Front Burner - Death threats, aliens, Boney M: inside a tour with Canada's 'QAnon Queen'

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Death threats, hotel rooms left empty for supposed visits by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and hours upon hours of the song Rasputin by Boney M. These are the conditions former followers say they endured on a cross-country RV tour with Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada." Didulo became a well-known QAnon conspiracy figure, with claims she was the rightful ruler of Canada, but she originally didn’t appear in public. Now, she’s touring the country with supporters in RVs, including a stop in Peterborough, Ont., last month where her followers tried to arrest the city’s police. Vice World News reporter Mack Lamoureux spoke to former tour “staff” members, including some that Didulo reportedly abandoned in the middle of Newfoundland. Today, what they allege about the abuse they suffered, and why both Lamoureux and some experts increasingly believe the group has the makings of a cult.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Maybe you remember a little while back, near the end of 2021, we did an episode about this bizarre character in the QAnon universe who's based right here at home. She calls herself the Queen of Canada

and insists that she really is running the country right now. I have removed all of the courts, all of the Senate, all of the Parliament, all of politics, all court systems, federal, all the way to provincial courts that have no validity in the Kingdom of Canada. I do not recognize any of them. At the time, Romana Didelo existed to her followers exclusively online, where she did things like post videos about how she'd ordered Canada to be a vaccine-free nation. But this year, she started making public appearances,

even showing up in Peterborough last month as her supporters tried to conduct citizens arrests on the police. So today we are going to turn the members of the Peterborough police station over to the U.S. Special Force Military, Canadian Military and Global Military Alliance who will be here to pick them up once we detain them. So today, Vice News' Mac Lamoureux is back with us. He's going to bring us up to speed on how Dito Lo's movement has changed this year and what he's learned from those who were once on the inside. Hey, Mac. Always great to have you. Thanks for having me. Let's talk about some weird stuff. Let's do it. So I want to get to some of the followers you spoke to in a little bit. But to

get started, of course, you will remember we did an episode with you last year where we talked about the beginnings of the QAnon queen, Romana Didolo. Could you give us a brief overview of like who she is and what she believes? Yeah, for sure. So Romana Didolo is a Victoria, BC based woman. We don't know too much about her background, but she was kind of somebody who would just kind of start businesses, they would close down. But then about two to three years ago, she started kind of positing herself as this political figure, this person that was behind this political party called Canada First. Hello, Canada. I'm Romana Didolo. I'm the founder and leader of Canada First. Which I'm sure you can see takes inspiration from, you know, the mega movement down south.

She slowly started to migrate into the QAnon really weird conspiracy world. And she eventually found herself talking about being the Queen of Canada. I'm the head of state and commander in chief, head of government and Queen of Canada, replacing Queen Elizabeth II of England, who has now been executed for crimes against humanity. And this actually brought a very little fanfare. And it wasn't until she was scooped up by a QAnon influencer who saw her and quote unquote confirmed her. And through that, this woman who was just kind of posting online from a little boarding house in Victoria kind of blew up on the online QAnon scene and started getting lots of followers, primarily Canadian. And then this, plus the fact that she got some people that were willing to help her run a series of Telegram chats where they were able to organize all of

her followers, had her kind of explode in popularity. For her followers, Romana Dadulo is everything. They do what she says. They preach what she asks them to do. Dadulo was flagged by intelligence officers in a recent federal threat report. The report said last year she encouraged her online followers to kill health professionals.

People really believe in what she says her followers do to the point where they quit paying their bills because she told them that they no longer have to pay them and some are losing their homes. I mean, these folks fundamentally believe that they have opted out of the society we all live in. It has left social media and is in our real world and we need to learn how to disarm it. real world and we need to learn how to disarm it. So you were talking about how her online influence had been growing. I remember back in December, you told us she had like an estimated 70,000 followers on Telegram. And so how has all of that morphed since December? A good way to look at it is kind of when we last talked, she was in like

phase one. And now she's clearly entered into phase two and things have evolved and morphed a lot. And the catalyst for this is, you know, of course, the trucker convoy in Ottawa. She saw the mainstream attention they were getting. So took her mostly actually the people who were administrating her online chat rooms and she brought them together and they made a convoy of their own and they drove from victoria bc all the way to ottawa in way too short of a time and from there she's been on this what could best be described as this never-ending tour of canada in this series of rvs while they're just kind of driving around the country and stopping at either campgrounds or department store parking lots.

And they're bringing out people in the cities who believe in her to come out and see her. And like someone they see her, they start crying and they give her gifts and they listen to her speak. And this very, it's been very interesting to watch this completely online movement morph itself into what some experts have told me and I've come to believe is probably best described as just a real world cult. Huh. Like, tell me about what she did in Ottawa when she got there to the trucker car. Yeah.

Ottawa was actually a complete disaster for Romana. One of the first things she did was that they actually went and they gave a big speech downtown. It's actually kind of shocking how much it looked like a royal procession. She had a ton of followers within the convoy and they lined up in front of the parliament, all holding up her purple flag. And she marched down that with her people and started speaking. But then she made a very crucial error. And during her speech, she decided to try and burn a Canadian flag because, you know, her flag is a real Canadian flag.

She's the queen of Canada. You know, the Canadian flag is a false flag. The pun definitely not intended there that burning of the flag in kind of a public way where um the media could see um really turn the truckers against her because they were they're a pretty patriotic bunch, if you recall. And so they started yelling at her and she quickly turned on the truckers and started saying they were like funded by George Soros and all these kind of conspiracy things. But on top of that, like some other really dumb stuff happened. They had to give their RV back because they forgot that there was tracking stuff in it. And they signed an agreement to not bring it to Ottawa and then just immediately brought it to Ottawa. One of their videographers

who they were traveling with them, she got mad at him because he went and picked up electronic equipment without her explicit permission, which is something you don't do. She kind of rules the people that travel around with her with an iron fist. And so then she lied to her audience and said that he kidnapped everybody and hijacked it and called him a devil worshiper and shared his phone number and caused all these old ladies to call him and threatened to kill him. On top of all of that, uh,

they had to sit in a hotel while she said she was waiting for Vladimir Putin. Um, she filmed, Oh yeah. She filmed herself going up to a Fox News reporter and demanding to be interviewed and then being turned down. And for God knows what reason, they decided to post that online

to their followers. It's the first opportunity you guys have to bring a story that Canada has a new queen. And you don't seem to be interested, yeah? So Ottawa was a real... Am I allowed to swear on this, Jamie? Oh, please. Ottawa was a complete clusterfuck for Romana.

And it didn't go well at all. I remember when you were on last year, you were talking about some of the ideas that she was espousing very anti-vaccine obviously uh as you said flirting with the q anon uh conspiracy have her beliefs evolved over the year like oh yes yeah what is she kind of glomming on to yeah so um she kind of grew from what i would call like a pretty prototypical q anon um poster there's a cabal of pedophilic elites who are raping and eating children that

sort of kind of typical stuff uh and now it's morphed into the truly esoteric well for a long time she's been posting about an intergalactic federation but now she's kind of signaling that she's actually an alien and if she's not an alien she is a creature from a different a different dimension a fifth dimension and she's kind of here to bring us to her current timeline and for her followers she's almost become a spiritual figure, like almost like a harbinger of a better age. It's definitely turned into something different from the majority of QAnon posters. So what did her followers tell you about why they wanted to follow her? And, you know, after Ottawa, why stick with her? Who did you talk to? What did they tell you?

Well, I spent about seven months on this story talking to people that were in the convoy. But the two key people I spoke to were actually kind of her two main organizers. It was a woman named Daisy and a man named Corey who were nice enough to speak to me for a really long time and kind of bare their souls of what happened to them on this trip. and kind of bare their souls of what happened to them on this trip. And they kind of told me they didn't really know exactly why they were following her around. There was a level of fear, for sure, of the fact that if she truly was who she said they were, if they abandoned her, it would have been bad for them. We'll get into the threats that were made. But speaking to some experts, a big way that

people get into this is there's a lot of sovereign citizen ideology that kind of plays within this movement. These are folks who do not recognize the government. The FBI labels them domestic terrorists. Many don't pay taxes, carry a driver's license or hold a Social Security card. They have little regard for the police or the courts. And a big thing within sovereign citizen movement is you don't really have to pay your bills. So she's promising these kind of disaffected people who many of them are really down on their luck that electricity is free now

and you can stop paying your electricity bill. Rent is free now. And she's making all these declarations of things that her followers desperately want. And that's a big way they get into it. A lot of it has to do with, you know, not wanting to admit you're wrong, I believe is in there. But also, when you get so sucked into a community like this, you surround yourself with fellow believers, I should say. And a lot of these people have alienated themselves from their friends and family to kind of get deep into this movement. If she ever posts something wrong,

or if something happens where it's a complete clusterfuck as we were speaking, they almost crowdsource excuses where you can watch it in real time and they start to explain it away. Do you have an example? Like, give me an example of how they may have circled the wagon. Yeah, for sure. So just recently, I won't talk about a different podcast on your podcast, actually. You're going on a different podcast? I'm going to not bring up the BBC podcast, but that was an interesting one. So a really interesting thing was she would just start posting gibberish.

She would just kind of at the end of some of her videos for a little bit, she would just kind of be like, carrot, moon pie, six feet under blueberries. And then you would go into her group's chat and you would watch them start to quote unquote decode, which is something that was very big in the QAnon movement. And they would start trying to take this message and make it mean something. So they would kind of use this sort of attitude to then explain away when something bad happens. So when the RV was taken away, then they were dropping off the RV because it was bugged by the government.

And so this was a way that they were able to do it without knowing, showing the government they knew they were bugged, if that makes sense. And that happens for pretty much everything, including my article that just came out. You've talked about allegations of abuse. So tell me now what you're talking about when you say that, what Corey and Daisy told you. And I just, I guess I'll just take this moment to say that the CBC obviously hasn't spoken to your sources, so we haven't like independently verified this, but of course you have a rigorous process advice, but please tell me what they told you. Yeah. Yeah. I was working on this story for eight

months, so this wasn't something I reported out lightly is what I would say. So Corey and Daisy to kind of set the scene of them is they were two of the people that actually left in Victoria with Romana. They actually picked her up from her apartment. Traveled with her for weeks. And they told me they were worked to the bone. They weren't able to sleep very often. They had to routinely skip their meals. Daisy, who is not a very big lady, told me she lost 10 pounds during this. And Corey also lost a significant amount of weight. If they pushed back, they were threatened with death.

And remember, they believe she's the queen so that she can do this and she has the legal right to kill people. If you kind of talked back, you were subjugated to a public humiliation and the rest of the people on these RVs. All in all, it was like an extremely bad scene, but also what they described to me as almost a fever dream um at one point during this uh romana became obsessed with the song rasputin by bonnie m and every morning would wake them up by playing the song for an hour on repeat and dancing around their RVs and saying, wake up, we have a war to win. And then one day while they were traveling from St. John's to Deer Lake, which is about an eight to 10 hour drive, depending on how fast you're going. And, you know, they're in a convoy of RVs, so they're not going very quick. She played Rasputin for 10 hours straight for them. 10 hours straight. 10 hours straight. Yeah. Oh my God. That's yeah. That's which I believe is

a CIA torture technique. Um, and the people on the bus were like pretending to sleep and she would turn up the volume and snap in their face by like that kind of snap. I mean, and the next day kind of Corey and Daisy who are married were able to get a hotel room for and spend time together for the first time in a while because she was mad at Corey and sent him to a different RV so he couldn't spend time with his wife and they decided enough was enough and she once again woke up and told them after she had eaten, told them to skip their breakfast. They said no. And that caused a complete implosion of the group. And she left with two of her followers, two of her most diehard followers

who were actually with her. And she abandoned seven people in Deer Lake, Newfoundland, which is if you're in a small town in Newfoundland with no way to get around, you're not in very good shape. And she left them there and carried on with her two people and they had to figure out their own way home. And the entire time they did, they thought people were coming to kill them. And she kind of turned on them like she did the videographer I mentioned

earlier, quote unquote, Corey described it to me as a mind fuck and one that it took a long time to get over. Obviously, they finally did. Now they're working to try and take down her movement from afar. They work with a group of people who kind of follow her and figure out where she's going to be. And they call ahead to try and get her events canceled. And they kind of troll her followers and they try and get her events canceled. And they kind of troll her followers. And they try and talk her followers down. Yeah. And is it fair for me to say that there are others that have filled in?

Like she has a new staff. Yeah. So definitely when this happened, I obviously watched it all go down. And I definitely was like, surely this is it. And I have a version of this story I wrote that I think the headline was how Rasputin may have taken down a traveling QAnon cult. Boy, was I wrong.

Oh, thank God we didn't publish that story. And we're like, let's just see where this goes. While she was traveling, she continued to use these two men to kind of drive her RVs around and drive her around. And at first they were, these people weren't organizers. They weren't working well, but every stop they had or every second stop

or every third stop, they would pick up another person. They would invite them on this convoy to leave behind their home, leave behind their family and come join them on this kind of again it's hard not to refer to as a cult because now they're all wearing the same clothes and they all kind of speak about this community and this kind of religion based around romana now i believe she has a staff of 11 again and I should probably mention that this entire venture is funded in full by her followers yeah that was my next question yeah yeah I've seen I'm ahead of you what's up so I've seen documents that have shown just from the time that they were with Corey and Daisy because Daisy's job was her bookkeeper because it's what she does in her day-to-day life, was that they raised over $140,000 from her followers just in like two and a half months.

What they're doing isn't cheap. Renting these RVs, filling them with gas, getting food for everybody and doing this nonstop tour isn't cheap at all. They're spending thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars that they're raising from their followers. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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have you been able to speak with didalo like will she talk to you no and i actually have gone to one or two of these meetings and gone up to her and asked her in person if she would speak to me and she would not you know I've sent out lots of requests for comments to her and to her followers and you know every time I do that there's like a cryptic post on telegram talking about you know how she's going to sentence the media to 30 years in prison for publishing false stories and then I'm like I get my like Telegram burner account kicked out of all these chats, the ones that I messaged her with. Yeah, yeah.

Let's get to Peterborough now, where we mentioned in the introduction, some of her followers tried to arrest the Peterborough police, actual police officers. And just describe that scene for me. Yeah, for sure. So Peterborough came about because one of her most militant followers, a man by the name of Frank Curtin is in Peterborough. And for over a year now, he's been videoing himself going into various places and handing

out her cease and desist orders, which we covered in the last episode, which you should go listen to. And he got it in his head that after the chief of police of that town had stepped down, that he was actually arrested because of him and because of Queen Romana. So he started organizing this big event in which he was going to citizen arrest the entire police force. And Romana actually saw this and she started amplifying it and backing it. And the entire idea was going to be they were going to citizen arrest them. And then Romana's secret military was going to come in and secure them and bring them off to Guantanamo or wherever these arrested people go.

And it didn't go well. go yeah and it didn't go well what happened was they all showed up in peterborough and they marched upon the peterborough police station only to be immediately thwarted by the most highest technological security system out there a locked door and the they couldn't get in and they started banging on the door. And they were like, please come out, police. We need to arrest you. Attention, officer. Please come to the front door.

Police didn't come out. And so then they called 911 and they were like, hey, there's an emergency. We need you to come out and be arrested. And they didn't come out and be arrested. So then they all decided to wait in front of this station. And, you know, they were singing music and they were acting like it was this great revolutionary act. And at a point, Romana came out and gave everybody snacks, which were veggies and sardines. Take the plate and pass it around. Thank you.

There you go. I cut them up myself. Sardines, eh? Okay. Yeah, you know the hot Ontario August sun? You want to

just burp down some salty fish. Yeah, although I do I do love sardines. Okay. Yeah, but she went essentially this is what they were doing

and it looked like it was going to be a complete failure until they went around the side of the building after a couple hours of just sitting there. And here they got to a restricted area where the officers parked their personal vehicles. And after a little bit, shift change happened. So actual off-duty cops pulled up. And when the off-duty cops pulled up, the police came out because they started seeing that they were getting into confrontations. Like these people were there and they were, they actually thought they were going to sit as an arresting cops. You guys are involved in the

COVID crime and we're placing these all under arrest. And so at one point, Frank and a couple of his really close people, he tells the cop they're under arrest. And the officer responds with, no, you are. And proceeds to take him to the ground rather roughly. And those officers who took Frank to the ground were then tackled by one of another one of Romana's followers. And that guy was also taken to the ground. And then this big melee broke out.

While her followers screamed at the police, stand down, you're under arrest. And so, you know, eventually Frank and his close partner were dragged inside that door. They wanted to be inside now. They wanted so badly to get into. And they're facing resisting arrest charges, mischief charges. The guy who tackled the police is getting two

assaulting police officer charges. I believe four more people have been arrested since then. It was, to me, marked a clear escalation of these people's desire to physically confront the state, which is where her entire movement is leading. I mean, I know you're saying they're part of this kind of sovereign citizen movement, people who believe that they're not under the power of the federal government. They consider themselves sort of exempt from the law, but they are not. Yeah, and I've spoken to experts who say that this kind of encroaching conflict of the state that she's leading all of her followers to,

and the fact that she dehumanizes pretty much anybody that doesn't believe her, is a recipe for violence. And now we've seen some people are willing to actually become physical with the people they believe are wronging them and against the movement, their enemies. Mack, when these followers are being arrested and in the midst of these, this altercation with the Peterborough police, where was, where was their queen? Where was Queen Romana? She was about a hundred feet away in heritioned RV, hurriedly talking to her

followers on a live stream, explaining to them how this was all part of the plan. Because in the end, all of this stuff to her, no matter what happens, is quote-unquote part of the plan. And no matter how poorly it goes, her followers seem to believe it. All right. Mac, thank you. Thank you so much for this. Yeah, thank you. All right. That is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Imogen Burchard, Derek Vanderwyk, Simi Bassey, Ali

Janes, Ashley Fraser, and Bryce Hoy. Our sound design was by Matt Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. The show was executive produced this week by Imogen Burchard and Ali Janes, filling in for Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. talk to you next week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.