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You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.
Jordan
In the beginning, it was covered mostly as a joke because it wasn’t really obvious how else to cover this.
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Romana Didulo, who often refers to herself as the Queen of Canada, made the claim on a YouTube video.
Jordan
But then Romana Didulo and her followers took their tactics offline and people’s lives and businesses started to suffer as a result. Then she began a nationwide tour which found itself this past weekend in Peterborough, Ontario. It was there it became clear this had gone well beyond jokes, well beyond online conspiracies, and almost well beyond control. So who is Romana Didulo? How did she come to find herself urging her followers to arrest the police? How did that work out for them? And what comes next? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Kurt Phillips is the founder and former lead writer for Anti-Racist Canada. He is a board member at the Canadian Hate Network and he has been watching Romana Didulo and her followers with, is his great interest a fair way to put it, Kurt?
Kurt Phillips
I’d say so. She’s an interesting, I guess we’ll say character.
Jordan
Yes. And we’ve covered her previously here, but it was a while ago. So for those who don’t know, can you just briefly explain who she is and who she claims to be?
Kurt Phillips
Right in a nutshell. Romana Didulo is a resident of Victoria. She’s a woman who has had a number of initiatives throughout her life trying to get businesses started off the ground. None have been very successful. She once started a political party, of which she was the only member as well. But things during the pandemic really kind of took off for her. She declared herself the Queen of Canada and initially she wasn’t getting a lot of, I guess you could say, coverage. She wasn’t getting a lot of support. But then her name was dropped on a really influential QAnon website and it kind of flew off from there. At one point, her Telegram page had, I think it was a little bit over 80,000 followers. I think it’s down to around 70-some thousand. But that’s still a remarkable feat for somebody who is claiming that she’s an alien queen from Queen of Canada, essentially.
Jordan
What does Queen of Canada mean in her mind? And what has she said about what she plans to do with, again, the quote-unquote, monarchy, I guess, in Canada? What’s the deal here?
Kurt Phillips
Well, she’s Queen of Canada. She says that she is the sovereign ruler of Canada. She’s actually recently given herself a promotion. She’s now actually Queen of the world and has been pointing viceroy to various countries because she’s got support not just in Canada, but in other countries as well. I guess the reason for ruling the country if she believes in her own stick, is to create some sort of utopian vision of the future with med beds where people if you could regrow limbs, figures of light, are giving humanity beneficent technology. And we could laugh about that because it’s kind of patently ridiculous. But there’s also a very dark part of this too, where she’s also promising retribution to their enemies. And those enemies are people who, for example, were involved in trying to help people during the pandemic, the health professionals.
Jordan
Right.
Kurt Phillips
For example. And she has promised mass executions of these individuals. And anytime there was mention of executions prior to November 2021, it got incredible coverage. Essentially, people are really excited about that. In a moment, we can talk about what changed about that.
Jordan
In November of 2021, but first when we covered her before, and you’re absolutely right that you can kind of look at this as a joke, and there’s certainly a lot that is darkly funny about it, but it kind of misses the point. So maybe you could tell us just a little bit about what kind of her first, I guess, actions as quote unquote, queen were because they involved taking things off the internet and into the real world a little bit.
Kurt Phillips
Right. Among the things she has done is taking other conspiracies off the internet. For example, the belief that legislation passed in the United States that she claims to pass in the United States, and then later on the world has forgiven all debt. So you do not have to pay your phone bill, you do not have to pay your electricity, you don’t have to pay your mortgage. And there have been a number of people who have taken this to heart and we’ve seen some really sad examples of people contacting her on telegram, kind of desperate, saying, look, they didn’t get the memo. These people are still demanding I pay my rent or my mortgage. You need to talk to them because they don’t know that you’re a queen and you need to set them right. We’ve seen examples of people who have had their utilities shut off. We’ve had people who say, well, they expect me to pay thousands of dollars to get it turned back on. We just saw a story in the news about a woman who again, lost her home. It was foreclosed upon because she truly believed that she no longer had to pay these debts because Romana Didulo, the Queen of Canada has forgiven these debts. So we see some real-life damage that this is causing.
Jordan
And what did happen in November of last year? You mentioned previously that there had been a lot of and we saw this at the previous time we covered her, there had been a lot of talk of public executions, of people who gave vaccines, I think it was to children or to anybody.
Kurt Phillips
So previously she had been asking her followers to send out cease and desist orders to hospitals, schools and school boards, to other public institutions and private institutions, claiming that the Queen of Canada has ordered you to stop providing vaccines or poison. If you don’t stop, there will be repercussions, essentially. And the promises were, of course, that those people would be executed. Again, it buys into a lot of the conspiracy theories about vaccines that existed prior to COVID, just been beyond weaponized at this point, and on steroids. But she promised executions and the rhetoric began ramping up more and more to the point where it became very concerning. We wrote about this in Canadian Anti-Hate Network, and not long after she had a visit from the police, she was taken into custody. She was taken to the hospital for a mental wellness check and she kind of checked out, apparently. This is partly her story as well, and it’s very self-serving. But the interesting thing was after she left, she really toned it down. She really minimized any talk about deaths or anything along those lines. She now talks about everything’s going to be done peacefully, which really suggests there are a lot of people who believe that she was mentally ill and that she’s delusional. But the fact that she knew enough to say, oh, I crossed the line here, if I don’t want to get in trouble, I need to tone it down, really does suggest she has at least an understanding of what she’s doing and what lines not to cross now.
Jordan
And that’s a really important context to cover before we get into what happened this past weekend. So just to pick it up from November or I guess maybe December or January, tell me about her tour because this is what took her all around and eventually to Peterborough, Ontario. Right.
Kurt Phillips
Absolutely, yes. And she’s been touring all across the country. So as everyone remembers, the convoy occupation in Ottawa occurred from late January through the middle of February. There are a number of people on the far right who are involved. Also, conspiracy theorists got involved, one of whom was Romana. She was somebody who wasn’t initially going to join in this. I mean, this is something that she thought perhaps I mean, I’m speculating here, but maybe would take away from her importance. But as it got bigger, became something, she was like, well, I want to kind of attach myself to this, I believe. And she started a tour. So they rented an RV and they drove through Saskatchewan, well Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, into Ontario to Ottawa, and they were there for a number of days. She had this big event, and a number of people showed up for it at the Centennial Flame, where they burnt a Canadian flag because or at least tempted to burn a Canadian flag. They didn’t do very well on it, but they tended to burn a Canadian flag because she said that, well, that’s no longer the flag of Canada, that was the corporate flag.
Jordan
Oh, I didn’t realize that was her followers.
Kurt Phillips
Yeah, that was Romana’s followers. We were really concerned because on the one hand, we have a bunch of people there that complain themselves as Canadian patriots, flying Canadian flags on trucks and vehicles and carrying them around, obviously, with some, I guess, whether you agree with them or not, on their protests, they’re trying to show some respect for the flag, I suppose. And then you have this group of people coming to burn the Canadian flag. It was really a real potential danger there for something potentially violent to occur. Thankfully, nothing did happen, but the danger is certainly there.
Jordan
And so the tour continued and eventually, I guess, brought her to Peterborough this past weekend. What did she and her followers have planned?
Kurt Phillips
Well, I think it’s also important to note that she’s been travelling, it’s now been more than six months at this point. Initially, the plan had been to go back to Victoria, but during this process, they decided to just do a grand tour of the realm I suppose. The plan had been, when they made their way to Peterborough, was to arrest the members of the Peterborough Police Department on charges of crimes against humanity for enforcing COVID mandates. The conspiracy, of course, is that COVID doesn’t exist. It’s all a deep state conspiracy to control us or to kill us. So a local resident of Peterborough initiated this and Romana, she boosted it, she encouraged her followers to participate and by the time she arrived, there were between 30 and 50 of her followers there.
Jordan
What happened when her followers met at the police station?
Kurt Phillips
Initially, not much. They were stymied by locked doors. I think the police had the determination just to ignore it. They would go away eventually.
Jordan
Fair.
Kurt Phillips
And as I was observing, I thought, well, it’s probably not going to get much worse than this, it’s probably going to peter out eventually. Some claim they’re going to spend the night, they’re going to camp out, maybe some will, but for the most part, it’s going to die down. So I was about to kind of sign off and then an incident happened on the side where there was a struggle, there were arrests made, police were assaulted by some of Romana’s supporters and it got to become really kind of a dangerous situation. It was really hectic and quite frightening, actually, what could have happened.
Jordan
Yeah, we played some of the audio in our intro and if anybody hasn’t seen it, it’s widely available, obviously, on the Internet. And it really does show police kind of struggling to maintain control as they are being screamed at, that they’re under arrest, as they are also placing people under arrest.
Kurt Phillips
Right. And it wasn’t even just that they were being screamed at, there were individuals in that group who are trying to pull them off of the people they were arresting or striking them. It was a very tense and very dangerous situation. Had there been more individuals there, it could have been even worse.
Jordan
And where was Romana while this was happening?
Kurt Phillips
She was in the RV. She refers to her RV, that she stays in as QR One, her version of Air Force One. I suppose her claims have changed since the event didn’t go down as expectable to say she really didn’t leave the RV at all. She left it occasionally to provide snacks of cut vegetables and sardines, which is interesting.
Jordan
Sure.
Kurt Phillips
When this went down, she called her followers lately, people who have been with her on this tour for much of the length of it, to get in the vehicle. They were planning on kind of taking off. And in fact, at one point in the live stream, she told the person who was driving, if the police look like they’re going to come to talk to us, we just drive right away.
Jordan
And people were arrested at this protest?
Kurt Phillips
Yes. There are two individuals who were arrested, one named Fred Curtin, who is the individual in Peterborough. I guess you could say he’s the person who spearheaded it locally.
Jordan
I guess the question I have is, what do police or the government, in general, do about this? So it’s pretty clear Romana wasn’t arrested yesterday, but she was the person behind I shouldn’t say behind, but she certainly promoted, actively promoted and encouraged this. What do you do with that?
Kurt Phillips
Well, it’s tricky too, isn’t it? Because after the event, she very much threw her followers under the bus, saying up to this point, she was promoting it. She’s talking about the American military coming to support them even during this event. She claimed that they saw a triangular aircraft immediately over Peterborough, the police station and that they were going to be getting their support right away. And people were banking on that. They truly believe this is going to happen. It was imminent that their enemies would be arrested and that never obviously happened. And ultimately, she and her crew kind of took off. The last part of her stream was her driving around and then eventually leaving Peterborough. That night, she put out a post on Telegram that kind of began the process of throwing her followers into the bus. But the next day, she wiped her hands clean of it. I had nothing to do with it. I was just there to observe both sides. I observed the side that wanted to arrest them. I observed the police department. I had really no say in this matter whatsoever. So she encouraged her followers, she promoted this event and then when it went south, she didn’t pay the consequences for what happened. The followers who believed her did and will. I understand the Peterborough Police Department are looking for videos. I don’t doubt that some of the people who were not arrested at that time, who were assaulting them, are probably going to be finding themselves contacted by the police within the next few days or weeks. But what are we doing in these situations? That is the question. It’s a tricky one because there’s not really a firm one solution to this situation. I think one of the things we need to make sure is that there is a tendency to kind of laugh at this as being fringe, as we talked about earlier. But the real danger is that these have real-world consequences. It’s not harmless. And I think there needs to be more done to possibly as much as we can educate people about what these people are up to, what they’re involved with. I think the media has been doing a much better job over the last number of years, certainly since the pandemic covering these events. But I think there’s still a long way to go and really kind of digging down to why do these people believe what they do and what is the real world damage and how has it affected families. We’ve had instances where individuals have contacted anti-hate saying, hey, their spouse is involved in this group. They don’t want to pay any of the bills. It’s causing marital stress. I don’t know what to do. I’m not the person I married.
Jordan
What do you tell those people?
Kurt Phillips
It’s tough because we don’t have real solutions for them. We certainly commiserate with them saying, we’re very sorry this is happening. Anti-hate is not a deradicalization organization, and there aren’t really many in Canada that really do address that. There are some organizations in the United States that exist for that. There really aren’t in Canada because I think Canada, for years and years, I’ve talked about this in other interviews where we kind of are very arrogant in many ways. We look at the United States and kind of turn our noses up and say, oh, thank goodness, we’re not like them. But we are like them. We just don’t want to admit it. We have had the same issues with racism. We have the same issues with people believing conspiracy theories. I think that for a lot of people, the convoy, which Romana was a part of, was a real eye opener. People had no idea this existed. They didn’t realize how big a deal it was. And granted, I mean the people involved in the convoy the auto occupation, they of course claim their numbers are far larger than they actually were. They claimed at one point there were 2.5 million of them there, which was patently ridiculous, but at one point, there were probably close to 15,000. And that’s 15,000 more than most people expect in these kinds of events. The fact that Romana has, at this point, 70,000 followers, well, some of them are like me. They’re people who are keeping an eye on her. But there are a lot of people who are true believers, and those are people we have to be wary of. They’re part of our community. And the issue is, how do we address that in a way that helps to prevent any potential violence? Because many of them are willing to do what she wants them to do. When she asked them or didn’t ask, she told them to take her cease and desist orders. They went all over the country, not just the country, but around the world. There are people being delivered them in Australia, in the United Kingdom, in Spain. These were found all over the place and they were directly result of Didulo.
Jordan
The last thing I want to ask you, and again, it’s really interesting to try to straddle between the ridiculous parts of this and the threatening parts of it. So the last thing I want to ask is what comes next and what worries you in the anti-hate network. Because again, we started covering this as somewhat of a joke. It picked up steam, it went to the real world, it became a tour and police officers were assaulted. So what happens now? And do you worry about this continuing to escalate?
Kurt Phillips
Well, of course, one of the things we worry about is the real-world effects it’s having on people in terms of paying their bills. People are going to be losing their homes, people are going to be losing their utilities. Marriages are failing. Parents and children, adult children especially, are being estranged from each other over this. So it’s really breaking communities apart in many ways. The real danger, of course, is, well, she did tone it down in November, but what says that she doesn’t tone it back up? I mean, one of the things that she was talking about yesterday and when she was tweeting some ridiculous military gobbly-goo, essentially one of the posts live rounds are now permitted essentially to fire upon their enemies. I suppose, again, it was in many ways a false promise because there was no military, there was no cavalry that’s going to show up. But it really did give her supporters a great deal of hope that one day the people who she has told them are their enemies will face essentially ultimate retribution and they will celebrate in their hanging during that event when the police are being assaulted. In addition to people screaming and swearing at them. You heard some individuals talking about, you’re going to swing for Nuremberg when you come before the Nuremberg two trials. They’re real threats here and these people genuinely believe that their enemies are going to die and they’ll celebrate those deaths.
Jordan
That’s the really scary part here. Thank you so much for this, Kurt.
Kurt Phillips
Thank you.
Jordan
Kurt Phillips, board member at the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us anytime via email at [click here!] and leave us a voicemail 416-935-5935. Let us know what you think. You can listen to this podcast wherever you like. You can ask a smart speaker to play it by saying, play The Big Story podcast and you can rate and review and tell a friend and we will be most appreciative. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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