen of Canada, King of America.
How about the king of America?
Right.
Oh, that's so great.
Um, this is wonderful.
I'm still curious, which we'll probably get in with the next episode.
Is like, okay, but where's the bat?
Where's the money at?
Where's the bag at?
Like, what are we?
When do she get to the money?
Like, what is the thing?
Yeah, what's the grift is she's going to raise money to support her quest to save Canada.
You know, like, that's what it's going to be.
You get followers and you take their money, right?
Um, now, 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 details, 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 thinks she's claiming this was a psychic battle.
She wasn't fighting them in hand-to-hand combat.
She was sitting in her house and became aware psychically that Chinese psychers were in tunnels underneath Canada, and she fought off China's psychic warriors.
So, using psychic powers, right?
Physically came to our tunnels.
That's a little unclear to me, prop.
I think so, but I don't think she fought them physically.
That's what I'm saying.
But why would they physically?
Oh, why am I asking about logic?
Why are you asking about logic?
But that means that, see, but see, we learn it here.
We learn it by omission.
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.
Yeah, you got to be in the psychic war.
You got to actually physically be on the Western Hemisphere under our ground.
Yeah, of course.
Or the radio signals.
That's why, again, Arizona was just too far.
The King of America's psychic power reached Canada.
He might have tried.
It's just his signal wasn't strong.
Maybe the caves were made out of dolomite, which we all know blocks psychic residents.
Absolutely.
No way to know.
So the queen claims that after she finished defeating the Chinese, her roommate, it sounds like she's saying her roommate walked it on her.
She doesn't exactly say this, but I'm guessing she was astral projecting.
And then afterwards, her roommate sees her and is like, hey, what happened?
And 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?
The queen having a roommate is really funny.
It's very funny.
It's really fun.
Yeah.
I'll just call Uber East, bro.
Like, seeing if you want to do anything?
Yeah.
Like, I'm the queen.
I'm going to need your half of the utilities bill.
Yeah.
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.
It's like, and then I told my roommate and my roommate started calling me your majesty from then on.
Of course she did.
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 just threatened to kill me.
So I probably don't want to push her too far.
This is clearly an unwell person that I live with.
All right, you're a majority.
I'm just going to say your majesty and get on Craigslist to look for another room.
Absolutely.
Okay, Your Majesty, well, it's your turn to do the bathroom.
So I don't know if you got any of your royal subjects to come do this, but it's your turn.
Yeah, you still got to clean the bathroom.
Yeah.
I was also interested in your acknowledgement of the tunnels being made of dolomite.
Well, I assume it blocks psychic powers.
Maybe not her psychic powers, but maybe the king of America.
I'm just saying my only reference to dolomite was a pimp from the great 50s.
Yeah.
Oh, he was also a pimp.
Okay.
Maybe the tunnels in Canada were made from a pimp from the 70s.
Okay, cool.
Okay, I was like, wow.
No, dolomite was a real thing.
Okay.
Well, everybody.
Hood Politics Mystery00:03:24
You're killing me.
That's this episode of Behind the Bastards.
Until next time, you know what you should do?
Listen to hood politics.
That's what you could, yeah, sure.
Listen to hood politics, listen to hood politics, and declare yourself the king 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 psychology with your brain.
Yep.
I'm going to work really hard on that.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.