Qanon Cult Queen Comes To Town And Residents Use Vehicles To Fight Back
It’s been a while since we’ve touched based with the Qanon “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo and her RV full of merry scamsters. Last we heard she was trashing rented RVs and abandoning them miles from home. Now she’s reemerged, causing one small town in Canada traumatized by a hurricane to come together and send her packing.
An Inside Look at Conor Daly’s RV
If you don’t know who Romana Didulo is, stop reading now and preserve your innocence. If you’re still with me, Didulo claims she is the actual, sovereign “Queen of Canada,” appointed by the “white hats” in the American government. She uses a heady mixture of Qanon bullshit, sovereign citizen bullshit and even a little dash of the bullshit of 19th Century occultist Helena Blavatsky. Didulo convinces followers that the current government of Canada is illegitimate to the point that they can stop paying their electricity bills and mortgages. She even tried to have her followers arrest some cops (which went about as well as you’d expect) and called for the on-sight execution of healthcare workers providing COVID-19 vaccines.
This is the lady so blisteringly irritating and in her own little world that the Freedom Convoy truckers who took over downtown Ottawa for three weeks (no slouches in the conspiracy game) actually kicked her out over burning a Canadian flag. After that, she began to aimlessly wander Canada, mainly heading east in a convoy of RVs. She mainly focuses on the regular grift of a cult leader these days; forcing her followers to work endlessly for her, live in inhuman conditions, and stay so tired and broke that they can’t think of anything except doing her bidding.
Luckily, Vice is still allowing one reporter, Mack Lamoureux, to abuse his mental health in order to keep track of this unhinged road warrior turned full-blown cult leader. He tracked her down to a tourist village located near some of the most beautiful places in eastern Canada—Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia—to see what Didulo has been up to over the winter. One story Lamoureux tracked down was the story of how Didulo was chased out of a town three hours north of Tatamagouche by a persistent truck driver and his community.
It all started when Didulo arrived in Cape Breton in order to “prove” Hurricane Fiona hadn’t actually devastated an entire community:
Despite the obvious devastation, Didulo arrived in Cape Breton on a mission to “prove” the hurricane wasn’t real and that local news and the government were misleading the people. Her journey took her to Glace Bay, a town on the northernmost tip of the island that was smashed by Fiona. Many of the homes were severely damaged, some quite literally having their roofs torn off by the 105 miles per hour winds.
It was an area still reeling from the pain, with pent up emotion she would soon try to take advantage of—and then feel the consequences from.
Didulo pulled into the hurricane-ravaged town planning to convince people that the hurricane was fake, but she soon found a new mark, a man she found sitting on the stoop outside a dilapidated building with his head quite literally in his hands. The man, who neighbors told me suffered from mental health issues, was set upon by Didulo and her followers, who halted their RV, got out, put him on camera and used him to fundraise.
The town did not take kindly to one of their own being manipulated into helping a cult leader. One man in particular, a truck driver named Robert Nolan, began to disrupt her using the power of his semi truck:
“We’‘re standing where my home was,” he told me. “You’re actually in my downstairs bathroom now.”
The hurricane ripped the roof off his home while he and his wife were hunkered down inside. Nolan told me they could feel “the pressure” in the home change and water flooded in. In the end, despite trying to save the home they raised their kids in, they were forced to demolish it. So when Didulo and her staff pulled in, not two weeks removed from the storm, he was not in the best of moods.
Nolan knew who Didulo was—her statements about putting health care workers to death were well-covered in Canada—so when he first saw her, he pulled up in his semi-truck and emptied the air horn on them during a live stream.
“I never thought about pulling in the driveway and laying on my horn, but it just happened,” Nolan told me. “It was spontaneous. I knew who she was. And I knew what she said about health care workers. I knew she was here to prove that Fiona wasn’t real. That’s a hard slap in the face when you lose everything. It’s somebody coming here to make a fool out of us.”
Didulo and her crew, always desperate to raise money, persisted with their, as Nolan put it, grift. Via livestreams on the location, they told their followers to donate money to repair the old man’s home (he never would see a dime.)
It’s honestly a heartwarming tale of a community coming together to fight off a manipulative actor with a desire to make money off denying their devastation. Nolan made a habit of disrupting Didulo’s fund-raising efforts with his big rig and soon his neighbors were also pitching in:
Nolan honked his horn from his big rig, and made them move their vehicles if they were parked on his property or in front of his driveway. At one point Didulo’s convoy drove up the street to have a private conversation so Nolan launched his drone and flew it above them. Nolan said he turned himself into the “town crier” and encouraged people driving by to share their thoughts about the convoy leader he called “Queen Dildo.”
“I couldn’t help what they were saying out of their window,” Nolan said with a sly grin. “A lot of it wasn’t nice.”
In an inverse of Didulo torturing people with her non-stop playing of “Rasputin,” Nolan’s neighbor Pat, who lives across the street, blasted Slayer and death metal whenever he saw them filming.
“I was just trying to get on their nerves,” Pat, who did not want his last name used in this story because he feared it would impact his employment, told me outside of his home, near a massive divot in the ground made from when a roof smashed into it during the hurricane. “Like playing Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood.’ I just backed my car up, pop the sunroof, every window, pop the back hatch, and let ‘er rip.”
That’s just a tiny taste of this exhaustive and absolutely bonkers report from Vice. Lamoureux found Didulo up to her old tricks—abusing her followers, begging for money, and spinning out wild conspiracy theories and predictions that never come true. I highly recommend burning a huge chunk of your day reading it here.