Sometimes the biggest surprises come from the strangest of places.
On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Andrew Kirell, senior editor at The Daily Beast, return to the icy north to discuss the QAnon “Queen of Canada,” Romana Didulo, and her disco RV.
While very little is known about her pre-QAnon life, the middle-aged Filipino immigrant has become one of the biggest success stories of the QAnon movement since claiming that Q appointed her queen of Canada in 2021.
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Didulo crisscrosses Canada in a caravan of RVs meeting with her followers, but it’s her caravan and what goes on inside that has people talking.
“There was some song from a disco supergroup that every morning she would play for several hours,” Kirell explains.
That song is Boney M’s “Rasputin.”
“And so, if you can imagine, you’re in some random hotel and then suddenly you hear, ‘Rah, rah Rasputin’ and it’s like, ‘Oh crap, we gotta load up the RV,’” Sommer says.
“She would blast this thing. She played ‘Rah, rah, Rasputin’ for a 10-hour drive and supposedly she’s dancing around saying, ‘We got a war, people!’ dancing in the RV as this music plays.
“It reminded me a lot of the Alfred Molina scene in Boogie Nights, where he is really coked up and there’s a guy throwing firecrackers and these people seem to have wondered, ‘How did I find myself in this situation?’”
“I guess the vibes aren’t good. It’s the simple way to put it.”
Also on the podcast, Rolling Stone political news reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez talks former kickboxer “turned-awful-man” Andrew Tate.
“All of a sudden this man… has kind of completely exploded in the last several months,” Ramirez says.
“And the reason he’s gotten very viral is his kind of misogynistic, very anti-woman, alpha male rants. Andrew Tate went from being someone who was kind of known in certain circles… if you knew a little bit about the U.K. reality TV scene, and then he’s just become sort of like the face of male misogyny.
“Within the last two months, you could not scroll through TikTok without seeing a video of Andrew Tate.
“This is a man who, in his own words, manipulates women into sex work—whether or not that is true or not, it’s something that he said he used to have on his website, that his job was to get women to fall in love with him so he could convince them to join his camming business, which is classic grooming pimp tactics to manipulate women into sex work.
“We know through his own social media presence, he’s acted out, beating up women, choking women. He’s talked about how, if a woman ever accused him of cheating, he would threaten her with a machete and choke her out.”
Social media has since cracked down on Tate. Facebook and Instagram last week banned him, followed by YouTube and TikTok.
“The platforms that Tate was on allowed this to happen for far too long before taking action,” Ramirez says. “I think they waited until there was a critical mass of people calling for him to be banned before they actually felt empowered to do so.”
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the hotly anticipated upcoming Hunter Biden biopic, My Son Hunter.
“I think they’re right on the money in realizing that there’s a market for these streaming conservative movies,” Sommer says.
“I’m always paying for these movies and I don’t even like them. So you have to imagine, I think there’s a gold mine to be had there.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.