Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed "Queen of Canada," evolved from a cryptocurrency grifter into a dangerous cult leader who issued fictional executive orders to withdraw Canada from global institutions and replace the economy with a fake quantum system. Her followers distributed threatening cease-and-desist notices against mask mandates, stopped mortgage payments, and claimed authority over a non-existent military tribunal, while Didulo delusionally declared Queen Elizabeth II executed and promised alien-backed violence. Despite attempting to capitalize on the 2022 Trucker Convoy by leading an uninsured caravan that burned a flag, her movement collapsed after failing to gain mainstream traction, illustrating how online conspiracy theories can rapidly escalate into real-world financial ruin and physical threats. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Great Grift Explained00:04:02
Cool zone media.
Welcome back.
Oh.
Sorry, I was doing it.
I was doing Robert.
I was doing Robert.
It was fun.
Yeah, well, I did it first.
I'm always the first to be Robert.
If you don't count that guy who produced The Godfather.
I don't.
But other than him, no other Roberts anywhere.
That's right.
Yeah.
A lot of people are saying this.
A lot of people are saying this.
You're the only Robert.
That's right.
Only Robert.
That's right.
You would have met one if there was another.
And if you have met one, you're a liar.
Anyway, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bastards.
And this week, about the Queen of Canada, Romana Digilo.
Prop, Jason Petty, our guest.
How you doing?
I'm here, man.
I can't wait to talk about Tita here that swears she's the Queen of Canada.
Commander-in-Chief.
Queen of Canada.
Commander-in-Chief, Queen of Canada.
The Canada First Party of Canada.
That's right.
For Canadians.
If someone came up to me and said, I'm the Commander-in-Chief and you have to do what I say, I'd say, I'm simply not in the military, motherfucker.
I would probably respond.
Her roommate would be like, oh, word.
All right, Will.
Yeah, probably realistically, like, oh, Your Majesty, excellent.
Great.
I'm going to get out of here.
Fantastic.
Your Majesty, do you want some coffee?
Because I was going to make some coffee.
You're like, oh, shit, you got that royal money.
Guess that means we can upgrade to, you know.
I know.
You know, you know what I'm saying?
Guess we're getting that dope TV package.
Like, you feel me?
When is we leaving?
Can we finally afford ESPN?
Oh, no, of course, we can't afford ESPN.
Even a royal salary can't pay for ESPN.
The Queen had to fucking pirate that shit.
Yes.
Jesus Christ.
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 Marancini.
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 have happened 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 a man who's shaping our future.
Escaping the Cult Delusion00:05:48
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.
Anyway, let's talk about this great grift.
Well, not that great grift.
This kind of like shockingly mediocre and lazy grift that works way better than it ought to.
Now, in any con like Romana was pulling, there's usually the initial grift, right?
There's the play someone is intentionally making when they start down the road of declaring themselves the queen of Canada or whatever, right?
There's like, this is my immediate plan for how I am going to make money or make myself famous or whatever, improve my situation by lying about this thing, right?
And then that initial grift, either they achieve it, you know, in some cases, they meet their initial goals and then they have to figure out, well, what am I going to do next?
In some cases, the initial goals prove impossible, but they get sane.
Anyway, there's the initial grift and then there's what the grift grows into over time as the leader and the followers become less and less moored to reality, right?
That's also the factor is that I think cult leaders in general, especially the ones who say, I'm an alien.
I'm the reincarnation of Jesus, you know, I'm the secret king or the secret queen, when it's that sort of thing where I am this kind of person or being that I couldn't possibly be.
Everyone believe that in those cases, especially, the cult leaders generally start more sane than they end up.
And it's kind of like getting crazy rich, right?
If you get billions of dollars, suddenly you go from, I have to interact with the world and my experience in the world is a mix of what I want to do and what other people want and how society is set up.
And so there's times where I have to compromise.
There's times where I have to do stuff I don't like, like go to the DMV or stand in line at the TSA because that's just life in society, right?
It is.
And then when you're a billionaire, all that shit goes away.
You get to opt out of everything everyone else does.
Life is just a series of what you want in any given moment and nobody can ever like challenge you or question you.
And so you grow increasingly unmoored from reality and crazy, as we're all watching happen in public to all of the billionaires who run our society, right?
Yeah.
People stop telling you no.
Exactly.
And the same shit happens probably in a more accelerated and even more aggressive way when all of the people around you are playing into this delusion that you're Jesus or a queen or a king or something, right?
Like where you are pretending to be some sort of supernatural, infallible being and 100% of the people you talk to on a day-to-day basis are all buying into it.
That damages your brain more.
I'm not trying to make you, oh, the poor cult leader, but it's like objectively, they lose their sanity the longer they do this because it's sad for you.
Yeah.
I mean, there's, yeah, like, like, I think, I think you use the right word of like, this is, it's, it's objectively breaking your brain.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
You're just, you are losing a complete grip.
And yeah, you can't not know when you put your little single out for your new, your new, you know, techno DJing career, you know what I'm saying?
That like you, this song is objectively trash.
But like, yeah.
Like if I were to start a cult where I convinced people that I was some sort of divine figure, I would also get like a part-time job at a Barnes ⁇ Noble or something.
Just that I had something outside of the cult business that I would like go to and like be around.
And that way you can keep yourself one step ahead of the feds, right?
You're not going to lose your mind too much, you know?
Every cult leader, go out and get a part-time job doing something normal, you know, if you really want your cult to go the distance.
Anyway, just some free advice for the cult leaders out there.
I feel it.
You know what I'm saying?
Backup plan.
It has to be solid enough to where you can maintain pieces of the grift right, you know, and somebody might follow you there.
But like, you have to keep knowing what reality is enough to avoid the pitfalls of reality.
Yeah right, but you're not.
Yeah, you're not ending up.
You're not ending up in the.
You know, the John Mcafee situation you feel me like exactly.
Mcafe is a great example right, but he went too far.
He bought into too much of his bullshit and the world was not willing to to uh, float his delusions any longer.
All right, whereas you compare him to the goat, right to L Ron Hubbard where, as crazy as he got and as many nuts things as he convinced people to believe, Lrh always knew.
Time to get in the boat.
Time to leave.
I gotta get out of this country.
Law is coming for me.
Time to bounce.
I'm out listening.
May I try to make my movies work.
Let's just go to the boats.
Time for the boats, hit the boats.
You calling Lrh the goat will never not be funny.
He's the best, he was the best.
No one has ever been a better cult leader than L Ron Right, like he's he.
He was the king of it.
He's so good at being a cult leader.
You know the fact that, like it still exists, like that's the crazy part about what.
I was in La last week or like three days ago, and I ran past the Scientology building.
It's still here.
It's huge, it has outlived his legacy, like that L Ron Hubbard Boulevard.
Yeah, at that point you you have to like no, you're the goat, like we all every documentary, every expose, we all know, but it's still sitting right here.
I'm like you win, you win, bro.
Yeah anyway, he did it, he did it.
Yeah so uh Sarteshi, Christine Sarteshi's write-up gives us the best insight into what the original con that Didlo was going for might have been.
Quote, an investigation by logically revealed that Whiplash 347 was one of the two main Telegram HUB channel leaders involved in recruiting individuals to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency tokens, described by experts as a large and well-organized Ponzi scheme.
Believing in Debt Jubilee00:14:46
Whiplash is the guy who like, first backed Romana from the QAnon world.
Okay, this Ponzi scheme netted the scammers approximately two million dollars.
The nature of De Dulo's affiliation and or relationship with Whiplash 347 remains unclear.
So again, we don't know why this guy got in bed with her, but he was.
He's like a crypto Ponzi scammer and my guess is that was the original plan or something like that for him, some sort of Ponzi scat.
Well, and he she was involved too where he was like look, if you can get some juice behind you, we can sell your followers on some bullshit and split the money.
That would be my guess.
I don't know.
My guess is something like that was because of because of who this Whiplash person is, that he's a Ponzi scam guy, and because there's no other reason for her to have suddenly started supporting De Julo's claims, other than he thought maybe she had the juice to get a following and he could wrench a bunch of money out of her followers.
That's, that's the only thing I can think of.
Right, I don't know, but that would make sense to me.
Um, I guess you're not having any idea what crypto is either, but anyway right exactly, and just listening to whatever this guy says totally, as the summer of 2021 began, Romana Didulo added the title sovereign Her name.
So her full honorific was sovereign head of state and commander in chief of the sovereign Republic of Canada.
Love it.
Again, you don't need sovereign twice.
Love it.
A head of state implies sovereign.
I would say head of state and commander in chief of the sovereign Republic of Canada.
Sure, but love it.
It's weird to do it the other way.
Of Canada.
You know what I'm saying?
And there are, as you might guess, there's some sovereign citizen stuff mixed into this too.
She's also part of that community.
Some of her language, especially around like debt cancellation, is very sobsit.
She refers to Canada, the government of Canada, the illegitimate one is like an illegitimate corporation that's ruling Canada, very sovereign citizen, adjacent stuff.
Okay.
Which is again, it's an American sovereign citizens should be very wrapped up in America and American law, but they're all over the world because all you need to do is just make a bunch of fake court papers for whatever country you're in and convince people.
You know, anyway.
Okay.
So she announces as soon as you know, this is in her first year as being the queen, she starts announcing a bunch of new policies, like any new world leader does, right?
You start putting out, here's the big policies I'm going to do.
Executive orders.
These all sounded crazier in 2021 and 2022.
They now just sound like actual policies of the U.S. government because she withdrew Canada from the United Nations, withdrew Canada from the WHO, and canceled all foreign aid.
She advised her followers.
So first off, we're just doing Trump stuff here, right?
Like maybe, I mean, Trump's doing the Gilo stuff, right?
Yeah, that's a teaser.
He's dripping her off.
Bar advisors.
Bar, fans.
Right, right.
She advised her followers to prepare for a complete and total worldwide shift in financial systems.
The world now lived under the quantum financial system, which in brief meant that everyone who believed in the quantum financial system got a bunch of free money.
And if you were poor and riddled with debt under the old, we'd say real financial system, under the quantum financial system, you're suddenly rich, right?
And that's the me and the other white hats are replacing the global economy with a quantum financial system.
And now all the poor people have money, right?
That's the idea.
I love it.
I'm as the father of two daughters, the amount of times I've had to sit down and eat and get paid money and eat, you know, imaginary meals and you just have to go along with it.
This tastes so good.
And it's just a shredded piece of paper.
I've had so much imaginary tea.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
This is definitely given that.
So my first thing is I am outlawing chores.
Okay, baby.
Okay.
Sure.
No more chores.
And all grownups have to eat vegetables for everyone.
Okay, baby.
That's your new laws.
Anyway, go on.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Sure.
I mean, and that's, you know, we can talk about how the laws should be.
I do think that all grownups should have to eat the vegetables.
I agree with that.
And that was off her plate.
Those are your vegetables.
Anyway, that's true.
We're not going to agree on this because I'm a bedtime abolitionist prop.
Very anti-bedtime.
That's a dude that ain't got kids.
Let me tell you something.
You're damn right.
No.
It's like incredibly pro-bedtime.
Yes.
So, this nonsense she's peddling about the quantum financial system has its origins in another series of episodes we've done.
A couple of years ago, I did a two-parter on Nessera and Jessera in E-S-A-R-A, G-E-S-A-R-A, which is an old conspiracy theory, right?
And it's an economic one.
And Nesser and Jessera started out as a real series of economic reform propositions in the 1990s.
This was a the origin of this is there were some actual attempts to reform our economic system that people misinterpret.
And it becomes by the late 90s, early 2000s, this conspiratorial belief that all there's going to be a debt jubilee.
So all debt will be canceled and an economic reset, right?
Which is a super, first off, in order to just kind of, because we talk a lot about how silly conspiratorial beliefs are, and they are, I want to peel back a little bit because wanting to believe very badly in a debt jubilee, it's not only is like, I understand why people would want that, but that goes back really far.
I was going to say it's pretty ancient.
The roots of Judaism in a lot of ways.
There's a lot of Deuteronomy.
Not that that's the roots, but in the roots of Judaism, there's a lot of talk about debt jubilees, right?
It's all over the Bible.
This used to be a thing.
And part of it was if you've got a new king, this wasn't just a thing that happened in the Judeo-Christian world, right?
If you got a new king and the new king, as often happens, maybe came to power through a little bit of conflict with whoever wasn't charged before, or the new king really needs to establish and get like the support of the people.
All your debts are clear.
No one owes anything anymore, right?
This used to, it wasn't universal, but it happened a lot because it's a smart way to get people on your side.
Yeah, everybody's doing it.
Imagine start over.
Yeah.
Everyone's credit card debt.
If a guy became the president, was like, all your debts are canceled.
How would you feel about that president?
I'd vote for his credit card.
Probably better than you do about the current president.
I'd vote for his third term.
It's also like the preposterousness of saying that America is $4.9 trillion in debt.
You're just like, yeah, that's not a hit.
Come on.
That's not just hit zero, dude.
Like, it's not.
What are we?
Who's going to call that?
I mean, Europe theoretically could call some of it.
Like, right?
Like, that's part of the problem with us fucking around with our allies.
But also, realistically, who's going to do that?
Who's going to do that and just nuke the global economy right now?
Maybe in the future when people have uncoupled themselves from the dollar, but it's not good for anybody.
Anyway, whatever.
I find this all interesting just because this is, there's a really old desire to believe in stuff like this.
And it's a huge part of there's all sorts of different expressions of this adjacent to and underneath the MAGA movement.
There was a lot of talk within QAnon people about an economic reset.
There was even this side belief that, like, for whatever reason, people should be collecting Iraqi dinars because Trump was about to like revalue the Dinar and it would suddenly be worth a bunch of money for, again, weird conspiratorial reasons.
But like a bunch of white people in the Midwest were buying like old Iraqi currency in their belief that it would make them rich one day.
It's like, man, people in Iraq don't even want to take DNRs.
I've had to spend money there and I usually spent dollars in Euros.
You know, nobody wants the fucking Dinar if they can avoid it.
And a big chunk of like what gets taken out of Nessera and Jessera, this older conspiracy theory into the modern era is this idea of a debt cancellation.
It's prominent among MAGA people, prominent among the Q movement.
And that's what she's tapping into.
And it's a tantalizing proposition for desperate people living on the margins who are always the people most likely to find themselves drawn towards cults, right?
Romana Didulo's teachings found their audience.
Followers had reasons to convince themselves she was legit, including the fact that, and this is my favorite, is once people decide they believe in her, they have to work backwards to try to find evidence that like, you know, there's all sorts of clues that she's legitimate.
And one of the chief ones is that her name, Romana Digilo, is an anagram for I am R. Donald.
Like, I am the Canadian Donald.
That's seriously enough proof for some people.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
Wow.
It must be so whimsical to believe in the world the way you do.
Wow.
Oh, man.
These people are at the red light next to you.
Like, these are.
Yes.
And these people are at the, well, not in Canada, but in the U.S., they're allowed to buy all the same guns you are, which is not great.
Yes.
They can all, their votes count as much as yours.
Yeah, that part doesn't matter because voting isn't real, Sophie.
The mushroom aliens inside Mount Shasta control all of our elections.
But, you know, let's continue with this.
I am our Donald.
I am R. Donald.
I've been saying that for years, Sophie.
You are R. Donald.
Thank you.
I'm going to find an annagram for Sophie's name before this is over.
Donald Sutherland, I assumed we were talking about.
I've always considered you the Donald Sutherland of CoolZone Media.
At first, I like misheard.
I thought you said Donald Sterling, and I got real scared.
That would be an issue.
I don't know who that is.
Good.
Keep it that way, sir.
But I know who Donald Sutherland is because I just watched him in a not very good movie.
Donald Sterling would be a great bastards episode, actually.
He'd be a great bastards episode.
I don't feel like you should lead that one, Sophie.
Put him on the list.
Put him on the list.
The list that never dies.
Yes.
So to get back to Romana, once you start to feel as a cult leader, like you might as an as a as a fledgling cult leader, right?
Because she's spent months now building her telegram.
She's got tens of thousands of people.
She's getting traction.
People are talking about her, right, within the Q movement, but she doesn't, she hasn't met any of them in person.
She's not like, I think she's taking some donations now, but she hasn't made a bunch of money off of this.
I think this is the point at which you have to kind of make a plunge.
Am I just someone who's created a weird little internet community?
Or do I really have a cult here?
Right.
And so if you want to answer that question, the next thing you got to do is stretch your muscles.
So in June of 2021, she starts ordering her followers to hand out.
And by stretch your muscles, I mean try to get your followers to do things in the real world before you take the plunge into like, follow me.
We're all going to live together and you need to give me all your money.
You got to see, can I get them to do anything other than like hang out on my Telegram, right?
No, it's real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's smart.
It's smart.
She's got to be.
Man, maybe you, maybe your song had a cool little TikTok audio.
Yeah.
But like, you can't, you can't sell a concert ticket.
You don't have a career.
So yeah.
Yeah.
You got to test that shit out first.
Yeah, totally.
This is part I sometimes feel as I study these because I never know.
You never get none of these, very few of these cult leaders ever admit to like, and I spent years reading about other cult leaders and how they did things that I would know what to do when I, you know, my time came.
They never say that.
I assume some of them do.
A part of me, I have this belief that there's, it's almost like there's like an a subset of Homo sapiens that's like the cult leader.
And some people are just born with a set of like instincts that makes them like really like, cause I, a lot of her behavior feels instinctual.
Like you're feeling out how to how to make and keep a cult going, how to grow it.
I don't know.
Maybe it's like being the Jedi.
Maybe it's like you've got enough midi chlorians and you can, you can build a cult, right?
And I've always said that Hubbard was the Anakin skywalker of American cults.
But anyways, he really is, including the fact that he got Ewan McGregor burnt his arms and limbs off.
A lot of people don't know that about L. Ron Hubbard, you know?
He got Ewan McGregor to burn his limbs off.
Yeah.
On a volcano planet where he kept his mansion.
Yeah.
Got it.
Yeah.
I sometimes mix up Darth Vader's lore and L. Ron Hubbard's lore, but I think I've got it right this time.
So, when you start to think, you know, all right, it's time to get out into the real world, see if I can get my followers to do anything, right?
So, in June of 2021, she starts ordering her followers to hand out cease and desist notices to local businesses with mask mandates, right?
Because she's really angry about the COVID mandate, she's angry about the lockdown.
So, she has her followers putting these up on businesses that require masks and basically anywhere that they'll get attention.
And Sophie will put up on for the video version.
You can see, here's a copy of one of these cease and desists.
I'm going to read it to you: Notice to cease and desist, effective today, and there's a blank for the date.
I am the witness of the law serving you a lawful document, cease and desist order to stop immediately all unlawful COVID measures.
This is very sobs, sovereign citizen language.
I'm a witness of the law serving you a lawful document.
We are now living in the sovereign Republic of Canada and are no longer in Canada Incorporated Corporation, which again, the doubling up on length, Canada Incorporated Corporation, huh?
Uh, your business is operating in the sovereign Republic of Canada.
Our newly appointed head of state, commander-in-chief, head of government of Canada, Romana Digilo, by lawful order, requires that we resume our lives back to normal and open our businesses to full capacity.
All former COVID-19 measures and restrictions are unlawful, unscientific, and unjust, and therefore invalid, null and void.
This means no more pandemic lies, no more masks, no more social distancing, no more temperature taking, no more lockdowns, no more quarantine or self-imposed isolation, no more genocidal COVID vaccines, no vast vaccine passport and ID chip.
If you still enforce any of the former COVID measures on any living, breathing man, woman, staff, and customers, you are violating the all caps universal human rights and are complicit in crimes against humanity and will be prosecuted by WE THE People Military Tribunal under national law and common law, by the head of state and commander in chief of Canada.
And again, it's this mix of it's all this American soft sit language, the whole, the fact that you're coming back to we the people.
That's not a Canada, that's not a Canada phrase bro, that's like a we the American people thing.
Some of the, some of the stuff too, she's very international cult.
Yeah yeah, some of this stuff also sounds like very much like an English second language type, like like you know, and I and I don't know, you know i'm saying like corporations Canada INK, incorporate corporations like Canada.
Yes yeah, I was like kind of sounds I it didn't hit me until I read it and I was like oh yeah, it's.
Gave me that.
First, that movie that Garrison made us watch Eddington From 20.
I didn't watch it.
Garrison maybe watched that movie.
Garrison can't make me do anything.
I'll watch it one of these days.
Psychic Control and Death00:07:07
I haven't gotten to it.
I was like oh oh oh okay okay um, all right, but yeah, it's crazy yeah, uh.
So her followers start handing these out.
Right, and I know what you're wondering reading all this.
Okay, if someone still continues to enforce mask mandates or whatever after getting the cease and desist, what are the penalties?
You know, they say that you'll be prosecuted by we, the people, and the queen.
So yeah how uh, to talk about that?
Here's a quote from one of Mac Lamoureau's VICE articles summarizing Romana's rhetoric and the dynamics of her community during this period.
Let's keep this simple.
Didilo wrote recently, death is the Penalty for crimes against humanity.
This was met with much jubilation from hundreds of followers.
Yes, wrote one.
I'm so happy we have you, wrote another.
She is the only one that is saying anything hopeful or anything that makes sense.
It felt completely hopeless before Romana came along, wrote a third.
As much as I hate to see people being put to death, it has become necessary because the jerks just won't stop what they're doing, wrote yet another.
Yes.
Yes.
You get a lot there in terms of what's appealing.
Well, this person's saying she's the only one saying anything hopeful or anything that makes sense because she's saying your debts are all about to go away.
All of the bad stuff that you think is genocide, the COVID stuff, that's all going away.
It's all been wiped aside.
It's hopeful, you know?
Yeah.
That's so much of it is just you promise people something more instead of it, you just reading the real news, which is often depressing and really complicated.
And it's very hard to figure out how can I help?
How can I do anything to fix things?
Instead, the queen's just saying, all the bad people are being put to death for wearing masks and your debts are about to go away.
Just continue to listen to me and share my stuff online and send me money and the world will be fixed.
And how are we killing these people?
What's her, what's her weapon of like, what is she, what is she saying?
Unclear, but they're being put to death in secret.
Yeah.
But it's going to be psychic.
Maybe it's psychic.
Do it with her psychology.
That's how I do it.
I feel like psychically killing people all the time.
You know, all the time.
Dude, lyrically.
Yeah, exactly.
I think lyrically murdering people.
The Homo sapien joint, like in as far as like that, that gene to be a cult leader.
Like, I feel like even in listening to this, I think about this all the time, especially with like the hood politics stuff.
It's like it breaks people's psyche that there are some things that are just out of your control.
That there is nothing you can do.
Yeah.
There's nothing.
And I feel like COVID really brought that out to where it was just like, it's a virus.
Yeah.
It just exists.
It should happen.
Like I don't wish, like the earth has viruses.
And I get, you know, having spent a little bit of time in war zones.
I get how people can wind up believing like, oh, I was like, say, something nearly killed me and it didn't.
And I saw other people died.
I must have been saved.
Yes.
Because I've had the experience of something like, you know, I was sitting at a fucking checkpoint and the guys that I'd been smoking with drove off ahead of us and got blown up by a vehicle-based IED.
And I guess I could be like, I was protected, but like, then why did God want those French people to die?
Exactly.
Why God didn't protect me?
Maybe it's just a crapshoot and I got really lucky.
I worked on your challenge, my G.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I don't think he picked me.
No, like some stuff just be what it is.
Shit just happens.
And I feel like, you know, yeah, some shit is just, and it's just, and, but, but the need to tie up the loose ends and have a reason for and find out the source of and just like part of it is just like this, like even just them saying, man, the lockdown sucks.
I'm like, yeah, nigga, I know, me too.
Fuck you want me to do like, you know what I'm saying?
Like, that's just what it is.
Nobody wanted COVID.
It just happened, you know?
So anyway, I just think that like them looking for this answer, she the only one making sense.
Ma'am, she don't make sense at all.
She's not making any sense at all.
She's not making any sense.
You just gave up on comprehending the world because you got too scared and angry.
Yes.
And yeah.
And you see that too.
We're like, I hate seeing people put to death, but the jerks just won't stop.
First off, if you think a group of people need to be put to death for their crimes against humanity and you call them jerks, they probably aren't committing crimes against humanity.
Yeah.
When I talk, when I talk about like when we talk about the Nazis, no one's ever like, what a bunch of jerks.
They really were some jerks.
Like, no, they were monsters committing crimes against you.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
Boy, Saddam Hussein was a real jerk when he gassed all those Kurdish civilians, you know?
Like, which is not the way we use the term.
It's just silly.
Like, yeah, that ICE agent was a real jerk for shooting that person in the head.
Like, it's just not how you do it, right?
When people believe people should be executed.
That's not how you talk about them.
Anyway, it's very childish and very...
Part of like language like that makes me almost wonder how much do these people really believe it?
Or are they just like it's way more fun to spend my days pretending this is real than accepting the reality around me?
I kind of think that is even more of it than I truly believe all these people have been executed, right?
Yeah, totally.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm maybe reading too much into it, but you know who's never been executed for crimes against humanity, prop.
Which is an issue, man.
Yeah, yeah, well, let's just go to ass.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
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.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
Stopping Bills and Utilities00:15:33
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, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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 Lori 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.
And we're back.
So in November of 2021, Romana posted an order for the King of Canada to the King of Canada's military on her Telegram.
Shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject children under the age of 19 years old with coronavirus 19 vaccines, bioweapons, or any other vaccines.
This order is effective immediately.
So again, she gives a shoot to kill order for the military to kill anyone giving out any kind of vaccine.
She follows up by editing shoot to kill to arrest because people do start.
Is she trying to get people murdered?
Which she is.
So she does alter that slightly, but she's going to also repeatedly talk about executing people.
She writes, please use airports, hospitals, schools, stadiums, and other public venues to hold and detain all traitors.
They will stay there until a military tribunal is held for each one of them until the day they are executed via firing squad or hanging.
So kill all military.
The Canadian one, the one that she's commander-in-chief of, obviously.
Where?
Well, in Canada, you know?
Yeah.
Telegram.
You'll find out.
That's where all lawful military orders are always issued through Telegram pages, you know.
So in that unique way, the internet has her community developed their own name for the armed men that she wanted detaining and executing doctors and political leaders, which kind of does suggest that she's not in control of the military.
If you think that you need to develop gangs of guys to detain and arrest and kill all the doctors.
But the community name for these people is Duck Hunters.
So whenever she refers to gathering her duck hunters, she's talking about the armed men that she wants to have murder all of the doctors and politicians who support masks and stuff.
Got it.
In a Vice article on the subject, Mac Lamarau posted a relevant screen grab from her Telegram channel.
He spent a lot of time in there, which will be up on the video version now.
But you see one of her followers, and it's worth noting, her Telegram name is Her Majesty All Caps, I am Queen Romana, right?
Like it's, you know, tying back to the whole I am movement.
I am.
She's using a lot of that language.
One of her followers, a guy named Ron says, all set.
I can bunk a few duck hunters in my home.
I'm all set to hunting gear ready.
And then he posts a picture of several firearms on a countertape.
Oh, Lord.
Yeah, several different rifles and stuff.
So that's an actionable threat.
When I used to teach classes on counterterrorism and stuff like that, when I used to lecture, I would be asked a lot by like, and this is, you know, when I was at Bellingcat, I was doing trainings primarily for like journalists and NGO employees.
And the one thing I would get asked a lot, especially by journalists, because I'm talking people through all these Telegram channels, how to find and follow different groups and different individual far-right figures on Telegram, which is still a pretty significant place for them to organize, but at the time was even more of a hub.
They would ask a lot, like, how do you know what to report on versus what not to report on?
Because it's a sea of people talking about wanting to kill people and the guns that they have.
And if you just, you can't publish an article being like, and here's another Nazi with a picture of a gun saying he's going to shoot people.
I don't know where.
I don't know when.
Because that's not really like a story necessarily.
And it also is just kind of riot because most of the people don't actually do anything.
Yeah, when I, how, how do you tell if something is serious enough that you do need to start gathering more information, report on it?
One thing I would tell people is if you see a sign that someone or a group is starting to experiment with real world activism.
So if you've got this group of people that are talking about wanting to shoot their enemies and they've started putting up flyers and papers in the neighborhood or whatever or something like that, or they've started showing up in the, well, then that's a sign maybe this group needs to be paid more attention to because they're starting to do stuff in the real world.
Take you seriously.
Right.
Yeah.
So when we've got Dadulo's followers going up to people that they see as targets that they see as deserving of the death penalty and handing them cease and desists and also posting pictures of their guns and talking about gathering, that's the point at which I would say you need to take these people seriously because there's every chance at least one of them is going to snap and do something tragic, right?
Yeah, for somebody to take that her little Microsoft Word little document, your cease and desist thing, print it, sign it, and then go do the thing.
Yeah, you telling me something.
Yeah.
That's someone who might be willing to do something more.
And that's a sign that a cult leader or that an extremist figure might have the juice to convince someone to do something.
Yeah.
Right.
Because they're starting down that road already.
In January of 2022, Romana Didulo declared all debts in the kingdom of Canada were forgiven.
Followers began to halt paying their credit card bills and mortgages.
And she specifically encouraged this.
She would even sometimes threaten people who like were still paying their bills.
Like not, she wasn't like following into people, looking into people's finances, but she would say, if you are still paying these bills, if you're still paying off your student loans, if you're still paying your utilities, that means you don't have faith in my government.
Oh my God, I'd be so frustrated if this was like my partner.
Like if you're a spouse.
Yeah.
And you're just like, you have to pay the mortgage.
Like, I'm done with your little Teragram thing.
And this is a huge, this is something that one of the things that Mac did a lot of work documenting is, as well as Soteshi, is like the number of people who stopped paying their bills and would start posting like, hey, my, we don't have any power and school's about to be back in session.
And I have a young son.
I'm still not paying the power bill because I know we're not supposed to, but like, when is the power going to get turned back on?
Like, when are you, when is, when are you going to be in charge again?
Because I just feel like I can't like my son needs to go to school and he can't go to school without electricity in the house.
You get stuff like that.
People lost their homes because they stopped paying their mortgages.
Like people got evicted.
People, I don't know if anyone died, but when you're talking about people cutting off heating or cooling in certain times of the year in Canada, that could get someone killed, you know?
No, that code is evil up there.
Yeah.
You could die.
So we're now talking about someone who is like seriously endangering people.
Yeah, this went from funny to like quick, you know, where I was like, you ain't pay your okay.
Yeah, I want to show you guys a an image that was from a like a study uh Christine Sarteshi published on Romana DeGi Lo, where she's collected a bunch of different like posts people have made talking about how they've stopped paying their bills and utilities.
Okay.
I'm going to read a couple.
You can see like a clip of several of them here.
I'm going to read one or two of them.
I stopped paying my power and hydra bills when directed by QR, that's Queen Romana.
And last month they shut off my utilities.
I've been without power during some of the hottest days I've ever felt.
To add to the stress, my oldest cat passed away yesterday and I suspect it was due to the heat.
I don't know what more to do.
I can't keep waiting.
I need power.
I've been charging my phone and using the Wi-Fi at the nearby McDonald's in the meantime.
QR, early this year, you said that Canadians do not need to pay for utilities.
Recently, you've stated that it would be considered a war crime to turn off utilities.
When do these royal decrees start to take effect?
I've had my gas turned off by Sask Energy.
I picked up the mail today and received a letter from Sask Energy Legal Department saying I owe them for gas.
They must not have gotten your memo.
Account now, he gives his account number, right?
Like these are people.
Oh my God.
They're still begging her.
Like, you can fix this.
Here's my account number.
Can you make this right for them, right?
Hello, dearest HRMQR, Her Royal Majesty, Queen Romana.
Local transport services would not accept your decree 91 pertaining to free public transport services.
They detained me and called the local police services.
I explained and handed over the decree and asked them what criminal offense I was committing before handing over my personal ID.
The officers would not identify themselves either.
They did not hesitate to wrestle me to the ground after a very short time, five minutes for no reason, handcuff me and put me in their vehicles that they could write an appearance notice.
They told me to go to the police station and give my fingerprints three days before going to court.
A warrant would be put out otherwise.
Question: No decree covers this situation to my knowledge.
What new decree or amended decree can be applied with the cease and assist that we use?
Best regards, love and light to you and your team.
I bounce between, yeah, I bounce between like yet.
You don't realize?
Yeah, I bounce between like dumbass and like, oh, honey.
Well, like, you know, honey, this is important because I both, it's important to have compassion and understanding for victims.
I do try to reiterate: I think everyone has a point in their life and a cult that they could have fallen victim to.
Right.
Anyone could wind up in a cult.
That doesn't mean anyone at any point in their life could become a cult.
I think there's things that can immunize you to it.
Yeah.
We're not born immunized to it.
Yeah.
I think I can think of points in my life, particularly when I was like 19 or 20 and broke and overwhelmed with the realities of being an adult.
And like, I had no idea what I was going to do for a living.
I hated all the jobs I tried.
I was like miserable.
I potentially could have fallen into something right at that point in my life.
I don't think everyone could fall for every cult.
And I'm just going to go ahead and say the people falling for this cult are not the sharpest.
Yeah.
Jewels in the box.
Yeah, this, this, I mean, the second my particularly bad one.
Oh, honey.
Yeah.
Like, I, you know, look, man, if you feel like you need to, you know, wear, you know, a onesie for underwear, like, all right.
Right.
All right.
Like, I fair enough.
You think L. Ron Hubbard has mind powers?
He kind of did.
You know, he did.
I mean, some of the biggest A-list celebrities are part of this.
I could see how you could fall for it.
Be like, I'm trying to get the juice they got.
But my friend, my friend, my brother in Christ, the heat's not on.
And you can turn the heat on.
Clearly, this lady can't stop them from turning off your heat.
So I don't under.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's this.
This is part of why I also believe.
I just said, I don't think these are on the higher end of, like, I don't think these are the brightest cult followers that ever existed.
That said, I do kind of suspect a decent number of them really do know deep down that this isn't real.
And so in that case, it's not even an example of people not being super on the ball, brain-wise.
People are just, I think a lot of people are just choosing this as the delusion.
I want to be a part of that.
This is more fun than my regular life.
This is an adventure.
It's exciting.
I don't think that's an insignificant percentage of her people, you know?
Not all of them.
Leave me to my delusions.
Yeah.
Right.
It's more fun than the real world, and it probably is.
Did you low informed her followers?
Until you can't turn the light on.
And again, that's why you got to transition from just telling people to hurt themselves over the internet to hurting them in person in a caravan of RVs, which is where the story's heading.
So the queen informed her followers.
Is she the caravans?
No, she's a part of that, but she doesn't start that idea.
No, So the queen informed her followers that military tribunals had actually been trying and executing deep state cabbalists since 2017 as part of what she called the Nuremberg II trials.
And I hate to backseat alternate reality here, but Turemberg was right there.
Turenberg.
I mean, come on.
It's right.
She currently claims, for an idea, how bloodthirsty this is, as silly as it is, she claims 2.7 million people have already been executed.
Just like, that's like a lot.
It's like a third of the Holocaust or a fourth of the Holocaust, if I don't know how you count it.
Like, that's a lot of people to have executed.
The city of Toronto is gone.
Okay.
Yeah.
Executed at the command of, quote, our galactic federation of worlds of light beings, because by this point, she's brought aliens in.
We're in space.
Right.
We're in space.
There's alien white hats.
They're fixing everything for us.
They're going to solve all of our problems.
You know, and again, this is all a la carte bits and pieces of other cults, of other conspiratorial beliefs.
And like, there's a little bit of Star Trek in there, right?
This is a Dinuguan bowl.
Right.
All right.
Queen Elizabeth, at the time, the closest pick for actual Queen of Canada, right?
Because she's like the, they're like, you know, kind of part of the, they're part of the concept.
Yeah.
Crossing Free Speech Bounds00:12:00
And she was alive at the time.
But Romana claimed, no, she was not.
She had been executed previously, like in 2018 or 2019 or something.
I don't know exactly when she says the queen was executed.
But sometimes Romana would claim to have executed the queen personally, to have actually killed the queen herself.
Oh.
And, you know, this is the case with a lot of fake, like, for example, Joe Biden, who's the president when she starts her thing.
No, no, no, he's not.
He was executed.
He's been replaced with a fake.
Trump's running.
Yeah, he's a fake.
Or actually not.
She doesn't believe Trump's running things.
She believes the King of America is running things.
Oh, but from Phoenix.
Biden's a fake.
Yeah.
She first started to gain serious notoriety as a result of her imposition of the death penalty on basically every medical professional in Canada.
But as time went on, her regular threats of execution and death became a key marker of the movement.
As I noted earlier, followers began describing themselves as duck hunters while posting pictures of their purported firearms.
To the extent that any strategic thinking was at play at all here, I think part of what Romana was doing with this initially was trying to expand her fan base into the United States.
Any half-aware cult leader has to know that we're where the big bucks are.
You're just leaving money on the table if you don't think of a way for crazy Americans to follow along with the alternate reality game that you've turned your life into.
Literally down the street.
We're right around the corner.
You have to go get it.
You got to get involved.
Right.
You got to try for some of that cash.
She would send messages in her telegram that read, quote, American brothers and sisters, in parentheses, gun owners, and all American military veterans, please be ready to load those four by four flatbed trucks and trailers of yours, just in case I, Queen Romana of Canada, decides to issue a special royal invite for you all on a short notice.
Hashtag duck hunting.
Oh, and please bring extra guns and ammo.
Oh, man.
I just love that.
American brothers and sisters.
Gun owners.
Listen.
That's what I mean when I say American brothers.
Guys with guns.
All I read was my American brothers and sisters.
Pew pew.
Pew pew.
And I thought, and I thought of those like fucking clowns, those like racist people that had those guns, that couple that had guns at that protest.
Oh, in front of the mill.
She had a little piece of water.
Little piece of those.
That's the one.
She was commander-in-chief of the American military.
Why do you need a bunch of random Americans with guns to do your killing?
My American brothers.
Were I the most MAGA pilled person?
I would get this and be like, we have to go.
Like, we have to go see what this is.
This is the fucking thing.
I'm taking my guns across the border.
They'll let me go and like set up.
I would be like, we're going.
We have to go.
Like, let's just, we have to go.
You know?
Yeah.
It's just the little gun lady.
Yeah.
Oh, Lord.
Okay.
So, in late 2021, Didilo bragged that she had about 100 duck hunters ready to do her bidding.
A telegram group was briefly created for these followers, and according to our friends at the QAnon Anonymous podcast, was immediately infiltrated by researchers, which probably goes part of the way to explaining why that group is defunct now.
The larger part of why that group no longer exists is explained by the following story.
On December 3rd of 2021, one of the queen's followers was arrested after making threats to shoot people at his daughter's school.
Pervice.
Quote, the post was made inside a private chat for Canadian duck hunters.
The post featured the details of his daughter's school, which was offering vaccinations to their students.
He wrote, time to go hunting, bang, bang, at the end of the post.
The post has since been removed.
It is unknown why or who took it down.
I think I know why or who.
I think because this guy got in trouble.
Because again, if I'm a journalist seeing that, or if I'm fucking a mountie seeing that, that's an actionable threat.
Yeah.
Also, I was pretty close with Pew Pew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
So subsequent investigation by daughter's school accused man.
That's his daughter's school.
They're making her get vaccinated.
Queen says I can kill him.
Shouldn't I?
You know?
She is the queen.
Yeah.
Okay.
He and his family were all seemingly followers of Digilo, taking her advice to its logical conclusion, right?
All this brought Romana her first real-world consequences.
The RCMP, aka the Mounties, carried out a wellness check on her, and she was briefly taken into custody, although no charges were ever filed.
Again, these people are never like punished.
I would argue, I don't think it's a violation of free speech to say, if you're telling your followers, go murder all of the doctors for doing vaccinations, and then one of them threatens to do a school shooting because of what you said, you're somewhat liable to that.
I think you're lying.
Cross the bounds of free speech.
It's the same thing.
Sovereign leader, kill these people.
Yeah.
That's a bit of a thing.
Yeah, it was all funny games until, yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like I can, the wellness check part was, I shouldn't have found funny, but was also funny to me where they were like, baby, are you okay?
Yeah.
So up until the start of 2022, Romana was a figure of growing importance on the conspiratorial fringes of Canadian politics, but not someone who'd ever impacted the real world in a big way.
In fact, the queen had never been seen in public.
That all changed in late January when a group of self-described truckers began occupying downtown Ottawa.
This is what you were talking about, right?
The big truck convoy months really fuck up life in Ottawa for a while.
Yeah.
Their demands were, shall we say, inconsistent, incoherent, and largely motivated by right-wing grievances, right?
This is not a super rational movement with a lot of like specific things that they want that aren't insane, but there were a lot of them.
And for weeks, swarms of trucks and RVs choked the city like a boa constrictor.
And the sheer spectacle made it the most exciting and potentially lucrative moment in recent history for Canadian right-wing figures, right?
This is a thing where Ramana's not on the ground floor of this.
She doesn't help start it, but she sees this and she just hears a cash register.
Yeah.
Right?
There's attention.
If I can show up, a bunch of that attention will come my way and I get money.
You know, a lot of people, this is the case, you know, in a lot of things.
You can, you can talk about on the left wing.
We had our version of this during like the 2020 uprisings.
We were a bunch of grifters who were like, if I just show up at these things, I can start getting a lot of money, right?
Yeah.
You know, so Romana made the decision to break her isolation and display herself in public for the first time.
By this point, she had accumulated a kind of inner circle, right?
A primitive one.
This is like, we're not fully a cult yet.
You've got those trappings, but she doesn't have any like real-world followers quite yet.
This is what's starting to happen.
And the first of them were these people that she had appointed to moderate her Telegram channels.
These are kind of her initial inner circle.
They were a married couple of genially deluded Canadians named Corey and Daisy.
When the queen announced she was going to show up at Ottawa in person to take control of the situation, she pressed Corey and Daisy into service and had them pick her up from her home outside of downtown Victoria, BC.
The couple found their queen living in a small, filthy, and crowded room, more like a storage space than a home.
As soon as they showed up, Daisy related later, quote, We went up there and then she told us, Oh, don't call me queen right now because everybody here knows me as Romana and nobody knows that I'm living a double life.
Now, that's both inconsistent with what she claimed about her roommate previously, but also, why don't your roommates know that you're in charge of everything?
Why are you secret?
You talk about this online.
Like, you're not hiding your existence from the rest of the world.
Why can only your roommates not know?
How do you not walk into that and go, oh man, and then just turn around and lean on what life got conned.
We got conned.
Sorry.
Yeah, it's a fame it got connected again because they wanted to have fun, right?
I think because they wanted to have fun.
Yeah.
That's, I think, is as much thought as got put into it, really.
Like, because these people do leave, so they're not totally, they're not crazy.
They're able to like catch up with reality.
I think it was fun.
And I think at this point, it still is.
And you know what's really fun?
Tell me what's really fun, Robert.
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10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene from iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If 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.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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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.
Putin, Flags, and Disobedience00:16:03
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.
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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.
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Find out on Mostly Human.
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We're back.
So, as you might pick up on by the fact that they talk to the press later, Daisy and Corey get illusioned comparatively fast.
And this begs the question, how did anyone fall for this con for any length of time?
Yes.
And I think there's some interviews that make the basics of what they were doing pretty clear.
Didilo and her followers were all people who felt like something was missing from their lives.
Yeah.
For Romana, this was being a queen because she was not special.
She was not someone who the world said was special, right?
She was someone who was living on the margins, probably a fairly difficult life, probably a life without a lot of, you know, fun to it because she's struggling the whole time and not a life in which people are deferent, show deference to her.
And so becoming the queen, people are suddenly treating her with respect.
They're waiting on her hand and foot.
There's going to eventually be money in this.
But what do her followers get out of it?
Well, I mean, I think they're all people who want to play at being the special boys and girls with a special world-saving quest, right?
Romana offers them a fantasy and they chose to take it.
I don't know how else you explain this level of willful delusion.
And to emphasize that, I'm going to quote from one of Mac's articles for Vice.
Corey and Daisy drove Digilo to meet about 50 cheering fans at the launch point of her convoy behind Victoria's parliament building.
One person broke into tears upon seeing her.
Vice News also attended, and Digilo refused to answer any questions when asked.
From there, five vehicles, including several rented RVs, and about 15 people began their trek towards Ottawa at a breakneck pace.
And, you know, just the fact that like you show up and people break into tears seeing you because they're so overwhelmed with emotion at how hopeful like that, number one, that's someone who has definitely drank the Kool-Aid.
Yeah.
And that's also addictive for someone like Romana.
Yeah.
You know, you, you immediately go from your shitty little hoarder house to, yeah, people worshiping you.
Why would I ever go back home?
You know, that's how she's going to react to this.
Chris Cowan, a videographer, fell in with the group for a while when they passed through Calgary.
He later recalled the pace that they took as aggressive with Romana micromanaging everyone's position in the caravan.
If we were not within sight of the vehicle, we would get a call to go faster, he said.
This would prove to have been a warning sign for the future.
Once they reached Ottawa, Romana and her following, which is like a little more than a dozen people, and when you add in the locals in Ottawa, maybe there's a couple dozen people.
It's a little unclear to me the exact numbers, but it's not huge, but it's a lot for someone like her to suddenly have waiting on her hand and foot.
But they run into conflict very quickly with other right-wing protesters because this is a huge movement.
There's a lot of people in Ottawa.
And while they're all people we might call right-wing cranks, most of them don't believe that Canada has a queen who fought off the Chinese military in underground tunnels.
Most of them don't believe that.
That's what I'm trying to say.
I was waiting for this.
Maybe they're racist.
Maybe they don't like lockdowns.
Probably do believe some bullshit about COVID, but they don't believe this.
I've been waiting for this moment when she runs into the rest of the rest of it.
And they're like, wait, what?
No.
People say we, people say we crazy.
She's crazy.
And this didn't work well because one of the first things she does is, as I noted above, the Canadian government is Canada Inc. Corporation, which is an invalid, evil corporation.
She's the sovereign republic of Canada that she's governing, right?
Yeah.
So she burns a Canadian flag.
The purpose of this is it's symbolic of her symbolically destroying the corrupt corporate Canadian government and replacing it with her own legitimate regime, right?
However, a bunch of angry conservatives just see a woman who is not white light a Canadian flag on fire.
Always get you.
That melanin always comes over super well.
I was like, I was waiting for the Filipino part to play a role.
There it is.
All right.
Yeah.
So this, this causes some tense standoffs and a lot of yelling.
And several, a chunk of her followers leave at this point, actually.
These are people who had not gotten that deep into it, right?
This has just started.
They're like, ah, you know what?
This ain't for me.
I don't like this lady.
I don't like what she's doing.
Like, wait, hopefully, this does not seem very chill to see.
I didn't know we were going to burn flags.
Yeah, I didn't know we were doing that.
I didn't know it was getting this far.
Yeah.
What's interesting to me is that Digilo's reaction to this, I went back and forth as to like, what should you do?
Should you apologize?
Should you try to explain yourself?
Should you try and repair?
She refuses to apologize and refuses to admit any wrongdoing and instead starts attacking the truckers.
Because she's very frustrated, right?
She sees this as disobedience to her rule.
And she also sees she had really been hoping this would go over better for her, that like this is what's going to make me into a major national figure.
I'm going to take over this occupation.
Yeah.
And this is how all maybe, maybe she even thought she was going to physically take over the government this way with a huge caravan of weirdos.
I don't know.
She could have totally just played that so much cooler, be like, no, you guys don't understand.
I'm the queen of action.
I'm the queen.
That's not even our flag.
She's got to get rid of this bad flag.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, people just aren't playing along.
Even Fox News refuses to hurt humor her because they have no, whatever journals they've got in the ground has no idea who she is.
At one point during the occupation, she comes across a Fox reporter who's interviewing truckers and she like tries to insert herself in the situation.
And because she is who she is, she's live streaming this whole time.
So she tells her followers, oh, Fox has requested that I sit for an interview.
And then she tries to like barge in and talk to the reporter.
And the reporter's not at all interested in her.
Right.
And so she's like, don't you know I'm the queen of Canada?
And he's like, oh, I had no idea.
Yeah.
Like, I didn't, yeah, I didn't know that.
Yeah, I didn't know.
Actually, can you just wait right here, security?
Like, you know, and just, yeah, we're going to get to you right now.
Yeah.
And this, this goes over really badly.
She gets pissed and replies, oh, make sure your commander-in-chief in the United States Army knows about it.
And again, it's not in the army for one.
I'm not talking about Grandpa Joe.
No one calls it the commander-in-chief of the army either.
It's of the whole military.
Anyway, whatever.
And again, she's also, I should state, when she says, I'll make sure your commander-in-chief knows about it.
She's also not talking about Joe Biden.
She's talking about that dude in Arizona.
Carl in Arizona.
Yeah.
On the whole, the Trucker rally was a failure for her movement.
Her posts about this period show a deep jealousy more than anything else.
She is really unhappy with the fact that like other grifters are seeing more success than her, and she's kind of being ignored.
But I'm the queen.
Yeah, I'm the queen.
Don't you guys know I'm the queen?
Like, come on here, right?
Hey, this video.
Yeah, come on now.
So yeah, you see a lot of jealousy in the stuff she's writing at this time.
And I want to give you a, this is a quote from her Telegram page.
The ancient royal families, White Hats Military, and Global Alliance, Galactic and Intergalactic Alliance, Federation of Worlds of Light Beings have been working for thousands of years to free planet Earth.
And suddenly you say truckers freed the world?
Get your head out of the toilet bowl, eh?
Oh, she just talked like a Canadian.
That's good.
That's the greatest.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
You guys aren't saving the world.
The aliens are.
Oh, the truckers did it.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Thousands of years this plan's been in work.
Yeah.
The truckers didn't do anything either, just FYI.
Right, right.
And this is the kind of thing, this is a failure kind of for her.
She doesn't hugely increase her visibility or her number of followers as a result of this.
But it's a success in that she's now just spent days living in RVs, which are definitely nicer than her house.
For sure.
She's got like a dozen or more people who believe she's the queen and are talking to her like she's a god almost.
And she's got hundreds of more followers online sending her money and tens of thousands of people reading what she's saying.
Life's good.
Life's a lot better now than it used to be.
Why don't I just keep let it ride, keep this going?
And so she decides I'm going to continue living in a caravan of RVs with my followers as long as I possibly can.
I don't want to go back.
So this is, there's a little bit of a hiccup here, which because while they're living in Ottawa, Romana, they rent an RV.
At least one of the RV, I think a couple of the RVs they rent, they use are rented.
And when they're renting their RVs, the occupation's going on.
And the people who run the rental place are like, okay, but you can't take this to Ottawa for that big stupid occupation thing because all the RVs there are getting trashed.
People are like living in filth there and destroying them.
And we're not going to take that risk.
You're not allowed to do that.
And they're like, we absolutely aren't going to Ottawa.
And then they drive to Ottawa.
And they don't realize that like RVs cost a lot of money.
The cheap ones are like 50 or 60 grand in a lot of cases.
And it's many of them are like more than a quarter of a million, $200,000, $100,000.
They're expensive products, right?
And you don't rent something like that to a stranger without tracking it.
Yo, RV.
Yeah.
So the RV people realize and they call them like, you have to take these back immediately.
And they do take them back immediately because she's not the queen and she doesn't want to wind up on the hook for a shitload of money for these RVs that they would have been stolen.
Yeah.
Right.
So I already know she waived the insurance.
All right.
Definitely.
She's not wasting money on that.
But I feel like that's really interesting to note because that shows a level of like understanding right and wrong decision making and like being a little bit financially aware.
That's very interesting to note.
Yeah.
So she has to, while these RVs get returned and she figures out how to set up a better situation for themselves travel wise, she has to put her whole cult up in a hotel for like a week, which is strains the movement's finances.
They were making money, but it's like thousands, maybe in the low tens at this point.
And between renting RVs, paying for gas to drive across Canada, keeping more than a dozen people in hotels, you're going to run through that fairly quickly.
Yeah.
And you're going to run through it even more quickly because Romana started making, we just talked about like, well, she's capable of some sort of rationality because she had them take the RVs back.
She's also making objectively irrational decisions with her money.
Case in point, and I'm going to quote from Mac Lamoux article here.
For a good period of that time, Corey and Daisy said Digilo made them keep a room open for more than $300 a night just in case Russian President Vladimir Putin dropped by.
I invite President Putin to join the NATO alliance to continue to preserve peace and prosperity around the world.
She said in a Telegram live stream from one of her hotel rooms.
I welcome you to the kingdom of Canada.
She would later claim that Putin gifted her an autographed watch.
I just love it.
Autographed watch.
I just love it.
You got to keep a room open for Putin.
Sharpie?
Like, you just write on a watch?
I just love the idea of Vladimir Putin at a $300 night hotel.
Sophie, you're laughing, but I have a spare room in my house that is kept ready at all times in case Vladimir Putin drops by.
And I think he will one day.
At this point, I'm back on the team of the followers to be like...
Can I just give in the room?
Yeah.
Until he shows up.
Is that cool?
But it's giving, it's giving, leaving the clothes out for LRH to come back.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, there's, there's a lot of, there must be frustration because she's, a lot of these people are like sleeping two to a room.
Oh, right.
Because they don't have much money.
And there's like an empty room for Vladimir Putin so he can join NATO.
I'm sorry.
It's so funny.
But she just left NATO.
I love it.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the story of the autographed watch from Putin is a good case study and how Digilo warps and alters reality haphazardly to buttress her delusions of grandeur.
She was, in fact, brought a watch that looks from a distance like it might be a Rolex.
And she was given this watch by a large man who might be Russian named Marcus.
I'm going to show you a picture from Christine Sarteski's study of Marcus handing her this watch.
This is great.
But there's like this big square-jawed guy smiling.
He's got like a vaguely military-looking jacket on, standing next to Romana in her white coat.
They're both holding the watch.
She has a very serious look on her face.
Well, he could be next to an RV that has her portrait on it, Queen, Her Majesty Queen Roana.
Yeah.
He could just be an extra on that season of Stranger Things in Russia.
That's what I'm thinking.
And it's got, you can see her little flag, which is like a maple leaf that says God loves you, which is a nice message for someone who mostly talks about executing people.
This is great.
I know what you're asking.
Who's Marcus?
Yeah.
Is he connected at all to the Russian government?
Is he Russian?
I don't know.
I have found nothing about him other than this photo that Sartesi took.
Or has.
I think she took it.
I like my theory.
My guess would be that he's a minor figure in the QAnon world.
I don't know, though.
Maybe he's just some guy who would all watch for her and she cooked up the rest and he agreed to play along.
Maybe he came to her with the lie.
I'm sure it's a fake Rolex.
I can't tell.
There's no way in the world.
Isn't that the photo?
There's no way that's a real Rolex.
Yeah.
So after the, and it's very funny.
She's really obsessed in this early period.
And this isn't like the last few months before Russia's expanded invasion of Ukraine.
She's really talking about like, I'm working with Putin to make peace.
He's going to join NATO.
Everything's going to be fine.
He would never invade Ukraine.
Putin's on the side of the white hats.
You know, we're all working to get rid of the evil deep state cabals.
Man, you couldn't keep my electricity on.
Yeah, like your followers' cat died because he didn't have cooling in the summer.
Okay.
So as Russia starts to move troops and mass troops on Ukraine's border and then invades, she's before the invasion saying nothing's going to happen.
And then once it starts, she takes to the air to tell her followers: the Russian army is only in Ukraine to clear out the deep state and no civilians are being hurt whatsoever.
You just stop at the deep state.
Again, you'd think that this is an obvious lie, made even clear.
Again, some of her followers, there's a sizable Ukrainian diaspora population in Canada.
Mac Lammer will say that, like, people were getting calls, people in Ukraine were getting calls from family members who bought into this stuff, being like, you guys will be fine.
Like, that's just got to be really, really infuriating.
Furious.
So, in her article on the subject, Sarteshi writes, quote, Digilo also announced that she and her team were planning a trip to Russia to meet with Putin.
Yoda Wisdom and Lies00:04:46
For the trip, she and her team were to fly aboard Air Force One, the plane used by the President of the United States, which Digilo said she would be renaming QR1.
Months prior, Digilo stated that she had been asked for and received Air Force One.
Digilo would soon be traveling on QR1, but not before the aircraft was repainted with her insignia.
Digilo stated that North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-un has placed Digilo's self-created flag on all of his government buildings, kept her framed photo next to his, and said that she was personally invited to coordinate a state visit to Pyongyang.
Digilo has also claimed that the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club personally offered to provide her with security, and that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, is a personal friend and her brother.
Digilo has said that she is in frequent contact with MBS and that he regularly watches her live streams on Telegram and he sends her large sums of money.
This, he is wonderful.
Like, oh man, great, great.
Oh, man.
Great stuff, man.
Covered every base.
You got them all.
You got them all.
Oh, no, really.
I'm the homie.
I'm the homie.
If MBS is sending you money, why can't you just buy RVs?
You know, why are you renting them?
It's not even that it's not even the RBs, but if MBS is sending you so much fucking money, why are you, why are there three people to a hotel room?
Why is the hotel room a $300 hotel room?
If it's the plane, where's the plan?
Where did the Air Force one go if he gave it to you?
Also, why do you need Hell's Angel security if you're the commander-in-chief of the Canadian military?
Listen, listen, listen.
Because she good in the office and she good in the streets.
I got them both.
I got them chopped.
She's got them both set out.
Right.
Sometimes you need to roll with some guys who know how to get things done.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's right.
Okay, but then what?
Let's keep going.
Sophie.
I need to go to the bathroom.
But Sophie, come on.
Why should she ain't pull up though?
No Canadian gangsters.
Then what happens?
There's no Canadian gangsters prop.
They're too polite.
Oh, yeah, you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What are they doing?
Smuggling maple syrup?
Come on.
I know there's a lot of Canada guys.
You guys can commit murder.
Tell the rest of this story.
I'm dying here.
Okay, okay.
So as her semi-permanent road trip rolled on, Queen Dejulo continued her well-worn tactic of recording live streams and YouTube videos and posting on Telegram.
She became increasingly open about her real origins, which, of course, were not as an orphaned Filipino immigrant, but as an alien from outer space.
The website rapper interviewed Christine Sarteshi for an article on Queen Dejulo.
Quote, she has talked about being from the planet Arcturus.
So there's an alien element to this, Sarteshi explained.
She thinks that she has been sent here in sort of a divine way from God, Master Creator, that she has been sent here to save people.
Digilo does not shy away from claims like these in online videos.
The Arcturians are the most advanced.
Like the Yoda, she has said.
The Arcturians?
The Arcturians.
The Mark Turus.
Yes.
They're the most advanced, like the Yoda.
The Yoda.
The Yoda.
I think she's talking about the Star Wars movie.
She just says just.
That's not his species, I don't know.
That's his name, man.
That's his name.
I don't think the species is the Yodas.
Although I don't know that we have a name for the species.
It's probably somewhere in the expanded lore or some shit.
Maybe they retcon that.
Either way.
This is like the most worked up I've been in an episode, and I'm really sorry to listeners.
You're so funny.
Yeah.
It is so funny.
I learned all my powers from the marks.
Yeah, from the marks.
Oh, my God.
The Yoda.
She has said, I am not a dictator.
I am guided by the highest divine beings, and I am here to deliver peace and prosperity.
You know?
Sure.
Okay.
That's believable to me.
Go off.
I think that's all real, you know?
And I think that's a good place to end part do.
We'll come back next week.
This ran a little long.
We'll have a third parter, and then next week we'll also have a separate one-parter episode.
So you'll get your two episodes next week.
Don't worry, worry, folks.
I can't believe there's a lot of people.
I just wound up having a little bit too much fun with Queen Romana.
It's a nice little break from all of the crimes against humanity and murders.
Although she's mostly talking about that.
I'm going to try to calm down before part three, but I can't promise anything.
I can't believe there's another part.
Sophie, Sophie, take some of the wisdom of the Yoda.
You know, relax or don't relax.
There's no trying to relax.
Relax, I am.
Okay, listen to hood politics.
This is the episode.
You're tight with the Yoda.
I'm tight with the Yoda.
The Yoda.
The Yoda.
The Yoda?
All of them.
The Yoda.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Again.
Anyways.
Do we believe that?
I know we believe it's real.
I know there's people who believe Yoda's real.
There's people who believe that all of the fiction stuff is real.
I wish Yoda was real.
So cute.
Fiction Becomes Reality00:03:10
Don't tell people things.
They don't, you know, you can't make jokes.
You can't have fun in the world.
There's too many people who will just believe whatever crazy stuff you say.
It's unfortunate.
Anyway, As an island in which children are hunted for sport by the wealthy, um, you know, go out into the real world and take action based on this totally true thing that I told you.
Not a lie, not just a bit for a podcast.
Rory, cut that.
Rory, fucking cut that.
Robert, we can't.
Keep it in, Rory.
Keep it in.
Keep it in, Rory.
Fuck off, Robert.
Yeah, it's okay.
We've said it's a joke.
It's fine.
It's not fine, Rory.
Fucking cut that.
I keep it in, Rory.
Keep it in.
Bye.
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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.
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Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
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Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the 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.
Shocking City Hall Murder00:00:34
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.