Behind the Bastards - Part One: Romana Didulo: Queen of Canada

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Robert sits down with Prop (Jason Petty) to discuss the QAnon Queen of Canada, Romana Didulo. (3 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast, brought to you by no major streaming networks. That's not a thing that we're doing. Ignore whatever it is, Sophie says after me. That was so fucked up. That was so fucked up. That was so bugged up. I can't even tell you, guys, how many meetings that I've been in. I can't even tell you.

I was like up at five in the morning clipping together something for, I'm worried. so hard and Robert's like mind you you work so hard we're trash um anyways you work hard for our network that has nothing to do with a major streaming service anyways you tried so hard and come so far wow wow prop i'm really glad props here for this anyways just just wanted to give a little PSA at the top that uh if you're an audio listener not a single thing has changed for you my friends you can still listen to this podcast wherever you get your podcast iHeart radio app podcast Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a PSA at the end, if you're forgetting what I'm saying up top.

Also, full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. So hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. Yeah. And look, I know what you're all saying. Netflix only had one demand, which was that we stopped making actionable threats against it. Yeah, so. And, you know, I feel like that's a fair compromise.

Yeah, so hit, remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. And then for clips in older episode catalog, continue to just, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Yeah. Respect. That's what's up. Yep. Look, Mom, I'm on Netflix.

There you go. I'm saying? Well, let's stop talking about streaming and start talking about something important, which is our guest for this episode, Jason Petty, aka Prop. The best guy. Family. I'm so excited. We're back.

We're back. Back, baby. Back in the New York mood. Not really. We got photos back from the live show we did last year, and I was just looking at it, and it's the three of us. I was like, damn, I got to frame this shit. You know what I'm saying?

It's like a family photo album. I need it. I love you guys. Listen, it is a blessing and honor to be here to talk about some sort of piece of shit. Yeah, we are. Yeah, man. You know what I'm saying? I'm talking about.

I was just over here jamming some Barrington Levy. It's calling ICE murder. You know what I'm saying? I have shocking news to start this episode. What's that? The bastard of this episode is not a man. No, no, no. We've got a lady bastard this time.

We've got things are dark in the old United States these days. So I figured we'd take a trip up north to our normal and mentally healthy neighbors where nothing crazy ever happens, obviously, in Canada. And let's talk about one of Canada. most notable bastards of the moment, Queen Romana Didiolo, the queen of Canada, which does not have a queen, notably. I was going to say, AKA did for a while. AKA, who? Yeah.

So she is, she's essentially a QAnon influencer who's starting in like 2021 declared herself the queen of Canada, and she's been declaring things ever since, living in like an RV caravan with all of her followers. It's good stuff. Oh my God. On behalf of everyone who's just nervous system is beat to crap, man, thank you. Thank you for giving me something

this absurd. She's a mystical creature. No genocide. No real body count. She's a cult leader. She's, you know, in Robert's script, it says she might be an alien. She might be an alien.

We just got her. I'm excited. I love it. She might be an alien. She might be psychic, but she's definitely a cult leader, right? Thankfully, she's not a good one, which we don't talk about enough. Oh, God, dog. Listen, man, I was here for the Thomas Jefferson's. I was here for the lost cause, for the crack attack.

I was here. Yeah, let's get some fun. Man, thank you. Yes. Yeah. We're going to have a good one. Yeah. I feel like this is also, you know, because Himmler, if you're competing,

If you're out there trying to make your mark as a monster and you're comparing yourself to someone like Himmler, you know, you're just kind of wind up feeling inadequate. And I don't want any of the cult leaders that listen to this podcast to feel inadequate. You know, there's been a series of threads going around on Reddit where people are pointing out that like, you know, how few people actually make over $100,000 to be like, hey, if you're making less than that, you don't have to feel bad. And I want to do the same thing to the cult leaders out there. If you're a working class cult leader, you know, really bust in your ass to keep a dozen or. so people, you know, locked mentally in the chains of slavery to your insane will, this is for you, you know, you can't all be L. Ron Hubbard, can all have a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, you know? Again, I appreciate you saying this. This is like the, the, the, the, the DEI affinity

group of that's right, bastards in college. I'm obsessed with you. I appreciate this, man. You know what I'm saying? It's just like, listen, man, all of us don't start off. You feel me? Like, we all don't start off with the privilege of being a six-foot white dude, you know what I'm saying, with the money endowment where you can just buy land, you feel me? Everybody ain't Jim Jones. You know what I mean? Like some of us got to get it out the mud. Yeah, you have to like get people okay with the fact that like if all you can do is is really completely destroy the mental freedom and sovereignty of like 10 people, you know, that's enough. You're valid as a cult leader. And that's what we're telling Ramana, you know? I get it. And also, you know what I'm saying? If you're

If we talk about Canada, I mean, they got stuff like health care and like, you know what I'm saying? So they're kind of like. Justin Bieber. They kind of really don't got nothing to complain about, you know, so to get somebody to fall into a cult in Canada. Like, I mean, good for you. I do feel like they have something to complain about. They've got stuff to complain about. Largely the cult leader that has destroyed their lives.

I was going to say, I was going to say Drake, but. I was going to say 10 bits. But he's already been destroyed. I was going to say, but Kenny took care of that. Yeah, Cornwall Kenny already took care of that. I've also liked to say that, like, not that I would ever, ever, ever give a high five to any sort of Western world leader. But Matt Carney just got his bars off. Like, I'm going to give our Mark Corny.

Good little Davos speech. Yeah, he got his bars off. I appreciate that. He was like, can we just stop caping, y'all? Can we just stop pretending like. And again, that's part of why I support the Queen of Canada, right? Is that for too long Canada has sat in the shadows as American cult leaders have gotten all of the attention, you know, just because we're better at cults than Canadians, you know, a lot better, like way better. But that doesn't mean there aren't Canadian cult leaders.

And today we're going to talk about one, right? This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King's senior. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles.

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for wherever you get your podcasts. Now, as I noted, Americans are better at Colts. And so before we get to her Royal Highness, I want to talk about a different cultic movement that people generally say, helped prepare the ground for Romanus cult. And this is an American cultic movement,

the I Am Activity. And it's always spelled, I Am in all caps and quotations, and then activity with a capital A. That's the name of the movement. And it's like a Christian faith movement. movement from the United States, kind of, that turned into like a self-help cult. You got to cropped up.

You got to say the whole thing, like a PIP named Slickback. It's like a tribe called blessed. The IAM activity. Yes. You have to say the whole thing. You can't abbreviate it. People won't know what you're talking about. So it cropped up during the peak of the Great Depression at the start of the 30s,

which is, you know, a good time to be starting a cult. A lot of our new age movements have some to, To some extent, their origins and the Great Depression. And the IAM movement has its roots in the city of Mount Shasta, which is the least surprising thing on earth if you've ever been to Mount Shasta. You're in the chat. Yeah. They're already in cults. You already know.

Like, you feel the cult vibration as soon as you leave the Bay Area. Yeah. You like, it smells like cold. If you live in Mount Shasta, you've already been told to cut ties with your friends and family. and hand all of your money to a charismatic stranger. Don't get gas over there, boy. Oh, you better. You better get a gas up in Wyrka, brother.

Wow. That's a lovely town. But Mount Chasta is a big volcano situated in northern California, not that far from the border of Oregon. It's very pretty. It looks kind of like a lady. And the town there has a reputation for being a hub of the New Age movement and various cultic groups. Like today, if you go there today, there's a lot of woo shit in Mount Chasta. and this has been the case for a long time.

Now Shasta kind of helped give birth to the New Age movement. Wait, the mountain looks like a lady? Yeah, that was a new one. Kind of, yeah, the mountain. It kind of has like the silhouette of a lady. So the native said, and it does. If you look at it during the sunset, it looks like it. You can see her face.

Oh. Cute. I kind of know. She's a pretty mountain. I tied Shasta with just like white women with dreadlocks. Well, yeah, there's them there too. but they didn't start being there. So it has a reputation for being a hub of the New Age movement.

There's also persistent rumors that aliens live inside the mountain, right? Didn't know that one. Yes, yes. And I can confirm that there are mushroom aliens living inside Mount Shasta via four independent interviews that I conducted with guys I got stoned with at grow houses in the area. So, you know, that's as solid evidence as you're going to get that there are, in fact, aliens living inside Mount Shasta. Yeah, I mean, that's a triple source confirmation. Exactly, exactly.

Any newspaper would print that. Yeah. Anyhow, the root of the proud tradition of kookiness in Mount Chasta starts with a local man named Guy Ballard, who while hiking on Mount Chasta received a vision from St. Germain. Now, when I heard that, I was like, oh, this guy's probably Catholic. Some saint visited him, right? Yeah. That makes sense.

You know, Catholics are always talking about the saints visiting them. That's not what St. Germain is. If you look up St. Germain online, you'll come across two different things. One is a kind of elder flower liqueur that you've probably seen in bars. It's got a pretty distinctive looking bottle. Okay. And I think it's named after a long dead confidence man who was not at all a saint, who described himself as a count and who made a bunch of famous friends, including Voltaire

and told them stories about being 500 years old and all-knowing, right? Oh, I love this guy. Yeah. This was a guy a few hundred years ago. who just kind of, he got famous for going to parties and lying about himself, right? Which was easy to do back then. Yeah. You know?

Who was going to check? Who was going to check if you wouldn't 500? Yeah, exactly. As long as you're in a different city than you're from, no one's figuring this shit out. There's a little bit of like, I kind of like, like, gaze back longingly over those days. Because I just feel like, if you think about like the whole plot of like the born identity. Right, right.

With facial recognition, you just don't have a movie. Like, this guy got all kind of like passports to say where he's from. It's like, excuse me, sir, can you step over here, please? Like, there's just, you can't have a fake ID. You know what I'm saying? So the idea of saying, because the internet exists, that I could be like, oh, yeah, no, we're actually royalty. I'm from Ethiopia.

We're royalty. Like, there's no way for you to check. Like, now it's like, sir, you were. born in inglewood. Yeah. Yeah. And Guy Ballard is, yeah, what are these, he, he sees this St. Germain fella. And I don't know exactly how to categorize St. Germain.

I think we have to file him under the category of, like, con artists whose cons have been lost to obscurity. Because he's hanging out only around rich people, and he's lying to them incessantly. But I don't know, like, entirely what the grift was, right? Like, what was he getting out of this? was just that he got invited to parties and he got to stay at rich people's fancy mansions. It may have been that, right? Yeah.

And he was a charming guy by all accounts and multi-talented. He was good at music and stuff. So he was fun. You didn't have TV back then. So a lot of prominent people, if you were just interesting, you could get invited to rich people parties and make an okay life for yourself because there was nothing going on. And all of the other rich people are pretty boring. He published a bunch of sheet music in his time.

and he wrote two books of magic. One was shaped like a triangle and detailed a ritual that would provide the practitioner with a natural wealth and long life, just as the count was said to possess. Okay.

And his books became influential among the occult. And as a result, when the the theosophists came around in the late 1800s, Helena Blavatsky declared Saint Germain to have been the most powerful wizard

of his kind in several centuries and that his astral form had visited her and bestowed secret wisdom on her, right? This is amazing. When we get in the end of the 1800s

the 1900s, that big occult wave that kind of does in a lot of ways leading to like the Nazis and stuff. Yeah. St. Germain is just from a previous era, a couple hundred years earlier. He's one of the most famous guys who was like into magic and everyone just wrote about him. So she says, oh, he visited me and he taught me his secret powers, you know?

And then he visited this. Yeah, Ballard. Right, exactly. Like 40 years, like 40 years after he visits Blavatsky. And so I bring all this up because Guy Ballard didn't just invent, oh, St. Germain, That's an interesting figure from the past who said taught me something. He's ripping off Blavatsky, right? Got it.

Like, she was the first one doing this. And so Guy is like, well, I'm looking to make a name for myself. I want people to see me as a cultic leader. I guess I got to have St. Germain back me up too, right? Okay. And so Guy Ballard takes this, you know, and he says basically St. Germain told me his secrets to long life and, you know, mental powers. And I'm going to teach him to you.

That's the basis of the I am activity, right? Which is this mystic educational movement based on St. Germain's supposed teachings. I am activity. The I am activity, always all caps and in quotation marks with I am. Don't you ever say it differently? Listen, like a tribe called quest. You got to say the whole thing. Exactly.

Yes. So per write up on the website, new religious movements. The core teachings of the I am activity center around the presence of the I am or God presence within each individual, a divine spark that connects everyone to the creator. Through specific practices such as decree, spoken invocations, and affirmations, followers aim to realize their divine nature, achieve self-purification, and ultimately ascend to higher spiritual realms, emulating the ascended masters. The Ballard's teachings also incorporated elements of American patriotism and nationalism, claiming the United States had a unique role in the world's spiritual destiny.

Bro, this is so, there's so many, like, like, seasonings of, like, Pentecostal Christian in that, like, you're declaring the I am that I am and you get to speak, speak the power of existence, bro, like, let me tell you something. Right. Like, I could, I already, I already see where that how this got, how this became Christian, you know what I'm saying? And that's, it's worth knowing, as you pointed out, the I am and I am activity is a reference to the Bible. Yeah, the God. Yeah, Moses. What God said to Moses. Yeah, what God said to Moses, right?

And that's what, you know, it's possible. We don't know Romana's going to say a lot of stuff that references aspects of the IAM activity. I don't know if she's aware of the original cult or if it's just because the IAM activity kind of becomes part of foundational American cultic lore. And as is always the case with this stuff, pieces of it wind up picked up by generations of later cultures. And thrown, and not just cults, but thrown into different aspects of like new age thinking. For sure. Think pieces of Ballard's work kind of wind up in self-help books and stuff for decades to come, which may just be the extent of like where, how she picks up on little elements of this, right? Now, the IM activities, you may have guessed from the fact that most of you probably hadn't heard of this before.

No. No. It was not a huge hit. It was just it was not, it was not, it was like middling. I'll say that. Its great claim to fame was a Supreme Court case, USV Ballard, over whether or not it was fraud for. leaders of a supposedly religious movement to collect donations based on religious claims they did not themselves believe. And the case was launched after Ballard's death. People sued and argued that like his wife and son who'd helped with the cult didn't really believe in anything, and thus were committing fraud when they took in more than $3 million worth of donations. The Supreme Court ultimately decided the question itself is inappropriate for a court to ask, right? We can't even rule on this because us, the idea that a court would have anything to say about

whether or not someone legitimately believes in a religion they espouse is inappropriate, basically. Like, we shouldn't even be here, you know? Yeah. Which is, I'm so mixed about it because both, if they had ruled, yeah, that's fraud, maybe a lot would be better. But also, it really isn't a court's place to say, I think that guy doesn't believe what he says he believes. Yeah, that's not really like, when it comes to religion, you know, when it's a crime, like. That's interesting. And, like, how could a court call that?

Like, to be like, it's tough. It's tough. Yeah. Yeah. That was super interesting. It's like, I don't know about your faith, buddy. You know what I'm saying? You said you believe, but I don't think you believe it. Like, because it's one of those things I can imagine a million problems we could have avoided if they ruled differently, but also a million new problems that we would have had. If we were like, no, the court gets to decide if you really believe in whatever you say you believe in. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like, yeah, that's probably a problem. Which one of these cans of worms do we want to open? Yeah. I'm saying. Like, yeah, because, because even like, you know, even fast forward to, you know, again, American Pentecostalism, like, how many of it would have been like, hey, bro, you, you really

don't believe you could heal that person, do you? Yeah. You know, you don't think that what you pulled out of them. That's chicken gizzard. You don't think that's really cancer. Yes. And he's like, I got me, you got me. Can you imagine?

I feel like there is a line where it's like, yeah, if you're like pulling, chicken gizzard out of people pretending it's cancer, you're probably committing fraud. That's probably crossed the line. But if you're just asking, do you really believe that people can chant themselves into immortality doing this or whatever? Like, I, yeah, I guess I can kind of respect the Supreme Court being like, this isn't even our place. Like, this isn't even an appropriate thing for there to be a court case about it.

I kind of, I, it's really mixed, but I can see the logic, you know? So the movement limped along, the IAM movement. They won this case and they limp along until Ballard's wife dies in the early 1970s, at which point leadership passed to a board of directors. The group is still kind of existent today. The I am, but they've got like a newsletter they publishes of shit. But it's not like a thing anymore, not really. As I said, it's relevant to us because pieces of it have been passed down in New Age and

cultic and occult lore ever since. in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada. And the IAM movement is relevant primarily to us today because Ramona Didulo would later ape a lot of its core language, knowingly or unknowingly. And so let's turn to her now. Okay. The purported Queen of Canada was born in the Philippines and given her age would have had to been born probably sometime in the 1970s.

We get very little detail from her early life that can be confirmed to any degree. And she doesn't seem to have made a ton of claim. about her childhood and life before coming to Canada. Most of the stories we do have concern her grandmother, who is a sort of her figure within the cult that she's created. And Romana says that her grandmother, a first-grade teacher, raised her to speak five languages fluidly. Researcher Christine Sarteshi of Chatham University

is almost certainly Didulo's number one biographical expert, and she writes of the queen's further claims. That same grandmother mounted a strategic defense and offense and successfully block the Chinese from invading their regional stronghold during World War II. This claim could not possibly be true since during World War II, Japan, not China, occupied the Philippines. Because they wasn't there. She's going to say a lot about fighting the Chinese. This is a family business to her.

But again, they've got other shit going on in World War II. They're not in the Philippines. Yeah. I'm a bit like almost equal parts sadden and exciting. that this is a penai, that this is like a Filipino woman. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was like, oh, she's from a Filipino. Okay, so that adds a layer of like awesome.

And again, for newcomers here. Yeah, for newcomers, as y'all can see my face, my stepmother's Filipino. So, like, I'm part of the culture, so there are things that I can participate in that I can only participate in because one of my moms were Filipino. Yeah, and she is,

Didulo, she doesn't, It doesn't emphasize that part of her heritage very much. She'll talk a little bit about her grandmother, but she's not massively, like, she's more Canadian, I think, than anything else. Because she leaves when she's very young, right? And I doesn't seem like she has a ton of contact with her family over there, although that's kind of unclear to me. Yeah, does she go to Toronto? No, no, Vancouver. Okay.

If she goes to Vancouver. Yeah, I was like, because those are two very pretty big, like, Filipino populations. Yeah. And I don't, she, anyway, she may have been closer to her family there. We get very little about her life before she comes on the scene as a cult leader, but she doesn't talk much about anything to do with her, like, background, really. Like, because she's very, she has a vested interest in not having you think about her before she was the queen, right? Like, that's kind of why.

So I just, there's not a lot to say on that account, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Her father was a lawyer and an engineer, but he dies when she's 10. Her mom dies a year later. and so she's raised by her grandmother for a couple of years, but not long after her parents die when she's 15, she moves to Vancouver. And she's raised by other relatives there. It's kind of unclear, you know, how much of this is her grandparents, so they move with her. I actually just don't have that information.

And that's really about all we've got, as refers to her early life. We don't have any sort of real documentation about her outside of this. Sarteshi and a journalist from Vice, Max Lamarrow, are kind of the two people who have really delved into her background a lot. So I am, I haven't, there's a couple of other things I found just from like shit she's written online. But most of what you're going to find about her is from those two. And there's just not a lot that's known yet about what was she doing the first like 40 years of her life, right? You know who doesn't have a public life?

because they live only to serve you and to bring you joy. It is known. Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. That's right. Glorious. Yeah. Yeah. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.

America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the board of trustees, including Martin Luther King's senior. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in a little like Lamouba. Listen to the A building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

So keep this secret for so many years. He's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage. But it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who prays unvulnerable and trusting people. Your creditor might go up and good. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation and the day integration at night.

When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together, but not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were just dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power.

They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea.

In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not taking. Your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody.

There were years right at where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a bit to come around here in my wife.

Boom. Boom, this is the red weather. Listen to the red weather on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, when Romana next appears on the public record, she's a Canadian citizen and an entrepreneur. She seems to have run a couple of different companies. And I know Mac Lamarrow of Vice is someone, he's reported heavily on her, and he seems to think these businesses that she had were some kind of con, but the specifics. if maybe how she was trying to con people

or unclear. That's at least how I interpret something that he said in the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Mac, if I got your meaning wrong, I apologize. That seems credible to me. Although, again, we don't really know what she was doing with these businesses.

We have very little on them. Sarteshi writes. Side note, dude. Yeah. Wait, hold on. Side note. Like, QAnon feels like a fever dream right now. It's still there.

But, yeah, I mean, that happened. Yeah, I was like, wait, that happened. We moved past it in a lot of words. Yeah, because our nature of work, we know it's still kind of there. But I was just like, bro, them fools went to the, they stormed the capital. They stormed the capital. They won. A lot of them got into positions of power.

And they seem almost to, like, I think a lot of the folks who have gotten into power who started out being cue-pilled, a decent chunk of them have had to even pull back somewhat. Because once you're in office, you can't, like, there's not a lot that you can carry further from a lot of the QAnon shit, right? Yeah, it's a real job. Once you get to, it's like, this is actually a real job. I got, like, stuff. I'm going to goifting, too, but, like, I can't, I can't keep talking about how all of my

colleagues that I work with every day have secretly been executed. Like, that doesn't make much sense. I share a desk with this guy. I do love, I do love the idea of a conspiracy theorist, you know, as pilled as that. And then you get to finally, like, the deputy director of the. I don't know, interior for agriculture. And you're like, oh, it's just spreadsheets. Yeah.

Everybody here is just doing spreadsheets. And now I'm one of them. And I know, what do I do? It's the sad thing of when you really come to, like, growing up, I was a conspiracy theorist, not like in a literal believer way, but as like a fandom. I enjoyed the conspiracy phantom, right? It's fun. One of my OGs.

This is a diversion, but it's very funny. One of my OGs told me a joke recently. And like he called me, my man Jonathan. He called me. He said, hey, I got a joke for you. He goes, okay, this conspiracy theorist dies and he goes to heaven. And he's sitting down and he's talking to Jesus. And Jesus says, hey, you know what?

Ask me anything. And the guy goes, all right, JFK, what happened? And then Jesus goes, dude, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, third story, single shooter. right out the window. He got him. Three shots all from him. And the conspiracy theorist goes, man, so this thing goes higher than I even thought. You get it?

Because he thinks Jesus is in on the conspiracy also. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at Sophie. I mean, I've been saying that for years because who else would have had the power to drop someone like JFK, you know? Yeah, of course. But I, so like, I mean, obviously Bernie Sanders. But of course.

Of course. You get to, like, you get to this point where you study the world enough to realize that, like, there are conspiracies, but they're all, as you said, they're mostly guys with spreadsheets. Even conspiracies are like, they're not usually fun. They're like some guys hiding a bunch of financial crimes on a spreadsheet or, like, hiding the fact that they're bribing people to put in place a law that increases their bottom line by and maybe that also kills a few hundred thousand people. But they're doing it because it makes them like 8% wealthier, right?

Yeah. And it's only usually like four of them. Yeah. Like, and nobody doesn't really know the whole story except for maybe two of them dudes. But the idea that like, yeah, 70 countries have agreed that we're going to lie about the shape of the earth. Like 70. Like, you know what I'm saying? For 60 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They couldn't, again, like they couldn't keep, like we're seeing the actual conspiracy now with like fucking Alex Prattie's murder, right? where we all see the video of this man who is completely unarmed and was never violent just getting executed by an ice agent.

And then the government's like, no, he nearly killed him. He nearly killed him. That, my friend, is a conspiracy. But it's not like, it's not fun. It's just like, oh yeah, it's just brute force of evil just lying. And that's like what conspiracy. It's never seven different kinds of alien

have gotten together to hide the fact that the world leaders are drinking the blood of children in order to get high. Yeah. No. It's, again. It's, again. It's, again.

The exact same thing with Renee Good. She was going to run this man over. Literally, no, she wasn't. Or fucking Epstein, right? Where it's like, yeah, there was a conspiracy. A bunch of guys looked the other way at this dude's shady financial dealings because he provided them with 15-year-old girls, right? Like, that's pretty simple.

There's no aliens. Yeah, pretty simple. It's not, it's not blood sacrifices. Yeah. It's young. women. It's just the basic debauchery that we all know. And that's that's not very fun, which is why people like Ramana Dulo have juice, right? It's why all these conspiracy theory figures, why there's an appeal to them is that like anything's better than realizing how fucked up the world is in such a banal way and how small your power is to actually do anything as an individual.

So you might as well believe that like this guy who you met. living in a fucking squat is actually secretly in touch with the alien masters of the universe and is the secret king of America or whatever. And if you just follow him in an RV, you know, that's way more fun. So much more fun. So getting back to Romana here, right? Christine Sarteschi has charted her earliest online presence, which seems to be in October 2006 article in a business publication that describes her as the present.

and CEO of Global Solutions Canada. The company description makes it seem like a rinky dink budget version of Salesforce. You know, it's a company that provides you with HR resources for your startup. And their specific specialty was recruiting engineers and geologists for the oil and gas industry. And again, maybe she tried to make a real business and it just failed. I am assuming there was an angle here. There was some way in which this was fraudulent because of who she is, right? Yeah, me and my buddies try to come up with a sentence to describe like what some sort of

company like that. Oh, Global Solutions LLC. What do we do? What we do? Global Solutions LLC, that sounds real. Yeah. What we do is we try to integrate and synergize between two different operating systems to make sure that we can streamline the, the processes for the, we centered, like just putting together a bunch of words. I'm glad you brought up synergy because during our first meetings with Netflix. They told us how important synergy was to them. And I said, guys, I love sinning. I'm sinning right now. I got so much synergy. I've got endless energy to sin. You know what I'm saying? This never happened. I got sin in me. I got sin out of me. Yeah. For legal reasons, left and right. Left and right. It happens. It happens.

So, um, after this fucking global solutions geology, sales force business, whatever that really was. Her subsequent ventures, she has a series of real estate corporations that are described by Sarteshi as shell corporations. And I have to assume that's definitely some sort of con. Of course. Yeah, of course. Sarteschi concludes,

Digiloh also has two additional open businesses in London and Wales. No substantial activity with these corporations is known. Success in the business world seems to have alluded her, right? She's not successful. She's not making money. So what does this? Yeah, so what does your real estate company do? Oh, well, we make sure that the integration of, you know, our HR systems and our, you know, projections.

Send me $1,500 and you'll find out. And I help you out, man. We could set you guys up, you know. Yeah. Are you guys getting a gang of emails that are clearly written by AI about how you can synergize your companies? I get a lot of those. I get a lot of them from PR people being like, here's an article for your website that we think your readers would love. You can post it.

And it's just like talking about how cool the CEO of this company that's going to fail in five months is. I love PR emails. Oh, man, they're so great. And then I'll get a follow up. Hey, just making sure you saw our last email. And I'm like, I saw it. Go into my spam folder. Yeah.

I saw it. So, I can't judge you. I have in my secondary email, 49,000 unread emails. Oh, yes. My other one has more. I think, too, like, you know, for the listeners and observers, like, the bit about Robert is, he's actually a very good businessman. And it's pretty funny to see you click into serious. Sophie's a good businessman.

Yeah, wait, let me finish. Let me finish. is when I see like the switch is so quick because Sophie is like cut throat this is what we're here for this what we're gonna do

right like this what I need this the bag wear my money talk to me when my money ready right that's Sophie and then but you don't realize because you know Robert's being goofy

and all of a sudden he clicks in and he says well actually I think that really if we set up and you're just like whoa like so I just want to like Robert got a switch he got a professional switch did I get my image

MBA from Harvard. No. Yes. No. No. They wouldn't let me into Harvard. I had like a 2.8 GPA. What do you think they let me in?

Did you see my face when you started that sentence? I was like, wait, but Robert's a fantastic business partner because he listens to me. Yeah, I'm a fantastic business partner because I let Sophie run things while I write about the Queen of Canada. But yeah. Much, much like Bill Gates. So from other interviews conducted with people who saw her and he, he said, and he, he, From other interviews conducted with people who saw the queen in her home, prior to announcing that she was the queen, we can say that Didulo did not live well. People have described her as living in squalor and maybe having been something of a hoarder. She was, I don't know if she was like poor, poor, but she's like not, she's like lower middle class at best in terms of like income level. She seems to be struggling financially, right? We don't have a lot of context here, but this is people who saw her house.

like she was not living well. She had a room. It was crowded and not very clean or nice. Like she's, she's, like, this is someone who's doing about as well as you'd expect someone who's orphaned at 11 and then has to immigrate to a new country to be doing, right?

Like, she's not someone who's living in a rarefied air. She's struggling. Yeah. Yeah. And she does not seem to have a particular position of respect or to be very well known by her neighbors, right?

In part because very few of them have come forward if she's gotten more famous, to even say negative things about her, which to me kind of suggest maybe she just, maybe in this previous areas of her life, she was, if not like a shut-in, then just not someone who was very much a part of the social life in her community, right? Maybe someone who was very isolated.

Given her proclivities, we can say probably someone who spent way too much time on the internet watching YouTube videos and reading articles about conspiracy theories, right? Yeah, I feel like she was in her own head for most of her life. That's the vibe I'm kind of getting. Yeah.

Right? That's the vibe I kind of get. Vices Mack Lamarrow has noted that in one live stream, she's claimed to have been homeless at one point and to have slept on the floor of a friend's nail salon. I don't see any real reason to doubt this. It seems pretty... She lies about a lot, but that's...

I've known friends who've been in the same situation. I'll tell you what. You know what I'm saying? I had to sleep on a few floors, you know? For her, as for millions of other people in similar situations, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic offered a life. That year she took the lockdown and the attendant explosion and conspiracy culture and fringe political organizing as an impetus to start her own political party, the Canada First Party of Canada. I love that way.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Because what else? It could be the Canada First Party of America. I'm going to start the Canada First Party of America. I think U.S. politics should be entirely geared towards what's best for Canada. First off, give them our nukes. You know, they're better suited to them.

And you know what? You guys can have Maine. It reminds me we went to the R&C and they had those signs everywhere that said Make America great once again. And you're like... Didn't we already do it? You just added once?

Yeah. No, the Canada first party of can't. The Canada first... She's seeing... The Canada first party of Canada. The Canada first party of Canada. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Glorious.

She's seeing all these people... Number one, she's stuck in... Yes. But everyone's stuck inside. And she's seeing traffic explode. Just because of the things that she knows and brings up, she is familiar with a bunch of weird little, particularly a lot of alien-focused conspiracy world. She talks a lot about, like, the hidden secret bases that the army is supposed to run,

which we talked about in our UFO episodes. This starts out in like New Mexico because people are trying to hide the results of some, like, nuclear tests. But it's turned into today. There's people leave like the Getty in Los Angeles has like a deep underground military base where they're like taking adrenachrome out of children. She's big into all that. She believes in med beds, which is this, these extraterrestrial aliens have these beds that will

heal any sickness. And they're trying to give them to us. But some group of evil elites is keeping them away from us, right? She believes in all of that stuff. Was I on this, was I on the show for the, for the alien conspiracy ones? I don't remember who our guests were. I remember us doing it and then and how like the CIA or the yeah the the government was like Yeah, because it was mostly like the the the DIA or the military intelligence even that was fucking around more than the CIA with this and they kept feeding secrets to homeboy yeah

Yeah exactly yes yeah yeah it was like yeah no you're you're you tapped into the conspiracy brother you might be on it bro you might be on to something yeah so great yeah there's a few times it's like you know like like like the reality is If he wasn't such like a flaming piece of vomit, like Trump is hilarious. So funny. Oh, yeah. Funny, man. If he wasn't so evil, he'd be the funniest man ever. So for the government to be like, wait, you think Area 51 is aliens? Yeah, man, come here.

Let me tell you some more. That's funny. There's even more going on. Yeah. Bro, you don't even know the half, homie. So that's the chunk of the conspiracy culture that she seems. to be most in and dated in. And during 2020, she's watching traffic to all of the different people that she watched,

all these videos. It's all going up. And she's seeing, you know, she's watching the news. She's seeing the protests and stuff all over the, in the U.S., but she's also seeing, like, the anti-lockdown protests. In general, it's hard not, if you have, and I think most people who have cult leader Jews have a kind of sixth sense for timing. For the lick, yep.

And I think for her, it's like, this is the time to try something. People are uniquely vulnerable and I could maybe get and maybe change my shitty life if I can if I can rally a following around me. So she starts the Canada First Party of Canada. Know Your meme describes the party platform as generally opposed to progressive socialist and liberal ideologies as well as what it describes as the UNs and globalist plans to turn Canada into a third world country. The website for the party seems to have been created sometime during the early summer and by August it's telegram. page had about 17,000 members, which probably didn't translate to more than a few hundred Canadians who would call themselves members of the party. But first off, for someone who's living alone in like a hoarding and like a tiny room,

suddenly you got 17,000 people on your telegram page saying they believe it. That's got to be addicting, right? That's like, that's got to feel amazing. That's like giving someone with a congenital predisposition towards addictive behavior their first hit a heroin where they're like, oh, no. Oh, it's over because. Oh, my whole life just changed. Yeah.

This is what I've been waiting for. Yeah, yeah. I've been looking for a drug to destroy my life. Thank God. Oh, my Lord. You know, it's also interesting, too, like, and it's, like, this is the part about, like, con artists and hustlers that I still, like,

I still kind of trip out on because I'm like, okay, so what I think about, like, there are some, I can think of three dudes that I grew up with that I'm like, I have known for over 20 years. and I realize, I know nothing about you. Like, there's a way that they, and a lot of them are like hustlers, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

But there's a way for them to, like, really the knowledge of knowing how much to tell you and how much not to tell you. And, but you, but it feels like we're friends. You know what I'm saying? And I do believe, like, you know what I'm saying? And this person, like, thinks highly. One of the homies, I remember was like, I looked up, like, this dude was in Cuba. I was like, what do you, like, he's visiting Cuba.

Like, he just went to, like, you know what I'm saying? I'm like, you just went to go visit. Like, I'm like, I have known you for 20 years. You know what I mean? Like, I've been to your house and I realize, I don't really know you, you know. You know, so I think that there's, but there's this sense of, like you said, just like, since, sense to know, like, time to talk. time to shut up.

Time to go. Time to get out. Like, oh, this is the moment. Yeah. It's always interesting when you run into people who have that, like, skill for leaving some stuff on the table. I had an older friend when I was in my 20s. Like, it was a lot older.

And we did, like, a biking club and stuff together and would hang out. And I'd known him for, like, two years. And I don't even remember how it came up, but he was just like, yeah, I did three tours in Vietnam. I was like, what? Like, what? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, you never mention anything like three, first off, three's a lot. Most people

didn't do that. Yeah. That says something. What? Yeah, but yeah, that's so even us knowing like what we know about her and then how much we don't know about her is like, yeah. You know, but, but I feel like the people that are able to stay in the hustle are the ones that don't get addicted to the attention. Like, you love the attention. then that's going to be the downfall. I don't know. I think because I think most cult leaders are addicted to the attention, but you're right. There's something, there's a degree, there's a degree of separation you have to have from the bullshit in order to be, like, El Ron Hubbard, I think always knew exactly what the bullshit was, right?

And that's why he had the staying power and the success he did. It's not that he wasn't deluded about certain things, but I think he was generally pretty aware of what reality was and was just conscious, and he loved the attention. He loved being worshipped. But it never, I mean, it did near the end of his life. It eventually did kind of overwhelm him. But for a very long time, he was able to keep enough of an understanding of reality.

Enough of a distance. Yeah. To stay ahead of the authorities, right? Yeah. It's not even about, I don't want to say, like, Elron Hubbard was perfectly sane and rational. No, no, no, of course not. But he kept enough, he had enough of an understanding of what reality was, that he didn't fall victim to his own bullshit.

That's the thing. life and died free, you know? Yeah, that's the thing. If you can hold on to something that's like, this I know is, this is who I really am. Like you know what I'm saying? This is what I really am. This is work. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, on November 20th, 2020, Romana uploaded the first YouTube video to the Canada First Party of Canada's YouTube account featuring a song that made it sound like every movie trailer from a decade earlier. The video otherwise had featured minimally competent editing and fairer. clear audio, which sets her apart from a lot of people trying to, like, make fake vanity political parties in this time.

Sophie's going to play you a little bit of the Canada First Party for Canada's ad here. So you can, this is her first, her first documented grift. So we got to see this. Yes. But before you play this, like, I'm going to, I'm a laugh every time you say that Canada first party of Canada. Party of Canada. I'm a laugh every time.

Okay. Hello, Canada. I'm Romana Didolo. I'm the founder and the leader. of Canada first. It's time for us to clean up the swamp in Ottawa, to put an end, corruption,

criminality, incompetence, and lies in the government. See? You know, she is not it. It's pretty... All what I thought she would be.

No, no, and that's the thing. She's not very charismatic. She's not a great speaker. There's no Riz. That's what is so crazy. Again, there's effort, because that's a competently, it's not like unclear, the audio, it's not like good, but you're not, I've listened to a lot of these.

Usually the audio's worse and stuff like this. Usually the editing's worse. Like it was, like she hit a minimum bar of competence. Yeah. Which is how I generally describe her as a cult leader. She's not a good one. She's a minimally competent cult leader. She's mid.

And what's interesting is that she's managed to get a lot more attention than you'd expect, given her generally low level of competence, which I find compelling. It's also bizarre to me that, like, this is. isn't like she's using the exact same. Like it's like, this is a bite. This is currently what we're saying. Like there's already currently this, do you copy my whole flow bar for bar? Like it's already currently, we're already doing the drain the swamp.

Like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just a rip off of Trumpist populism. Yeah. Mixed with, you know, Trump is objectively charismatic. You may not like him. Most of us don't. Yeah, he's very to the people, he's able, a lot of people do, a lot of people do, a lot

people pick up what he's putting down. He can give us, you know, you know, he used to be better when he was younger, but he can get, he can give a speech. She's not good at that, right? She has no stage presence. It's one of the least energetic examples of VO. I've heard in the right wing populist politics game. And this is kind of the big mystery about her, right? She doesn't have any money. She doesn't have any power. And she's boring as hell. Why is anyone talking about the queen of Canada, right? Because she's, she's had a lot more of an impact than you'd guess given all this. And I think the answer I have to give is sheer persistence. She seems to have committed to launching a career for herself out of the right-wing fever

swamps in the early days of the pandemic, and she stuck to it tenaciously. I can imagine that watching the first four years of Trump's presidents, your first three years, had given her a lot of ideas as to content and made it clear that there was no bottom floor of credibility as long as you hated vaccines in the UN, right? That's all she needed to say, and it didn't matter how much bullshit she was otherwise, right? That's what works with these people. This first video only gets about 24,000 views in 18 months. And the Canada First Party of Canada sputters out.

And there's not really anything memorable anecdote-wise about it. They don't have any fun moments. They don't have any big conventions. It's a failed grift. It's mainly interesting because of what comes next. She pivots immediately from the failure of this political party to announcing herself as the queen of Canada. Love it. And from the outside, that seems like a desperation move, right?

That probably shouldn't work. It's like if Trump, if like the campaign hadn't worked and then he just started telling everyone he was secretly the king of America, you know? Like that wouldn't seem like a well-considered pivot, right? Yeah. But it's going to work, right? And that's kind of what's most interesting to me about her. On May 30th, 2021, DiGiloh uploaded the first video on her personal channel, announcing that she was commander-in-chief of Canada. That's before she's queen.

She says that she's the commander-in-chief. The language in the video deliberately apes QAnon. She describes herself as opposed by a deep state cabal tied to a global pedophile conspiracy that she was battling alongside white hats. Okay. Which is a term that comes out of like the hacking world, right? You've got like black hat hackers and white hat hackers, right? And the black hats are people who are trying to fuck up systems for their own benefit.

Generally, the white hats are like the people who are generally defending against malicious hacking, right? Like that's kind of the basic idea. I don't actually have a great handling on why White Hat got taken up by the Q&on people, but it does. This is way pre-Di-Di-Lo. This is the early years of Trump that they're starting to use the term white hats to talk about like. And these are, when they use it, it means the members of the government and the intelligence services in the military who aren't part of the deep state cabal, right? They're the good guys who are fighting this secret war, you know. Now, I can't find her first video.

Okay. But if you've seen one of her pronouncements, you've seen most of them. So here's an example from less than a year after May 30th when she first makes her video. This is just to give you an idea of what it looks like when she addresses her subjects. This is filmed in an RV. Wait, what? You said this is filmed in an RV? It sure is.

What the hell? You just threw that in at the end. Okay. Those are RV-grade curtains, man. Yeah. All right. Let's go. My fellow Canadians, I address you today.

as your queen and commander-in-chief. We are on the eve of World War III. I ask that everyone come as one people and one nation and to work with the United States and all of our allies around the world. God help us and Godspeed. Oh, my Lord. Yeah.

What is she? Who are you? Yeah, I mean, it's, she's interesting, because again, no charisma, no juice seemingly. I will say she's putting some effort into dressing up, you know, the white jacket thing is a good call because that's kind of look vaguely regal, you know? Don't give her that. She got flags. Again, she puts in some effort. Like, it's not the zero effort version.

Like, she's got, she makes sure everything's white behind her. It looks vaguely, but it looks almost like kind of like an air. Force One type video. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, but it's like production, but the production value is like West Wing 1997. It's very much, it's very much a TV show. Yeah, in the 90s about. Yeah, 90s West Wing.

She's trying, but she doesn't have a lot of resources to try with, right? She's doing as much as she can with what she has. I think I'm starting to realize how she even made it to your radar and into this podcast, because it's like, yeah, this is a very much of. against all odds because there is no reason we should know anything about this person based on the two things that you just showed me. No. She should never have hit our, but here's the thing.

Part of why I'm doing this prop, this is, she's in our top four or five most requested subjects. That is. Like anytime you go online to where people talk about like, hey, who should we do next, she's always prominent. I love that. Which is why I'm doing her, you know? I think now I, like I'm telling you, man, like the vision. is becoming very clear to me, like,

where you, that you was like, okay, she's definitely like a C-minus thing, but the, but the tenacity of, like, how you manage to poke through and get a number one record is just, that's crazy. Yeah. With no bars.

Yeah, and I, yeah, that's kind of the big mystery of her. So her first and second video, she puts out, trying to claim that she's now in charge of Canada, get roughly like 14,000 views in their first year. each. So there's no sign yet that this Queen Grift is going to take her any further than the Canada First Party of Canada. It's a little less successful, it looks like initially. But trying your

hat at becoming a figure in the right-wing fever swamps is a little like playing the slots, right? Each time you pull that lever, actually it's generally just a button. The levers don't really too much anymore on most-mon slot machines. Yeah. Whatever. Every time you say go, right, you have a random chance of winning. And in this case, when it comes to being a right-wing kind of conspiracy cult figure, winning means someone bigger in the movement, catches onto your content, and decides to either direct their followers your way, or to play in with your bid. This is a big thing.

This has been an aspect of UFO culture of like the psychic, you know, the whole new age movie that believes that we have psychic powers where people will be like, I'll play along. Yeah. I saw those aliens too. Or that alien she's in psychic contact with. I'm also in psychic contact with so you can trust her, right? And it's, yeah. I'm confused.

Yeah. Because at first I was like, are they just like, are people like, you know, posting and sharing it because they think it's funny? Or like you said, like, that's what I was thinking. I was like, I feel like people are doing this ironically. But then. I think that's a good chunk of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Even within the right wing. Because it's like even the, even the brain. folks still got some sense to be like, well, this is just funny. This seems nonsense. Yeah. And I think most, even most people on the right who are aware of her, like, well, this lady's a kook, right?

Even most of the kooky people on the right are aware that this lady's a kook. But in part, being made fun of and being ridiculous enough that you get elevated by people talking about what a bad con artist you are is part of how you get success in this field because it just raises your general visibility, you know? Like when people are talking about you and laughing about how silly you are, that also, that's another, it's a free play of the slots, right? Because maybe somebody who can burnish your reputation, somebody else will come across your shit that way and we'll decide to play in, right? Or to share your stuff. So it's not necessarily bad for you to be initially just seen as a figure of like mockery, you know, which I think is kind of what happens to her.

But as Mac Lamarrow writes for vice, quote, the outlander self-promotion went nowhere until a well-known Qunner figure confirmed her in early 2021. At the time, the titular cue, who drops clues for the community on Aitkun, had disappeared, and DiGylo stepped into the power vacuum. And if matter of months, her popularity exploded. And this is important. We're in early 2021. Joe Biden has taken office. Trump is at least temporarily. Seems like he might be out of the game, right?

And he was not wildly popular for the first couple of months after January 6th. And Q's not doing drops anymore. So there's still just as much, as we're all aware of, just as much interest in this stuff, just as many people who are on board for these nonsense right-wing conspiracy theories. But the most prominent people have kind of dropped out temporarily. And so part of why she gets success is she just starts trying to make a name for herself at a point in which there's nothing on TV, you know? It's kind of like one of those shows that wouldn't have been a hit if there'd been anything better on.

Totally. Because there's not, you know, people like, okay, you know. So this prominent Q&ONF figure, who is the first guy who really gives your credibility, seems to have been a fellow who went by the username Whiplash 347. He runs a telegram channel with about 300,000 followers, which makes him a fairly large fixture in the Q&N community. And like many influential Q-heads, he claims to have close personal ties to Elon Musk, Donald Trump and J.F.K. Jr., who is deceased.

Wait, but they believe is secretly alive. Oh, yeah, I forgot. He's alive. My bad. I got to keep up. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what never dies, prop? Oh, man, Goonies? Well, that's true. Actually, one of the goonies must have died, right? Goonies never say die. They never say die. Figure out if one of the goonies has died, and if they're all alive, hunt one of them down.

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The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush you. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and visit Myrtle Beach, comes Charlie's Place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On June 11th, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.

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corruption in California's high desert. Do you have any advice for us while looking into this disappearance? I wouldn't do it alone. Listen to Valley of Shadows on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Sophie's telling me that we are not allowed to tell people to hunt down the cast of the classic film Goonies. They're wonderful people. They're wonderful people.

Probably don't hunt them down unless you have like a really good shot at it. You're going to get kicked out of Oregon for that take because that was shot in the Oregon. It's very much Oregon. I think it mostly annoys people from Oregon though because that house, you know, that whole neighborhood probably property values are swollen as a result. Dude, imagine, yeah, like every morning. Well, I kind of live next to a kind of like a cult, classic location.

I won't say exactly where. Don't say which it is. Yeah, I won't say exactly where. But let's move on from this. Yeah. You got too many, too many listeners. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm. So in the space of a year from like early 2021 to early 2022, uh, Didylo goes from someone who couldn't crack 15,000 views on a YouTube video to someone who in May of 2020. had close to 20,000 followers on her personal telegram channel. Amazing. And at least hundreds of people claim to embrace her as their rightful sovereign and leader.

She's eventually going to get close to like, it's going to be like 80,000 or something like that on her telegram channel. So again, you know, the guy who kind of vouches for her has like 300,000 followers on telegram. So she's never up to his level. But that's enough. When you've got like 80,000 people following your telegram, you can pull out a couple a dozen folks who are going to be willing to change their lives to follow you in the real world. Oh, no, that's real.

Yeah. That's enough. You know, it's not enough to be a big deal, but it's enough to change your shitty life into something more fun. Oh, yeah. So during this first year, she's not out in public yet. No one's seen her. She's not traveling immediately, right?

She's mostly for the first kind of few months that she's the queen of Canada. She's just making videos, and she's expanding the lore about herself. She's doing a lot of live streams. She's talking a lot in her telegram. And, you know, she's thought this through to some extent. She knows that royalty doesn't just conjure itself up out of thin air. It's appointed by other royalty, right? You can't just say, I'm the queen.

Some other king or something has to say, I'm the queen, right? That's kind of how it works, generally. I mean, initially, there's always some guy who's like, I'm the king. Here's what a king is, right? Yeah, totally. By this point, we've got a fairly robust system of, royalty in the world someone needs to vouch for you. They kind of know all our royals.

I think we kind of know them now. Yeah. Yeah. Now, here's how researcher Christine Sartesci summarizes Digilo's description of her own rise to power, as recounted over a series of live streams and YouTube videos. Digiloh had been living with a roommate in Victoria, British Columbia, working a regular nine to five job. The two were living in a basement. At night and after working her day job, Romana was secretly interacting with a man she

would later reveal as, his highness David J. Carlson, married. to Her Highness Sarah M.G. Carlson, who is acting in the role of Commander-in-Chief of the United States Air Force Academy's Civilian Command of Military Operations, which... What? Who? What? That's not... Commander-in-chief of the Air Force Academy Civilian Command of... What?

What? You're saying words. Yeah. Again, like the Commander-in-Chief... making sure that there's a connection between the two. Yeah. Yeah, she'll just call David Carlson, the commander-in-chief of the United States and king. There's a lot that's wrong about this.

It's what you'd expect. She understands America as well as you'd expect from a woman from the Philippines who's lived in Canada most of her life, which is not at all. First off, the commander-in-chief is a role that the president has. Where they're in charge of the military, because we're supposed to have a civilian who's in charge of the military, right? Yeah. It doesn't make you king.

It shouldn't. Right. And it's also, there's not a commander in chief just of the United States because that's also, that's not what the job is. The commander in chief is like oversight of the military. You're not commanding in chief of the country. It's so funny. It's so funny, dude. There's a lot that's wrong about this. That's what I'm like, y'all have to be laughing at her because that is funny. She does this too with Canada where she will kind of sometimes, especially earlier on, she would sort of, She would refer to herself as the commander-in-chief and the queen as if they were the same job, and they're not. No.

They never have been. It's just kind of, I think, a misunderstanding. Or she just likes the way the terms sound. Also, Canadians, from my experience, are actually pretty well-versed in, like, American history and politics. So, like, for her to even say that as like. Yeah. Not Romana. Not Romana.

Yeah. For a while, I think the overwhelming suspicion was that David, Carlson was not a real dude. Yeah. But after she mentioned him, he pops up being a very real guy in Arizona who does in fact claim to be the king of the kingdom of America. Yes. It's a little unclear to me.

How did this? Every time. Yes. Los Angeles Angels of Anheyeh. Angels of Anaheim. Every time. Yes. Okay.

I don't know. Robert does not get the joke, I fear. Was she and David marping behind the scenes, right? Like, was he pretending to be the king to her? her and she found him on like his weird king website and they started talking and he appointed her. I don't know. Or did she start claiming this about him and then he can't like it's a little unclear to me what came first like what the chicken or the egg is in this situation.

But she claims David appointed her queen of Canada in 2017. Now this can't be true. Of course not because there's no evidence of her. She wasn't a figure back then, right? She wasn't saying shit. It wasn't the play. We have no evidence that. Yeah.

Right. We have no evidence she thought of this until 2021. But the story needs to date back to 2017 to make room for another crucial piece of Romana's hastily contrived and poorly conceived backstory. According to this tale, King David Carlson became aware of Romana and made her the Queen of Canada after she saved Canada from an underground invasion by the Chinese Communist military. Oh, single-handedly. Oh, man. That is wonderful. Now, Prop, you have a reaction.

I think a lot of Canadians are going to have a similar reaction because, and it's sad, you know, in America, we have the Korean War is our forgotten war, right? Americans just don't know a lot about the Korean War. Yeah, we just don't know. And I think Canada, we can all agree, Canada's forgotten war is that time China invaded through a series of underground. From underground. From underground. From undergone. From underground.

Oh, my Lord. From underground. That is so. I love it. Everything's got to take place underground. She's from that chunk of the UFO community where everything's happening underground. Yeah, everything's, yeah.

There's a whole world under there. If you're like China invaded Canada, Canadians are going to be like, I live in Canada and I didn't see anything happen. But if you're like, no, no, no, they came up underground. They were in the tunnels. Well, maybe I haven't been to the tunnels. I might have missed that one.

Was it up in the Yukon? Because if it was underground, it's pretty cold up there. I don't think you could borrow through it. It's a cold place for tunnels. Why would they do that? You're killing me. I'm imagining like an us sort of situation here, which is what they're imagining, right? That's part of what that movie was inspired by.

As the story goes, there were Chinese soldiers that were like being stationed in tunnels that ran from Canada through the U.S. down to Mexico, and the Chinese army was going to invade. And they were going to invade like Canada and the U.S., and I guess Mexico simultaneously. And as they were preparing and getting their army in place, they were using the tunnels. Because if you've got these stories. tunnels. Before they're filled with soldiers, that's a lot of a real estate outlay to buy these tunnels. So you're going to use them for something. And the Chinese army used them to harvest adrenicro from children. So a multinational tunnel. Like you say through three countries? Three countries,

a tunnel system. Presumably underneath like all of the major habitation areas of those cities, right? I would assume. This is incredible. This is absolutely incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Now, again, she's cribbing from some old and well-established conspiracy theories, which all have underground bases and cities and stuff about the, you know, children being abducted to provide organs and narcotics for the elite. This is, none of this is new. She's just wrapping old stuff in her conspiracy theory. Christine Sarteshi continues,

Didiolo claims that the Chinese communist military is a front for the new world order, Satanists and individuals who want to engage in eugenics. Didiolo asserts that she single-handedly remove the Chinese communist military from Canada and additionally the remainder of the world. It's got to be news to China. Digilo maintains that if the Chinese communist military attack the United States as was planned, that it would have sparked a world war. She contends that her subterranean military achievements thus prevented World War III.

For that, she was awarded her title as queen. The entire world, she explains, should be thankful for her monumental efforts. And you know what, prop? Let's end this episode right now by just saying thank you. Romana for stopping the Chinese communists from destroying Canada and I guess also America. I'm curious as to why your commander-in-chief in Arizona, like why he ain't do nothing about it before he even got to Canada? Like, why was he not?

And why would you, like, I feel like... Why is the King of America not stopping us? I feel like I would have an issue with him. Maybe he's down in Arizona. They haven't made it there yet. Way down south. You could have gave me a heads up that they was coming. You know what I'm saying?

I feel like... That they were going to invade? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. One thing I love about this is that it is very clearly the kind of grift that, like, someone who doesn't know much about Canada or the United States really would make. There's this almost, like, childlike vantage point where, like, obviously, if there's a queen in Canada, she must have been appointed by the King of America, right? Obviously. Because that just makes sense.

Of course. Which is, you know, I think kind of offensive to most Canadian, even most crazy Canadians. But it makes a lot of sense when you think about like Romana's backstory that she's, she does have this kind of outsider look where she's like, okay, I got to find someone, who could make me queen of Canada, king of America. About the king of America, right? Oh, that's so great. This is wonderful.

I'm still curious, which we'll probably get in and in the next episode, is like, okay, but where's the money at? Where's the bag at? Like, what are we, when did she get to the money? Like, what is the, what's the thing? Yeah, what's the crift? Well, I mean, the grift is she's going to raise money to support her quest to save Canada. Oh, okay.

That's what it's going to be. You get followers and you take their money, right? Okay. Now, again, when I first read about her exploits tunnel fighting the Chinese army, I had the same question you're all asking. How did she do that? And unfortunately, she never gives us to tales. She just says that she was unable to eat or sleep or think while fighting off China's invasion. And when she finally achieved victory, she wept and was allowed to eat and sleep again.

I think based on my general knowledge of these kinds of movements, that she thinks she's claiming this was a psychic battle. She wasn't fighting them in hand-to-hand combat. She was sitting in her house and became aware psychically that Chinese psychers were in tunnels underneath Canada. And she fought off China's psychic warriors using her own psychic powers, right? Physically came to our tunnels. Like, so they- That's a little unclear to me, prop. I think so, but I don't think she fought them physically.

That's what I'm saying. I don't know, though. Why would they, oh, why am I asking about logic? Why are you asking about logic? But that means that, see, but see, we learn in here. We learn in biomission. See, that means that, like, your psychic fighting abilities has a range. It's more like radio rather than satellite.

So you've got to be a little closer to Canada. So that's the best way to fight your psychic war. You've got to actually physically be on the Western Hemisphere under our ground. Yeah, of course. Or the radio signal. That's why, again, Arizona was just too far. The King of America's psychic powers couldn't reach into Canada. You might have tried.

He might have tried. He might have tried. Maybe the caves were made out of dolomite, which we all know block psychic residents. Absolutely. You know? No way to know. So the queen claims that after she finished defeating the Chinese, her roommate, it sounds like she's saying her roommate walked it on her. She doesn't exactly say this, but I'm guessing she was astral projecting.

And then afterwards her roommate sees her and it's like, hey, what happens? And she's like, I am the queen and commander in chief of Canada. I defeated the Chinese communists. And if you tell anyone, I'm going to have to kill you. And that's not a joke, right? Oh, man. The queen having a roommate is really funny. It's very funny.

I'm the queen. Yeah. I was just called Uber Eats, bro. Like, seeing if you want it something. Do you want anything? Yeah. I'm the queen. I'm going to need your half of the utilities bill. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. And here's the thing. What's funny to be is this is part of her story to her followers about like how she came to power is like, and then I told my roommate and my roommate started calling me your majesty from then on. Of course she did. She's like, he immediately recognized that I was the queen. I think this guy might have been both joking and also like, well, she just threatened to kill me. So I probably don't want to push her too far. This is clearly an unwell person that I live with. All right. Your Majesty. I'm just going to say, Your Majesty and get on Craigslist to look for another room. Absolutely. Okay, your majesty will. It's your turn to do the bathroom. So I don't know if you got any of your royal subjects to come do this, but it's your turn. Yeah.

You still got to clean the bathroom. Yeah. I was also interested in your acknowledgement of the tunnels being made a dolomite. Well, I assume it blocks psychic powers, but maybe not her psychic powers, but maybe the King of America. I'm just saying my only reference to Dolomite was a. A pimp from the 70s. Yeah.

Oh, okay. He was also a pimp. Okay. Maybe the tunnels in Canada were made from a pimp from the 70s. Okay, cool. Okay. I was like, wow. No dolomite was a real thing.

Okay. Well, everybody. You're killing me. That's this episode of Behind the Bastards. Until next time, you know what you should do? Listen to hood politics. That's what these. You could, yeah, sure.

Listen to hood politics. Listen to hood politics. And declare yourself. the king or queen of whatever country you happen to be in, you know, all you have to do is defeat the Chinese military underground using your psychic powers. With your brain. Yep. I'm going to work really hard on that. Behind the Bastards is a production of Coolzone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards

are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. state. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. At a Morehouse college, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the board of trustees, including Martin Luther King, senior. It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history that you'll never

forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Minnick Lamouba. Listen to the A-building on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Black history lives in our stories, our culture, and the conversations we still having today. This Black History Month, the podcast, I didn't know. Maybe you didn't either. Digs into the moments, perspectives, and experiences that don't. Don't always make the textbook. Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan. Brough had to pretend he didn't even exist just to sell his own invention.

Listen to I didn't know. Maybe you didn't either. From the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or simply wherever you get your podcast. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor and a trainer disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru.

And back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to the red weather on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.