by Diamond
Yeah. They act like they are in your corner and truly by your side—in order to benefit themselves.
They want to gain something from you. They use you as a stepping-stone for their own illusion, stepping all over you and your innocence just to fulfill their fantasy. They have their own agenda, like a devil in disguise.
Sis, you got that right. Describing opportunists as “devils in disguise” is an insult to the devil!
Opportunists are nothing new. During the days of slavery, our ancestors invented things that revolutionized and transformed America. However, they were unable to take the credit for any invention because they were the property of slave owners. Being the property of a slave owner meant the slaves had no rights, and they could be bought, managed, and sold at any time.
After slavery, when black people would come up with ideas, an opportunist would take the idea and run with it if it was a good idea.
Mm-hmm.
The invention of the cotton scraper is one example. A black man named Ned invented the scraper, and the patent was refused because a black man invented it. Then Ned’s owner, Oscar Stewart, made a significant amount of money selling the non-patented tool.
White people often ask, “Why are black people so angry?” One of the things that make black people angry is when they’ve worked hard through their sweat and tears to build something and opportunists, who didn’t contribute one thing to their success, think they are entitled to take credit for it.
In our case, let me be clear about how we got started: We were stumping for Trump and making videos, and it was real and genuine. Nothing was rehearsed; all of our ideas were authentic and our own original thoughts. We never sat down and discussed a strategy for what we were doing or how we were going to do it. We never viewed other videos to give us examples. We just did and said what we thought. It was our truth.
I made the first video by myself, entitled, “Dump the Rest of Those Chumps, and Vote for Donald Trump.” Shortly after, Silk came onboard.
Y’all, it didn’t take long before the opportunists started showing up. They tried to use us to help raise their profile. We talked to one over the phone. This person wasn’t concerned about our aspirations; this person ranted and ranted about himself and how he stays so busy. This person went around and around in a circle with words, like a rat chasing its own tail. This person was only concerned about making himself appear a certain way, as if he had all of this power to make things happen for us.
Hahaha. How could he make something happen for us if it wasn’t already happening for him? He was able to talk the talk, but he couldn’t walk the walk. After talking to him for a few days, we realized he literally sounded like the epitome of a racist. He began speaking to us in a tone like he was superior to us and we were less than inferior to him.
I can remember when this one opportunist asked us if we were serious about stumping for Donald Trump. Are you kidding? I wasn’t sure if I’d heard right. This person wanted to know if we would take a look at Ted Cruz and get behind him.
My whole body started to fill with rage, and it seemed like I could taste blood, not from my ITP but because I was mad as hell. I couldn’t believe people were asking us a question like that. We told everybody, straight out of the gate, that we supported Donald J. Trump only.
We found that when people are out to use you, they only have one agenda, and that’s their agenda. Sometimes people may think that we are standoffish, but we’re not. Experiences like this are the reasons why we don’t have any managers controlling us.
Most of the time, when you are in the middle of a situation, you can’t clearly see the details or why they are important. When the experience is over, you have to learn from it.
In all honesty, we’ve been victimized and taken advantage of by many narcissistic opportunists who thought they could verbally and emotionally abuse us to get us to bend to their will. People thought they could use and exploit us, then exploit Donald Trump. Well, that wasn’t going to happen on our watch.
Oh, no, it wasn’t.
We spoke out because we were tired of career politicians, and we needed something new. From day one, everything that we’ve done has always been authentic.
We were created by God for such a time as this. We took nothing and made something, and we are still building.
The only ones who get credit for our success are God, who created us; our parents, who raised us; us, Diamond and Silk, who created our own platform; and Donald John Trump, who allowed us to speak on his stage. That’s when we became famous.
Chapter 8 Ditch and Switch
There is a swamp, and it’s filled with Democrats, some Republicans, elitists, the Deep State, and people who wanted to change the rules in the middle of the game to ensure that Donald J. Trump couldn’t win the 2016 election.
First of all, when Donald Trump announced he was running for president, the news media made a big spectacle, trying to mock him, trying to make him look like a racist, and it was day after day of attacks on him. Everything seemed set up to destroy one candidate.
That’s exactly what it seemed like. All of a sudden, they came up with all of these creative rule changes.
Rule changes or stories? If they couldn’t damage him with a story, then they would try to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Right.
So one night, I’m sitting in my office watching Fox News, and Megyn Kelly was on. She used to host The Kelly File weeknights at 9:00 p.m. As I was watching, the screen flashes with this sudden, breaking news. It was another negative news story about Donald Trump.
I’m watching it, and I’m upset about it. I knew blatant lies were being told about this man to keep him from succeeding in the presidential race.
Mm-hmm.
Now, about this time, we learned that some Democrat voters could not vote for Trump in their primaries.
That’s right. Different states had different requirements when it came to voting in a primary election, and some states required that in order to vote Republican you had to be registered as a Republican. If you were a Democrat, you couldn’t vote for a Republican in some primary elections.
Mm-hmm.
Because we were Democrats in North Carolina and we wanted to vote in the primaries for a Republican candidate, we had to switch our party from Democrat to Republican in order to vote in the primary election. So in September 2015, we put out a video to show people how we went to the Board of Elections, dressed in our Make America Great Again hats and T-shirts, to switch our party from Democrat to Republican.
As we were educating ourselves at that time, we knew the general public was unaware of some of these rules.
Absolutely.
The average voters believed they could vote for whoever they wanted, regardless of how they were registered. However, this wasn’t a general election; this was a primary election, and the rules were different. A lot of people were not aware of the election rules.
Well, I was so disturbed about the fact that a lot of people didn’t know how a lot of this worked, so I picked up the phone and called Silk. We were fired up, and one topic led to another, and I said, “Gurl, we need to do something. We need to start some type of movement to educate people about switching their party to Republican so that they can vote for Donald J. Trump.”
That’s right.
So we sat on the phone, and we brainstormed all sorts of names until we knew we’d nailed it: “Ditch and Switch Now.”
At first, we wanted “Ditch and Switch,” but Silk did her research, and she found out that T-Mobile already owned the slogan Ditch and Switch. Anytime that I propose an idea and we debate it out, Silk always researches it to make sure we have the domain and so forth.
Exactly. After doing my research, I went to Diamond’s home, and, while standing in her office, I had to deliver the bad news that we couldn’t use Ditch and Switch. So we were trying to either add something to it or switch it around so it would work.
Mm-hmm.
&
nbsp; We kept throwing out all of these different added-on words, and, out of nowhere, I said, “Now, we want them to ditch and switch and do it now, so why not ‘Ditch and Switch Now’?”
I was like, “That’ll work.”
So I said, “Let me check to make sure that domain name is available.” And, sure enough, it was, so Ditch and Switch Now was born.
It sure was born. If you key “Ditch and Switch Now” into Google or Bing, Diamond and Silk pages will come up right along with it.
So, we made a YouTube video on September 28, 2015. We look at it now, and we can’t believe how young we were! I was wearing yellow and Silk wore a tannish-looking color. Now, we’ll be the first to admit that we may not have known everything, but we knew enough to garner up this enthusiasm that made people want to switch their party from Democrat to Republican in order to vote for Donald J. Trump.
We felt we had to do this because the stories in the media were wild, and we really felt they were doing everything they could to try to stop the voter from connecting with a certain candidate.
Mm-hmm.
So Silk did the research on it and put the website together with all of the states’ information for those who could not go to the Board of Elections.
And Ditch and Switch Now took off.
We got credit for Ditch and Switch Now in Philadelphia, four states away. This was in a March 15, 2016, article put out by renegadefinancialplanner.com: “Thanks to the Ditch and Switch Now movement started by the two North Carolina sisters, Diamond and Silk, nearly 46,000 Pennsylvania Democrats have switched to Republicans since the beginning of the year. The paper says in Massachusetts, as many as 20,000 Democrats have gone from blue to red this year, with Trump cited as a primary reason.”
Right. I remember hearing about this older lady that had heard a Diamond and Silk video, and she went to her Board of Elections and told them that she was there to ditch and switch, hahaha. They didn’t know what she was talking about. She kept insisting, and they finally figured out that she wanted to ditch the Democrats and switch to Republican because she wanted to vote for Donald J. Trump.
We started that movement by pumping it out there using Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. As a matter of fact, Dan Scavino even tweeted something about Ditch and Switch Now, and that also garnered up more enthusiasm.
We wanted people to leave what we call that “Democrat Plantation.”
Yes. We wanted people to leave the Democrat Plantation, and we didn’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to vote for Donald Trump because of the different rules that had been implemented by these different states.
See, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Mississippi have what’s called “open primaries.” Registered Democrats in these states who wanted to vote for Trump would be fine because voters didn’t have to be affiliated with a political party in order to vote for a partisan candidate. In other words, if they were registered Democrats, they could still vote for Trump in the primary elections.
Alaska, Arizona, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, and West Virginia have “semi-closed primaries,” where previously unaffiliated voters may participate in the partisan primary of their choice, but voters who are already affiliated with a political party can only vote in that party’s primary.
Now, these states do allow voters to register or change party preference on Election Day, but we didn’t want anything to go wrong; better to take care of the ditch and make the switch beforehand.
Here’s where it gets tricky: Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming have “closed primaries.” For states with closed primaries, voters have to vote the party they are registered with, and you have to have that in place prior to Election Day. People may vote in a party’s primary only if they are registered members of that party prior to Election Day.
So these Americans couldn’t show up to a primary election as a Democrat and vote Republican, and they had no ability to change their party on Election Day. We absolutely knew there were millions of Americans that didn’t know this.
Mm-hmm.
That’s why we had to put that web page together. It was Diamond’s brilliant idea.
Hahaha. Thank you, Silk. I can come up with the idea, but I don’t have a clue how to implement it, hahaha.
Hahaha.
Silk comes up with the way to make it happen.
Right; I figure it out: Strategy A, B, and C is how we’re going to make that happen.
We really do complement each other in that way.
That’s right. It’s like when two people sing on different notes to harmonize the whole song. I feel like that’s what’s missing, even in this country. Everybody wants to sing the loudest instead of allowing people to use their different gifts to harmonize and make a melody.
That’s right. You sing your part; I’ll sing mine. You stay in your own lane, doing your thing; I’ll stay in my own lane, doing my thing. Together, it’s harmony and balance.
That’s right, and that’s what creates the music.
So our Ditch and Switch Now slogan became a movement. And thank God we did our research. We knew that it was important. We didn’t just sit back and wait for our fate. We had to be Republicans to vote for Donald J. Trump in the primaries, and we made sure we were. We didn’t want to go to the polls in the primary as Democrats and find out we couldn’t vote for our preferred candidate. Donald J. Trump is the reason we switched our party to Republican.
Exactly. We often say that it’s not about the party, it’s about the person. So let me just explain that for a moment: it’s not about the party, it’s about the person, but because of the different rules we still had to play a smart game. We still had to go along and follow the rules of the election process.
That’s exactly right. And it just galvanized a whole group of people who understood our message and what we were saying. They also believed in candidate Trump and what he was saying. Something propelled them to get up and go switch their party.
That’s right. Now, because there were so many different rules for all of the different states, we just told everybody to ditch and switch; that way they wouldn’t run the risk of losing their vote.
I want our readers to understand that we weren’t being paid any money for this.
And no one told us or forced us or coerced us to do this. You have to remember, this started from an idea Diamond had. Nobody told us to do it; nobody paid us to do it; we just discovered some truths and decided we needed to educate everyone else as to what we found out, and that’s why we did it.
About a month after the Ditch and Switch Now movement started, in October 2015, we happened to be looking through our Twitter page and discovered that Donald Trump had started following us on Twitter.
Mm-hmm, yes.
I called Diamond because I was going through our Twitter feed.
Yes. Because I really didn’t know how that Twitter stuff worked.
Right. We had just learned how Twitter really worked anyway. So I called you to tell you what was going on. By the time we figured it out, he had been following Diamond and Silk for three days.
I’ll tell you, we were very humbled by it all. We did not get the big head because somebody very powerful was following us on Twitter.
No, we did not.
We were very excited yet discreet. Other people always brought it up and made a big deal out of it.
Yes. People figured it out, but it was really authentic, y’all; this was authentic. We didn’t ask for it, and we didn’t know it was going to happen. Like I said, we didn’t even know for three days, hahaha.
That’s exactly how it happened.
Mm-hmm.
So after October, when he started following us on Twitter, comes November…
I don’t remember if we were doing interviews
or what that day, but it was the end of a long day, and I remember checking Twitter, and that’s when we saw a tweet from Dan Scavino. The Trump team was inviting Diamond and Silk to the GOP debate in Wisconsin.
That’s right.
We replied with a picture.
It was one of our animated pictures because we were shocked, hahaha.
Hahaha.
We weren’t expecting it; we didn’t know it was going to happen, and we were over the moon because this was going to be the first time we’d ever been to a debate. I mean, yeah, we saw debates on television, but we’d never been to a live debate, much less been invited by the Trump team. We were so excited.
Yes, we were.
Now, the debate was in just a few days. So Silk was booking flights and arranging a hotel; it was happening just that quick.
Yeah, it really happened fast.
Anyhoo, the debates were the following night, so when we got to Wisconsin we had to call an Uber. That was the very first time we ever used an Uber.
Hahaha. Yes, it was.
The first car that came was so dirty, we refused to get in the car.
Gurl… yes it was. We were dressed up really nice, and the car had a lot of salt on it because it had snowed there. It was dingy, nasty, and dirty. We actually had to order another Uber.
So we got to the event; we were feeling good, wearing our blue pantsuits.
Yes.
I’m not going to lie; it was nerve-wracking in an exciting way. We didn’t know what was supposed to happen. When we walked into the venue, there were people who knew us from our videos. They kept asking us if we were the two girls.
We were like, “Yes. We’re Diamond and Silk.”
So just as we’re feeling sharp and a part of things, we locate an usher, and he escorts us up to our seats. We thought we were going to be right in the middle of the action; after all, the Trump team invited us. Y’all, they had us in the nosebleeds. In case you don’t know what the nosebleed section is, it’s all the way at the top of the auditorium.