Chapter 1: What is the background of Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed Queen of Canada?
Welcome back!
Sorry, 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. Ever. A lot of people are saying this. A lot of people are saying this. You're the only Robert. I'm saying this. You're the only Robert. You're the only Robert.
Yeah, 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 Digilow.
prop jason petty our guest how you doing i'm here man i can't wait to talk about uh tita here that's where she's the um queen of canada commander in chief canada commander in chief queen of canada the canada first party of canada that's right for canadian if someone 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
probably have the same response her roommate would be like oh word all right well yeah probably like realistically like oh your majesty excellent great all right out of here fantastic majesty do you want some coffee because i was gonna make some coffee you're like you're like oh shit you got that royal money guess that means we can upgrade to you know i don't you know can we get hbo now yeah i guess we're getting that that that dope tv package like you feel me when is we leave
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. It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
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Chapter 2: How did Romana Didulo gain a following and what are her main claims?
N-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 Nessera 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 there's going to be a debt jubilee, so all debt will be canceled, and an economic reset, right? Which is a super ā first off, in order to just kind of ā
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 as, 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 increase. Like in a lot of ways, there's a lot.
That's some Deuteronomy shit.
Not that that's the roots, but in the roots of Judaism, there's a lot of talk about dead 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 and 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 was in charge before, or the new king really needs to establish and get like the support of the people, right? All your debts are clear. No one owes anything anymore, right? It wasn't universal, but it happened a lot because it's a smart way to get people on your side.
Yeah, everybody's do-over, start-over. Yeah, it's so normal. Everyone with credit card debt, if a guy became the president and was like, all your debts are canceled, how would you feel about that president? I'd vote for his third term. 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 real money. Just hit zero. Come on. 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 that. 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 there's a really old desire to believe in stuff like this. And it's a huge part of...
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Chapter 3: What controversial policies did Romana Didulo announce to her followers?
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. Yes. 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 military tribunal is held for each one of them until the day they are executed via firing squad or hanging. So, yeah, friend, kill all the military. What the Canadian one, the one that she's commander in chief of, obviously. Where? Well, in Canada.
Telegram. They'll find out. That's where all lawful military orders are always issued through Telegram pages.
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, Mack Lamoureux 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 HERMAJESTY, all caps, I AM...
queen romana right like it's you know tied back to the whole i am movement i am she's using a lot of that language um 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 counter tape oh lord um yeah uh several different rifles and stuff um So that's an actionable threat.
When I was, 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. Yeah.
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 like far right figures on telegram, which is still pretty significant place for them to organize. But at the time was was even more of a hub.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Didulo's claims about executing individuals?
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 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. Yeah. This is a thing where Ramon is 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. Yeah. You know, a lot of people, this is the case, you know, in a lot of things 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, right? You've got those trappings, but she doesn't have any 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, B.C. 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 leave. You know what? We got conned. We got conned. Sorry. It's a fake. Damn it. Again, because they wanted to have fun, right? I think because they wanted to have fun. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How did Didulo's movement intersect with the trucker protests in Canada?
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 actual Canada. I'm the queen. That's not even our flag. We just got to get rid of this bad flag. Yeah.
Unfortunately, people just aren't playing along. Even Fox News refuses to humor her. Whatever journalist they've got on 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 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 barge in and talk to the reporter. And the reporter's not at all interested in her. And so she's like, don't you know I'm the queen of Canada? Yeah. And he's like, oh, I had no idea. Yeah. Like, I didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know. Actually, can you just wait right here, security?
Like, you know, and just, we're going to get to you right now. Yeah. And this goes over really badly. She gets pissed and replies, I'll make sure your commander in chief in the United States Army knows about it. Again, it's not in the Army for one thing. She's not talking about Grandpa Joe. No one calls it the commander in chief of the army either. It's 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?
It's the queen. Sheesh.
Yeah, come on now. So, yeah, you see a lot of jealousy in the stuff she's writing at this time. 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 Federations of Worlds of Light Beings have been working for thousands of years to free planet Earth.
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Chapter 6: What actions did Didulo's followers take during the protests?
So in her article on the subject, Sarteshi writes, quote, Didylo also announced that she and her team were planning a trip to Russia to meet with Putin. 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 Didylo 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 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 Hells 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's in frequent contact with MBS and that he regularly watches her live streams on Telegram and he sends her large sums of money. This, she is wonderful. Oh, man.
Great, great.
Oh, man. Great stuff, man.
Covered every base. You got them all. You got them all. No, really. I'm the homie. I'm the homie. If MBS is sending you money, why can't you just buy RVs? Why are you renting them?
It's not even the Arby's, but if MBS is sending you so much fucking money, why are there three people to a hotel room? Why is the hotel room a $300 hotel room?
Where's the plane? Where did Air Force One go if he gave it to you? Also... Why do you need Hell's Angels 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 both. She's got them both set out. Yes.
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