by Diamond
That next morning, I called the hospital. I told them that I was calling to see if my sister had passed. I was literally weak, sickened, and crying. After I gave my sister’s name, the nurse put me on hold, came back to the phone and said, “No, your sister is alive. She’s up and eating.”
I couldn’t believe it. Her vitals were good. The day before had been so gruesome; now, it was as if nothing major had happened. I started thanking God. I got dressed and headed to UNC Medical Center.
Once my body was pumped with blood and platelets, I felt like I was new again.
Someone from the air medical team came by just to check on me; they thought I had died. I was told not even an animal could live with a 0.1 blood count. I was supposed to be dead, but God said… Not so, and not right now!
Doctors didn’t know what to do. They were giving me rounds of blood transfusions, along with platelets and high amounts of prednisone. I stayed in the hospital for three days.
And I was there for all of those days. I even spent the night.
Yes, you did, gurl.
Once they got my platelet count up to a safe zone and my hemoglobin was also up, I was released.
The doctor told my mother that I could not drive a car or do anything that could cause me to get into an accident or have an injury. Just a minor cut could cause me to bleed to death. I moved out of my house and moved in with my mother and father. They were my sole providers. I felt like a child, and they treated me like a child.
They sure did.
Mother meant well, but she was so domineering and controlling. She wanted me to do everything her way, or it was no way. Most of the time, I was irritated with everything and the way my life was going. I hated being sick, and, though I enjoyed being spoiled, I hated being treated like a helpless child.
Although I thank God for my parents, I also thank God for all of my siblings, especially Silk. She was there for me, even when I just didn’t have the strength to be there for myself.
While on prednisone, I was having mood swings and started gaining weight. I felt like I was losing control of my very existence. I was used to being self-sufficient; now, I was dependent on Mother and Father to take care of me and pay my bills. I was always in tears and always depressed. I wanted a normal life, like everyone else.
I didn’t want to be anyone’s charity case. Mother was babying me so much that, truth be told, she turned me into a spoiled child. Mother and Father allowed me to behave like a little kid because I was sick. My siblings started doing everything for me. Mother would say, “Lynn can’t do it; you know she’s sick,” and I fell into the helpless trap. I didn’t want to be sick nor did I ask to be sick, but my body was rebelling against itself, and there was nothing I could do about it but accept the fact that I was sick.
I eventually ended up completing beauty school and moving out of my parents’ house, back into a house of my own.
About three or four years after this trauma, I had a second near-death experience; a blood clot was lodged in my lungs. If I had waited and assumed the pain was gas, I would have died. My first instinct was to get to a hospital, and it saved my life. To this day, I’m still under a doctor’s care for both of these life-threatening conditions.
Chapter 6 Walking through the Fear of the Unknown: How It All Began
The questions we hear most are, “How did all of this get started? When did this start? Why did it get started?”
Well, here is what happened: In November 2014, Wendy Williams was on the top of her game, right?
Mm-hmm.
Well, she was making this movie about Aaliyah and her life. Everybody was eager to watch the movie because Wendy Williams had promoted it so good.
Mm-hmm.
So that night, when the movie was about to premiere, we’re hanging on to our seats, me probably eating a bag of popcorn. I watched the movie, and I was disgusted in the end because the movie just didn’t turn out the way we thought it was supposed to.
Right.
So the next morning, Wendy Williams was very, very quiet about her movie, yet she was on her show talking about everything everybody else had done. Not one time did she utter any words about the horribly scripted movie she put out.
Mm-hmm. No, she sure didn’t.
So, I felt like I wanted to create a platform to call people like Wendy Williams out when they can’t admit they’re wrong and when they can’t admit they’ve messed up.
Right. I remember you coming to me about that, saying those exact words: We need a no-judgment zone, where people will be able to speak what they really feel, say what they want to say without being criticized or ostracized. We would be able to call out people like Wendy Williams—or anybody else.
Right. Not only did I call Silk, but I also called my other sister.
Mm-hmm.
I wanted to get her in on the action as well. So, we all put our heads together and decided we didn’t want to be seen on the Internet, but we did want to be heard.
Mm-hmm.
So we decided to start up a podcast.
Yes, we did.
To create a podcast, I thought we needed a microphone, headphones, and a computer.
That’s right.
I got busy, and I ordered everything we needed, then everybody paid me back for their share.
Mm-hmm.
Once everything came in, I started setting up for us to do a podcast.
Right.
Once I had everything set up, I called everybody over to my house.
Yes, and once we got there, we did the podcast, and it was so much fun. I felt liberated just to be able to vent.
It was liberating.
Yes.
Now, Silk and I loved the podcast; we didn’t see anything wrong with it.
No, we didn’t.
But our other sister felt like we were being so mean, and she felt we shouldn’t put that out there like that.
That’s right.
So that was the first and the last podcast we all did together. We never went back to doing podcasts together.
No, we didn’t. After that, we created our Facebook page, on November 17, 2014, and we named the Facebook page “The Viewers.” On that particular page, we began posting articles and posing questions to get people’s opinions. We were basically calling it, “The no-judgment zone.”
We wanted to hear what people had to say. We wanted to provide a place for people to really just be able to vent without being criticized.
Right. I remember, once you created that page, Silk, I looked at you and asked, “Will we ever get a million people on this page?”
And I looked at you and said, “Yes, we will get a million people on this page, and, once we get one million, we’ll get two million.
After that, we didn’t think anything of it; we started the page, and we started posting.
That’s right.
And throughout our busy lives, the deal was, we all had to post on the page: Silk, my other sister, and myself.
Mm-hmm.
Silk and I were comfortable with what we were supposed to do, but my other sister just couldn’t see the vision, I guess, so she really didn’t post. Finally, when we came to her about posting on the page, she sucked it up and posted one post.
Mm-hmm.
After that, she never posted again.
Right. We continued to post, and then you did a video with no sound.
Mm-hmm. I did a video with no sound. During that time, y’all, everything was in an uproar.
Mm-hmm. It sure was.
You had people out in the street, burning down their communities, arguing and fighting. You had Black Lives Matter shouting, “Black lives matter!”
Mm-hmm.
Then, when somebody would ask, “Well, what about other lives?” they made it seem like no other lives mattered.
Yeah, they shouted them down.
So I went back and we put together a video with no sound that showed all of the atrocities that happened to black people up to t
hat current day.
Mm-hmm.
Then, at the end of that video, it said, “Black lives matter, and all lives matter.”
That’s right. That’s what it said.
Before I even got into the political arena, I had enough sense to understand that, yes, black lives matter, but all of our lives matter, no matter what color your skin is.
That’s right.
When I’m in the grocery store, I don’t just see black people. I see black people, white people, and all of sorts of people.
Right.
I thought it was offensive to say only one group of people’s lives matter and not everybody’s lives.
Right. That’s right.
So that was the first video that was posted on our YouTube channel.
Right. At that time, Black Lives Matter was not as divisive or political as they are today.
That’s right, they weren’t. People asked us if we were part of the Black Lives Matter movement. We were never part of the Black Lives Matter movement. We saw the movement, we understood what they were trying to do, but when they invoked hatred and implied that only black lives matter and no other lives matter, that’s where we had the problem.
That’s right.
Then, everything fell apart when they started chanting at police, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” The original intent of their ideas was polluted with such hatred that their message came to a screeching halt.
That’s when they got political—very political.
We couldn’t go along with or agree with that. If an accident happened or a crime took place in my home, right now, I can’t pick up the phone and call Black Lives Matter for help. I can, however, pick up the phone and dial 911, and they’ll send an officer out to protect and serve.
That’s right. So when you made the silent video, that’s around the same time that I created the YouTube channel. That video was posted on January 2, 2015.
Right.
After that, no more videos were posted on our YouTube channel until June 15. That’s when you were talking about Rachel Dolezal.
Oh, Lord… Rachel Dolezal. Y’all might remember, Rachel Dolezal worked for the NAACP as a black civil rights activist. Basically, her parents outed her because she wasn’t really black; she was white.
So I remember putting a video out about that. I didn’t see anything wrong with her wanting to be black.
Me neither.
If she wanted to act black, let her act black. If we can have someone like Bruce Jenner live his life as a man for over sixty years, become a husband and father, then all of a sudden change and say he’s a woman, why can’t she identify as black? If it was okay for Bruce Jenner to identify as a woman, then it should have been okay for Rachel Dolezal to identify as black if she wanted to.
I really didn’t have a problem with it, so I made a video about it.
Yes. Why was it a big scandal for her to identify as black, when Bruce Jenner was applauded for identifying as a woman?
That’s right.
* * *
So while Donald Trump was announcing that he was running for president, I was watching it on CNN. Right after his announcement, it seemed like the media slid into the hate speech they spew today.
So, anyway, I was watching it on CNN, and I sat straight up because Donald Trump was talking about illegal aliens. I’m listening, like, oh my God; he’s right!
Now, we saw the influx of foreign workers moving into our small town and taking jobs. Like we said before, we didn’t know they were in the U.S. illegally. We just thought they were Mexicans.
I was lying across my bed watching with excitement, and I immediately stood up, went over to my dresser, picked up my cell phone, and dialed my sister’s number. I was impressed. He wasn’t playing; he wasn’t wavering; he wasn’t backing down. Everything he said, he meant, and I loved it.
Mm-hmm.
When she answered the phone, I said, “Gurl, cut on your TV. Donald Trump is announcing that he’s running for president.”
I stopped what I was doing, and I cut on the TV. Even though I know it’s supposed to be “turned on,” I cut it on.
That’s what she did.
Mm-hmm.
Then we hung up, y’all, and I’m looking at this man on my flat-screen TV, like, oh, my goodness.
It wasn’t even a good two minutes later that Silk called me back, halfway through Donald Trump’s speech. This is what she said: “Gurl, this is going to be the next President of the United States.”
That’s right. I felt that as he was talking. All we’d seen and heard since NAFTA were problems, and here Donald Trump was talking about solutions he wanted to implement to help the different communities within this country.
Everything that had been ailing the communities—especially the black communities—he had the solution for.
Mm-hmm.
When Donald Trump started speaking about it, I was like, wait a minute… He’s going to be the next president. He did not have a scared bone in his body, he was speaking words that were almost forbidden, and he wanted to face down the swamp.
Yes! He didn’t sound scripted, which was inviting and enticing because it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like, finally, I understand exactly what this man is saying. He’s not using these big words. He’s just saying it, and we, the American people, all could understand it.
Right.
I was so mesmerized by this man speaking out about how he was going to fix this country.
That’s right.
Remember, we had eight years under the Obama administration. Of all those eight years, the last two years were especially rough. It seemed like Obama waited for a time when he was secure in his presidency to really let his true intentions show. We got tired of seeing people in the streets fighting and bickering and arguing. We got tired of people killing each other. We didn’t want to see that. We wanted all communities to come up, including black communities.
So when he said he was going to secure the border, the first thing we thought was, well, that’s a no-brainer. Don’t you secure your house?
Don’t you?
Ain’t the White House secure?
Ain’t it?
Then the house of America should be secure.
That’s right.
Now, my heart’s racing because it felt like someone was throwing the American people a lifeline that we badly needed. I agreed with Donald Trump, and he continued, saying he was going to bring back jobs.
Mm-hmm.
See, we remember the jobs that were here, and we remember the NAFTA bill that was signed into law by Bill Clinton that took those jobs away.
Yes, we remember that.
Also, we used to work in manufacturing. We watched our jobs gouged piece by piece, while different people—yes, foreigners—were being bussed in to take them. We didn’t realize those people were in our country illegally.
To see Americans out of work, losing their homes, losing their vehicles, with no hope at all, it made us start asking, “What’s going on here, and why are these people coming in? How is it that they’re able to come in and work, but Americans can’t?”
We didn’t understand what was really going on until Donald Trump started exposing it, right there on live TV. Then it all started making sense. Nobody had the answers for us to these questions, but when Donald Trump started talking, it confirmed our thoughts and feelings about the devastation we’d seen in our communities. It was like an unexplained secret, and he was explaining it.
Remember, Obama ran on “Hope and Change.” We were hoping that something was going to change, but it didn’t change, and that’s the truth.
Yes. It got worse!
Here, you have this billionaire businessman letting all Americans know what was really going on; here’s what we can do about it; here’s how we can fix it.
Right!
When he talked about our jobs being outsourced, our first thought was, why would leaders outsource our jobs to le
ave the American people with no jobs? Who does that? If you’re ruling over a nation, why would you want to see people in distress, depressed, oppressed, with no job because you’ve outsourced them to other countries? I would have to assume it was because you were getting a kickback. No other explanation makes sense.
Yes. It was like Trump was outing the government, exposing their dirty little secrets. He changed the narrative from, “Oh, what a noble program NAFTA is” to “How does this make any sense?”
It didn’t make sense, but you know who did make sense? Donald Trump.
Donald Trump made sense, and we finally understood what had been going on and why it had been going on. Nobody else was man enough to stand there and say what he said. He was calling out illegals and the un-American values that were being forced on Americans. That was refreshing by itself, but he also had true answers and solutions to solve the problems. I knew that he was the man for the job.
That’s right.
So after that, y’all, Donald Trump said he wanted to bring back spirit. With everything that had been going on in our country, we needed spirit. We needed a different kind of man. We didn’t need another career politician; we really needed a businessman.
The first thing that came to my mind was, if you really want to know what’s going on with the body of people, check the head.
That’s right. Check the head.
If the head is prosperous and successful, then it’s going to trickle down to the body of people, and the body of people will be prosperous and successful.
That’s right.
So, from day one, he had me hooked.
Yes. We were both hooked.
We were hanging on to his every word.
That’s right; we were.
I noticed that after Donald Trump announced he was running for president, he stayed in the news every day, all day. They vilified him, demeaned him, disparaged him, and disrespected him, day in and day out.
That’s right. They sure did.
Nobody wanted to speak up for him. Everybody acted like they were afraid to speak out, even though they felt he might be on to something.