Romana Didulo claims sovereignty over Canada and is gaining fame online as trust erodes in the country’s civil institutions. She travels Canada in a flag-draped RV with an entourage. She greets supporters in small towns, who eagerly film the encounters on mobile phones. She’s called on her disciples to execute healthcare workers and politicians who support mass vaccination campaigns. To her more than 60,000 followers online, she’s the newly installed Queen of Canada. But to law enforcement and national security officials, she represents the threat that online conspiracy theorists may be all too capable of inflicting real-world harm. Romana Didulo, a leader within a fringe Q-Anon-linked movement, has claimed sovereignty over Canada, gaining limited but growing popularity amid an erosion of trust in the country’s democratic and civil institutions. (…) On her Telegram channel, she claims that Queen Elizabeth II was executed for crimes against humanity last year and that “white hats and the US military, together with the global allied troops and their governments” have helped install Didulo as sovereign of the “Great White North”. She subscribes to a grab bag of fringe views, including elements of the “sovereign citizens” movement, a baseless belief that high-ranking US politicians are part of a child-trafficking cabal and a claim that aliens visited Earth 300,000 years ago. “She seems to latch on to conspiracy theories and movements like the ‘Freedom Convoy’ [which paralyzed Ottawa for three weeks in February] and mixes a very religious Christian message. In a way, she’s almost become like a religious figure to her supporters. She’s charismatic and has created a movement for herself,” said Carmen Celestini, a postdoctoral fellow with the Disinformation Project at Simon Fraser University who has closely watched Didulo’s rise.
via guardian: ‘Queen of Canada’: the rapid rise of a fringe QAnon figure sounds alarm